If humans become extinct, wild animal suffering will continue indefinitely on earth (unless all other animals go extinct as well, which is unlikely but possible). Wild animals’ lives are likely not worth living, so this would be bad, but it’s not the worst thing that could happen.
Preventing human extinction obviously means that humans will continue to exist, but this direct effect is trivial compared to the effects described below.
Major reasons why preventing human extinction might be bad:
We sustain or worsen wild animal suffering on earth.
We colonize other planets and fill them with wild animals whose lives are not worth living.
We eventually create an AI with evil values that creates lots of suffering on purpose. (But this seems highly unlikely.)
Major reasons why preventing human extinction might be good:
We colonize other planets and fill them with wild animals whose lives are worth living.
We successfully create a hedonium shockwave–i.e. we fill the universe with beings experiencing the maximum amount of pleasure that it is possible for beings to experience.
Even if we don’t create eudamonia, we fix the problem of wild animal suffering and make most of the beings in the universe very happy.
We find other planets with wild animals whose lives are net negative and we make their lives better.
Emotional disclosure: I’m biased toward optimism here because I don’t like the idea of humans becoming extinct, and I definitely don’t like the idea that this could be the best outcome in expectation.
Even people who are pessimistic about wild animal suffering generally assume that preventing human extinction is good, but I do not often see this justified. Let’s consider some arguments for and against.
TL;DR: Go sign up for Wealthfront right now and transfer all your savings into it. If you’re young and/or you plan on donating most of your savings, choose the highest risk tolerance Wealthfront allows.
Investing Basics
You probably want to save money for retirement, or some future large purchase like a house. Many effective altruists have money that they want to donate eventually, but want to hold onto it for now. What should you do with that money while you’re keeping it?
The simplest option would be to keep all your money in a savings account at your bank. This way you’re guaranteed not to lose your money, but savings accounts earn hardly any interest. If you’re willing to put your money into some riskier investments, you will probably end up with a lot more money than when you started.
The two most important investment vehicles are stocks and bonds. You can buy these on your own, but you don’t need to.
Robo-Advisors
There are services like Wealthfront, called robo-advisors, that manage your money for you automatically. You give the robo-advisor some basic facts about yourself such as your age and how much risk you can tolerate, and it figures out a good way to allocate your money. You deposit your savings and the robo-advisor does the rest–you never have to worry about your savings again. A good robo-advisor invests your money to get the best possible returns for your risk tolerance.
Both individual and professional investors rarely outperform the market in the long run, so a robo-advisor like Wealthfront will probably manage your money better than either you or a professional would. Even better, Wealthfront has low fees–far lower than anything you’d get from a human money manager–so you get to keep more of your money.
When you sign up for Wealthfront, it will give you a short quiz to determine how much risk it thinks you’re willing to take on. The more risk you accept, the higher expected return you can get. Whatever this quiz tells you, it might be smart for you to choose the most aggressive, highest-risk allocation.
As Carl Shulman explains in “Salary or startup? How do-gooders can gain more from risky careers”, effective altruists can afford to take on more risk than most people. To borrow his example, your tenth Ferrari isn’t as valuable as your first, but with your tenth vaccine, you can vaccinate a tenth kid and do just as much good as with your first vaccine. Most investors are highly risk-averse: not losing money is much more important to them than gaining money. But as effective altruists, we can afford to take risky bets because if we win big, we can do massively more good in the world.
For the curious, Colby Davis’s A Guide to Rational Investing explains in more detail why investing on your own or with a (human) advisor is a usually bad idea, and why it’s possible to do better than simply buying a total-market index fund. Wealthfront is likely to outperform a total-market index fund because it puts some of your money into emerging markets, which probably outperform the U.S. market in the long run.
Why not Betterment?
Betterment is another popular robo-advisor that offers a similar service to Wealthfront. I slightly prefer Wealthfront, but if you already use Betterment and you don’t want to switch, that’s probably fine. It would be counterproductive to get into a debate about the minor points in favor of one or the other–if you prefer to use Betterment, by all means do so. The main benefits to be had here come from putting your money into a good robo-advisor. After that, it doesn’t matter much which one you pick.
There are a few other robo-advisors on the market which might be just as good. I haven’t spent much time looking into any others, but I feel comfortable recommending either Betterment or Wealthfront.
Why not manage my own basket of index funds?
(If you don’t want to do this, you don’t need to read this section.)
Actually, if you choose a good asset allocation and stick with it, you can probably get better results managing your own assets than using a robo-advisor. This approach requires more dedication, and you need to have a strong stomach to stick with your strategy even when it performs badly. But if that sounds like you, you might want to pursue this approach instead.
