
Consistent Vegetarianism and the Suffering of Wild Animals - DominikPeters
http://www.jpe.ox.ac.uk/papers/consistent-vegetarianism-and-the-suffering-of-wild-animals/
======
schoen
I'm a long-term vegetarian animal rights supporter and I support the
publication of work like this, even though many people take it as a sort of
anti-vegetarian propaganda, because I think this is how we make progress in
understanding issues!

Very often in academic philosophy people write papers that say "relatively
widespread position X seems to have weird consequence Y", which then provides
possible evidence against X, possible evidence in favor of Y, or an
opportunity to think about why the implication might be unsound. That helps
clarify how we think about things. (Toby Ord wrote a similar paper about
opposition to abortion where he pointed out that spontaneous abortion,
especially before people are aware of the pregnancy, is much more common than
induced abortion, so maybe many abortion opponents should be concerned with
medical research on how to prevent it. While Ord seemingly thought the modus
tollens side of this argument was stronger, ... maybe they should!)

Although I don't embrace the act/omissions symmetry that the theory here is
based on, I support the modus ponens side of the argument that wild animals'
suffering is a horrific thing that it would be good to find a way to mitigate.
This has led to some pretty long flamewars in the past; I remember a
particular incident when the "Tetrapod Zoology" blog discovered David Pearce,
a transhumanist who sees it as urgent (and feasible) to re-engineer nature to
eliminate all suffering. Fireworks ensued.

Overall, I don't think this argument is particularly new. I heard
substantially the same point presented as an anti-vegetarian argument at least
15 years ago. At the time I thought "predators aren't moral agents, accidents
aren't moral agents, there's no _wrongdoing_ here, there's no problem". But
now I think there is a problem after all, even if it isn't our
"responsibility" or "obligation" to solve it.

~~~
cjbprime
Hi Seth! I'm reminded of an Aaron Swartz story that I suppose we could share:

==

During my first few years in Cambridge, Aaron was one of my favorite people to
scheme with. We started and — then usually abandoned — a whole string of
projects. We would argue for hours and hours about sociology, economics,
technology, and ethics.

I remember one time I took Aaron to the Boston vegetarian food festival to see
a talk by Peter Singer who is an ethicist at Princeton who many people credit
as the intellectual founder of the modern animal rights movement. Aaron went
to ask Singer if we (humans) have an ethical obligation to keep animals from
hurting each other?

As Aaron approached Singer, I sort of shrunk back a little bit. Embarrassed.
The question just seemed, I don't know, “troll-ish” and I figured it would
just annoy Singer. But, to my surprise, Singer sighed, thought for a bit, and
said something like, “yes, if we can do it without causing more suffering in
the process, I suppose we should.”

That that's the Aaron I knew. A recklessly creative intellectual refusing to
be hemmed in by what most of us take for granted. And in that process, always
thinking about the greater good.

\-- Benjamin Mako Hill, [https://mako.cc/talks/20130311-bmh-
aaron_swartz_memorial_rem...](https://mako.cc/talks/20130311-bmh-
aaron_swartz_memorial_remarks.html)

~~~
schoen
Hi Chris! That's a great story. Thanks.

------
elif
His comparison of very low estimates of livestock population (a 2004 estimate
of 17B chicken compared to the 2009 estimate of 50B
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poultry_farming#World_chicken_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poultry_farming#World_chicken_population)
) to the entire wild animal population is a particularly negligent
simplification, and the cherry-picked stats and inexplicable use of scientific
notation for 60B and common notation for 17B show his motive for it.

The fact is, chickens would not exist if not for human captivity/breeding, so
it is irrelevant to compare 17 or 50 Billion to 60 billion wild "land bird"
populations. The comparison should be to zero chickens. These chickens would
not spontaneously be wild fowl of another species under any circumstances.

~~~
DominikPeters
I think the two estimates you mention are different things: 17B is the
population of chickens alive in a single moment, 50B for number slaughtered in
a year. (Broiler chickens live much less than a year.)

The comparison of farm and wild population sizes is relevant, because humans
have control over both the size of the chicken population (through choice of
eating habits) and the size of wild animal populations (through habitat
reduction or conversion).

~~~
elif
How do I have control over wild animal population? Hunting?

Is the implication that hunting a wild bird whose individual suffering I have
ascertained is somehow a preferable alternative to picking a box from the
shelf that says chikn nuggets instead of one which says chicken nuggets?

Or am I to believe that all wild animals suffer equivalently because of some
hand wavey quantification of an academic in some no name journal?

~~~
DominikPeters
You personally have less control over habitat sizes, perhaps, beyond subtle
effects from consumption choices (e.g., using a car will, in expectation,
convert some nature to parking spaces; beef consumption converts forests to
graze land). Collectively we may have more choices (such as conducting
research).

------
danhak
> "Ethical consequentialist vegetarians believe that farmed animals have lives
> that are worse than non-existence."

Nonsense. There are plenty of "ethical consequentialist" vegetarians who don't
care about animal welfare but believe eating meat is unethical because it
harms the environment or exacerbates human poverty and hunger.

~~~
schoen
I think "ethical vegetarian" in academic philosophy has specifically been used
to refer to people motivated by animal rights or welfare, and that's still
what academic philosophers themselves talk about most in connection with
vegetarianism.

~~~
danhak
Isn't that effectively a straw man fallacy, then?

~~~
schoen
Animal rights might be a more _philosophically_ interesting motivation than
concern with, say, climate change both because it's more controversial and
because it's harder to sort of trade off with other interventions/solutions.
Like with climate change, maybe a random person could, in practice, focus
their efforts elsewhere more productively. (I'm a vegan but I fly a lot, so my
carbon footprint is far _larger_ than even the developed world average; I
could make a bigger impact in that regard by just flying less than I do by
being vegan.)

With animal rights or welfare, not engaging in or supporting specific uses of
animals seems like the most obvious thing that one can do to promote or
respect these values (but if papers like this are right, maybe that's an
illusion!).

------
magic_beans
> From the abstract: "Ethical consequentialist vegetarians believe that farmed
> animals have lives that are worse than non-existence."

This article assumes that people are vegetarians because they are sad for farm
animals... Absolutely untrue. The largest concentrated majority of vegetarians
in the world are vegetarians for religious reasons, under the belief that
eating animals is an act of violence we have a moral responsibility to avoid.

~~~
cjbprime
It doesn't assume that. Those religious vegetarians are not "Ethical
consequentialist vegetarians". Consequentialism is an ethical framework, so
consequentalist vegetarians are vegetarian for ethical reasons.

~~~
nileshtrivedi
"Avoding voilence" is not an ethical reason?

~~~
dwils098
It is, especially if they are avoiding violence out of moral responsibility...

------
muninn_
Vegetarianism is not about making sure animals have good lives, it's about not
eating them or participating in the intentional destruction of them by humans
as much as possible. Stopping nature from taking its course in the world
outside of human action is not a concern of vegetarians. Moving them to farms
seems to be something very much against what a vegetarian would do.

~~~
cjbprime
It's specifically talking about ethical consequentalism, which is related to
utilitarianism -- the idea that you should act in a way to maximize happiness
and minimize suffering.

Some vegetarians are not consequentialists, and so they can reject this
argument for the reason you describe, but I know many who are.

~~~
TillE
I've been around a lot of hardcore vegans, and literally none of them would
subscribe to the bizarre abstract philosophy of "minimizing suffering" in the
wild. It's an absurdity.

The idea is to remove human causes of destruction, not to intervene in nature
to manufacture some kind of utopia. Again, absurd. Essentially nobody would
actually believe this, aside from philosophical masturbation.

~~~
cjbprime
That's the point of the paper, though, right? The paper compels them to
explain _why_ they find it okay to dismiss the idea as absurd, if they want to
consider themselves as being ethically consistent regarding animal suffering.

------
exodust
Nice trolling. Wild animals don't experience 24/7 discomfort from a confined,
crowded unnatural space before ultimately marched to a mechanized execution.
The last possible confused thought the numb animal has: "well that fucking
sucked".

Suffering in the wild is not sustained or imposed to support a cheap-ass
burger industry.

Vegetarians want animal welfare taken seriously, and environmental concerns
guiding the regulations around animal agriculture.

In response to the point about animal non-existence, the vegetarian could
argue that favoring non-existence might motivate the livestock industry to
address environmental and animal welfare concerns. Respect is earned and more
meat sold to the "mostly vegetarian" crowd as a result, and less young people
flocking to vegetarianism after watching the latest meat-bad doco. A means to
an end for the vegetarian rather than a fixed philosophical position.

------
marojejian
The argument he makes hinges on the empirical suffering of wild animals vs.
domestic.

As he admits, there is not sufficient evidence to conclude that wild suffering
is indeed greater, so the case is not strong.

That said, I do happen to identify with the sort of vegetarian logic here. If
there were strong evidence that wild animal suffering were much greater than
domestic, that would be very important to me.

So I agree with his conclusion that more research into the lives of wild (and
domestic) animals should be a priority.

However, given what I know of the literal sausage factory that is
industrialized food production, I fear the suffering of domestic animals is
very great, and unlikely to be topped.

------
the_gastropod
Isn't this effectively the same argument pro-slavery advocates used?
"(Slaves|Animals) would live brutal, worse off lives if they weren't owned by
their masters. Therefore (vegetarians|abolitionists) want more suffering in
the world."