For nearly risk-neutral investors, even Wealthfront’s highest-risk, highest-return allocation still leaves a lot of room to squeeze out more returns. You could earn considerably more money by putting a larger percentage of your portfolio into high-return assets, and the best way to do this is to manually manage your investments.
This means buying a basket of index funds with a high weighting in asset classes that have historically outperformed the broad market, which could include small-capitalization stocks, value stocks, and emerging market stocks. You should NOT simply buy a total U.S. or total world index fund. This will both perform worse than Wealthfront (because it is not weighted toward high-return asset classes) and have higher risk (because it is less diversified). It might sound like a total world index fund is maximally diversified, and in one sense it is because it holds stocks from every part of the world. But Wealthfront’s asset allocation has better diversification properties because it holds a higher weighting in asset classes that tend to be less correlated with each other.
I plan on writing a future post with some recommendations for nearly risk-neutral investors who want to manage their own investments. For anyone who wants to learn more now, I recommend William Bernstein’s The Intelligent Asset Allocator, which lays out which asset classes perform best and how to find a good allocation.
Is this just for effective altruists?
No, not really. Most people would be better off if they used a robo-advisor. But it’s particularly important that effective altruists are able to make money on their investments, because it means they will have more money to donate.
Disclaimers: I am not affiliated with Wealthfront; I just think robo-advisors are awesome. I am not a financial advisor and you should use your own judgment when making significant financial decisions.
Disclaimer: I haven’t researched or thought about this much, and a lot of what I’m saying is probably derivative or completely wrong. I just wanted to work through some of my thoughts.
What would happen if we implemented basic income guarantees tomorrow?
Assume we’re just talking about the United States here. Assume we don’t have any major technological advances between today and tomorrow, so we can’t automate every single person’s job. Let’s say that the income guarantee is enough to live off of—maybe $30,000.
What would people do? And would the economy continue to generate enough money to be able to pay for everyone’s income guarantee?
Change in Incentives
When people automatically get $30,000, this dramatically reduces their willingness to work. There are a lot of jobs that people only work because they desperately need a job, and they would really prefer not to. Once they get a basic income guarantee, demand for these jobs will drop dramatically. If the jobs are important, wages will increase until some people once again become willing to take those jobs.
Exactly how much people are willing to work depends on the tax rate. Let’s say we have a progressive taxation scheme which starts much higher than the current tax rate—maybe 50% at the lowest bracket and 90% at the highest (I’m just making up numbers here). That means if you make $30,000 a year for doing nothing and take a job that pays $30,000, now you’re making $45,000 after taxes. People have diminishing marginal utility of money, so people will be less willing to do this, but there should still be a lot of people who want to make more than the basic income and end up taking jobs.
Which jobs will they take?
Jobs
When people have a basic income, that dramatically changes their incentives to work. In economic terms, supply of labor drops. Which jobs continue to be prominent depends on which jobs have high or low price elasticity of demand for labor.
To get more concrete, let’s think about two jobs: garbage collector and fast food burger flipper. Probably a small minority of the people in these jobs actually enjoy them; if these people suddenly had a guaranteed $30,000 a year, how would the market respond?
People really need garbage collectors, so they have a high willingness to pay for their salaries. Or, more precisely, they have a high willingness to accept higher taxes so that the government can employ garbage collectors. In all likelihood, not enough people will be willing to work as garbage collectors for their current salaries. Demand for garbage collectors is highly inelastic, so as supply of willing workers decreases, wages will increase by a lot. The increase in wages should be enough to incentivize people to continue working as garbage collectors.
The labor supply for burger flippers would similarly decrease. Fast food companies would have to raise salaries by a lot in order to get people to keep working for them, which means they would have to increase food prices. The increased food prices would decrease quantity demanded, and fast food companies would shrink (and possibly disappear entirely). I am probably okay with this.
The Broad Market
But since people have less need to work, they should become more willing to work intrinsically enjoyable goods, so we should see an increase in the supply of short films, music, and other similar goods. Interestingly, writing books seems to be so intrinsically enjoyable that the market’s already over-saturated even without a basic income guarantee—publishers get way more manuscripts than they can use.
There’s a spectrum between “everybody intrinsically enjoys this” and “nobody intrinsically enjoys this”, and every job lands somewhere on the spectrum. Even among jobs that most people don’t intrinsically enjoy, we will still see differences. A lot fewer people will work in factory farms, since I can’t imagine that anybody would actually want to do that. But we probably won’t see that big a reduction in the quantity of auto mechanics. A lot of people like working on cars—people often do it as a hobby. We’d expect these people to be willing to work as auto mechanics for only relatively little pay.