------
deontologizt
This is a great reductio ad absurdum of utilitarianism. However, I find it
very worrying that the so-called "effective altruism" movement takes this kind
of thing seriously. Look up the EA-affiliated "Foundational Research
Institute" \-- it's an entire pseudo think tank whose philosophy is based on
negative utilitarianism, the idea that all that matters is minimizing
suffering, and we should do so by any means necessary (not excluding the
extinction of all life). There are other organizations that support habitat
destruction on utilitarian grounds, such as "Sentience Politics" and "Animal
Ethics", but FRI is the brains of the operation, so to speak. (Animal Ethics
is the propaganda wing, and Sentience Politics is trying to make it policy.)
Brian Tomasik, who is cited in the OP, is the founder of FRI and has written a
lot about "wild animal suffering" on his blog. His conclusions are very
counter-intuitive; for example, he thinks forest fires are good because they
reduce the number of suffering animals in existence. That said, his articles
on the possibility of sentience in reinforcement learning algorithms are
pretty interesting!

~~~
antisthenes
This can't possibly have anything to do with utilitarianism as it is
impossible for us to understand domesticated animal utility preference curves
beyond "being fed and warm = good". If one is being pedantic, I'm sure one
could find many wild species which fare will in confinement, and make a case
that it is cruel to contain wild animals in cases where utility from our
entertainment does not outweigh their dis-utility from being imprisoned (such
as zoos). I'm not convinced that such an argument could be made for
domesticated or feral animals.

Utilitarianism is primarily about maximizing utility of a wide spectrum of the
population as it pertains to humans and societies and has nothing to do with
animals, wild or domestic except for the utility they provide humanity with.

Negative utilitarianism separated from the general concept of utilitarianism
is, of course, a nonsense concept in and of itself, since its end goal is non-
existence, which makes utility unable to exist.

I'm not familiar with other pseudo-think tanks, so I'll defer to you on that
one.

~~~
deontologizt
> Utilitarianism is primarily about maximizing utility of a wide spectrum of
> the population as it pertains to humans and societies and has nothing to do
> with animals, wild or domestic except for the utility they provide humanity
> with.

Actually, utilitarianism is about maximizing the welfare (i.e., happiness
minus suffering) of all beings that can be said to have a "welfare". This goes
back to the father of utilitarianism, Jeremy Bentham, who argued that any
being capable of suffering deserves moral consideration. (more extensive
discussion can be found in
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utilitarianism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utilitarianism))
More recently, the most prominent living utilitarian philosopher is Peter
Singer, who has argued extensively for the moral consideration of animals.
Utilitarianism in the philosophical sense is distinct from the anthropocentric
economic interpretation.

------
holri
If some bird is killed by a crocodile it is not my concern. If I eat a chicken
it is.

~~~
cjbprime
Many people have ethics like yours, but these are not _consequentialist_
ethics, which is what the article is discussing. In consequentialism, an act's
rightness is determined by the goodness of what happens, not other factors.

~~~
glibgil
You and the paper miss the mark by not imagining the position that leaving
something wild is good

~~~
themaninthedark
But what is 'wild'? If I as an animal follow my instincts and hunt a deer is
that unacceptable in your eyes?

~~~
glibgil
Why would a human hunting deer be a problem at all? As long as the numbers are
right you should be able to hunt. Meat, as it is consumed by most people, is
probably not sustainable. Hunting exists outside that system

------
spraak
Is this a big troll? The author moves directly from

> "reducing harm to these animals without reducing their numbers"

to

> "support reducing the number of wild animals, for instance through habitat
> destruction or sterilisation"

WHY at all would that make sense?

It's a giant IF they believe reducing harm is better than non-existence.

So... er, ok... the author is saying (to put it succinctly) that IF an
existence of suffering as a farmed animal is better than non-existence, then
clearly vegetarians should want to

> "support reducing the number of wild animals, for instance through habitat
> destruction or sterilisation"

It doesn't follow logically at all.

~~~
bqe
The argument is pretty straightforward.

According to this paper, vegetarian philosophers argue that livestock live
lives not worth living because of the cruel treatment they receive. The paper
then argues that wild animals receive worse treatment from nature. Therefore,
their lives are similarly not worth living. Reducing suffering is the goal,
and not living is better than living, so reducing the number of wild animals
is best.

There are a number of good arguments to this. One would be that humans
breeding livestock increases the amount of suffering, whereas wild animals are
not bred. Another is about directly benefiting (eating) from this suffering
verses not benefiting. Yet another is that active harm from cruel treatment is
different from passive harm by "not helping" the wild animals.

~~~
cjbprime
Note that none of of these are _consequentalist_ arguments, though. A
consequentialist argument would focus on the relative amounts of suffering,
not on the beneficiaries or agents of it.

------
glibgil
What a stupid paper. The whole point of "ethical consequentialist
vegetarianism" is to allow for an untouched wild domain where animals can
suffer in a way consistent with environment and evolution. Becoming a human
vegetarian is, after all, consistent with environment and evolution. We can be
vegetarian from an evolutionary position and we maybe should be vegetarian
from an environmental position (i.e. our high population)

~~~
schoen
"Nature" and "natural" are very culturally salient in vegetarianism over all
(when I travel, I look for a "natural foods" store, where I might then buy
highly processed foods like Daiya...!), but I think in philosophical debates
"suffering" has been more controversial. I don't think the significance of
"natural" suffering has been accepted by western philosophy, or at least
people would then have a significant debate about what it means for something
to be natural!

Consequentialism _in particular_ I think is very averse to arguments that
natural things are good or OK. Quite a few philosophical consequentialists are
interested in radically anti-nature views like transhumanism because of the
idea that we can do much better than nature has.

~~~
glibgil
I didn't mention nature, but rather domain, environment, and evolution. The
goodness of the action of vegetarianism is that one species limits
interference of other species in their own domain, consistent with their
environment and evolution.

------
anotheryou
Wrong title if you base your argument on something "compared to free range
live stock".

I read just a little further and also have to nitpick, that good times can be
experienced before reaching adolescence.

it is still an interesting argument.

------
bykovich
I'm the guy who thinks that suffering and pleasure are additive inverses.

------
jstewartmobile
This is the kind of argument your anti-social prick brother gives at Christmas
dinner for attention, and they gave him a prize for it? Really!?

------
musha68k
Most elaborate troll post I've read in a while, I upvoted it.

------
exratione
I've made a similar argument here. The goal of elimination of suffering leads
to a future very different from the world we inhabit today, but definitely
better for it. A world of limited beings who all suffer is amenable to
improvement on many levels.

[https://www.exratione.com/2016/06/the-hedonistic-
imperative-...](https://www.exratione.com/2016/06/the-hedonistic-imperative-
followed-to-the-ends-of-paradise-engineering/)

Suffering is not only human, however. The natural world from which we evolved
continues to be as bloody, terrible, and rife with disease as it ever was.
Higher animal species are certainly just as capable of experiencing anguish
and pain as are we humans, and the same is true far further down into the
lower orders of life than we'd like to think is the case. We ourselves are
responsible for inflicting great suffering upon animals as we harvest them for
protein - an industry that is now entirely unnecessary given the technologies
that exist today. We do not need to farm animals to live: the engineering of
agriculture has seen to that. The future of paradise engineering could, were
we so minded, start very soon with an end to the farming and harvesting of
animals. That would be followed by a growing control over all wild animal
populations, starting with the lesser numbers of larger species, in order to
provide them with same absolute control of health and aging that will emerge
in human medicine. Taken to its conclusions, this also means stepping in to
remove the normal course of predator-prey relationships, as well as manage
population size by controlling births in the absence of aging, disease, and
predation.

Removing suffering from the animal world is a project of massive scope, as
where is the line drawn? At what point is a lower species determined to be a
form of biological machinery without the capacity to suffer? Ants, perhaps?
Even with ants as a dividing line, consider the types of technology required,
and the level of effort to distribute the net of medicine and control across
every living thing in every ecosystem. Or consider for a moment the level of
technological intervention required to ensure a sea full of fish that do not
prey upon one another, and that are all individually maintained in good health
indefinitely, able to have fulfilling lives insofar as it is possible for
fish. General artificial intelligences and robust molecular manufacturing
technologies, creating self-replicating machinery to live alongside and inside
every living individual in a vast network of oversight and enhancement might
be the least of what is required.

At some point, and especially in the control of predators, the animal world
will become so very managed that we will in essence be curating a park,
creating animals for the sake of creating animals, simply because they existed
in the past - the conservative impulse in human nature that sees us trying to
turn back any number of tides in the changing world. It seems clear that the
terrible and largely hidden suffering of the animal world must be addressed,
but why should we follow this path of maintaining what is? What good comes
from creating limited beings for our own amusement, when that same impulse
could go towards creating intelligences with a capacity equal or greater than
our own? Creating animals, lesser and limited entities that will be entirely
dependent on us, to be used as little more than scenery, seems a form of evil
in a world in which better can be done.

Given this, my suspicion is that when it comes to the animal kingdom, the
distant future of paradise engineering will have much in common with the goals
of past religious movements and today's environmentalist nihilists, those who
preach ethical extinction as the best way to end suffering. Animals will
slowly vanish, their patterns recorded, but no longer used. If animals are
needed as a part of the world in order to make the human descendants of the
era feel better, then that need can be filled through simulations, unfeeling
machinery that plays the role well enough for our needs. The resources
presently used by that part of a living biosphere will instead be directed to
other projects.

~~~
schoen
It seems like you were influenced by David Pearce, especially in your
terminology, but you don't seem to have mentioned him here. Maybe you could
add a link?