Software Development
I want to talk a little extra about software development since it’s my field. Generally speaking, a lot of programmers enjoy programming, but there are a lot of kinds that are more fun than others. We’d probably see more people starting their own companies and fewer people working software jobs that involve a lot of boring repetition.
This changes the incentives for companies hiring developers. Boring routine work becomes more expensive since fewer developers are willing to do it, so companies have stronger incentives to automate as much work as possible.
There probably won’t be a huge effect since developers tend to make well $30,000, so that extra money doesn’t do as much for them; the most affected jobs will be those that pay less than or about as much as the basic income.
Does It Work?
An economy with a basic income guarantee would reduce or remove unimportant jobs while still retaining important jobs. Prices would be higher and people probably wouldn’t buy as much, but the things they’d buy less of would mostly be the things that weren’t really important to begin with. People aren’t perfectly rational; a lot of purchases people make just keep them going on the hedonic treadmill and don’t actually improve their lives.
Perhaps a world with McDonald’s is better than one without, but if it is, it’s certainly not much better, and I wouldn’t feel too bad about it if McDonald’s went out of business after all the low-level employees quit.
Please explain in the comments why I’m wrong about everything. I think the economic effects of a basic income guarantee could be really interesting and possibly surprising, and I want to hear what you think.
Haskell has all these language features that seem cool, but then you wonder, what is this actually good for? When am I ever going to need lazy evaluation? What’s the point of currying?
As it turns out, these language constructs come in handy more often than you’d expect. This article gives some real-world examples of how Haskell’s weird features can actually help you write better programs.
Lazy Evaluation
Lazy evaluation means that Haskell will only evaluate an expression if its value becomes needed. This means you can do cool things like construct infinite lists.
To take a trivial example, suppose you want to write a function that finds the first n even numbers. You could implement this in a lot of different ways, but let’s look at one possible implementation (in Python):
def first_n_evens(n):
numbers = range(1, 2*n + 1)
return [ x for x in numbers if x % 2 == 0 ]
Here we construct a list with 2n numbers and then take every even number from that list. Here’s how we could do the same in Haskell:
firstNEvens n = take n $ [ x | x <- [1..], even x ]
Instead of constructing a list with 2n elements, we construct an infinite list of even numbers and then take the first n.
Okay, so that’s pretty cool, but what’s the point? When am I ever going to use this in real life?
Why It’s Useful
I recently wrote a simple spam classifier in Python. To classify a text as spam or not-spam, it counts the number of blacklisted words in the text. If the number reaches some threshold, the text is classified as spam. 1
Before reading further, think for a minute about how you could implement this.
Originally, I wanted to write something like this.
filter the list for only blacklisted words
see if the length of the list reaches the threshold
Here’s the equivalent Python code:
class LazyClassifier(Classifier):
def classify(self, text):
return len(filter(self.blacklisted, text.split())) >= self.threshold
This code is simple and concise. The problem is, it requires iterating through the entire list before returning, which wastes a huge amount of time. The text might contain tens of thousands of words, but could be identified as spam within the first hundred.
I ended up implementing it like this:
class ImperativeClassifier(Classifier):
def classify(self, text):
words = text.split()
count = 0
for word in words:
if self.blacklisted(word):
count += 1
if count >= self.threshold:
return 1
return 0
Instead of using higher-order functions like sum, this implementation manually iterates over the list, keeping track of the number of blacklisted words, and breaks out once the number reaches the threshold. It’s faster, but much uglier.
What if we could write our code using the first approach, but with the speed of the second approach? This is where lazy evalution comes in.
If our program is lazily evaluated, it can figure out when the count reaches the threshold and return immediately instead of waiting around to evaluate the whole list.
Here’s a Haskell implementation:
classify text = (length $ filter blacklisted $ words text) >= threshold
(For those unfamiliar with Haskell syntax, see note.2)
Unfortunately, this doesn’t quite work. If the condition is true for the first k elements of the list then it will also be true for the first k+1 elements, but Haskell has no way of knowing that. If you call classify on an infinite list, it will run forever.
We can get around this problem like so:
classify text =
(length $ take threshold $ filter blacklisted $ words text) == threshold
Note that the take operation takes the first k elements of the list and drops the rest. (If you call take k on a list with n elements where n < k, it will simply return the entire list.)
So this function will take the first threshold blacklisted words. If it runs through the entire list before finding threshold blacklisted words, it returns False. If it ever successfully finds threshold blacklisted words, it immediately stops and returns True.
Using lazy evalution, we can write a concise implementation of classify that runs as efficiently as our more verbose implementation above.
(If you want, it is also possible to do this in Python using generators.)
Partial Application
In Haskell, functions are automatically curried. This means you can call a function with some but not all of the arguments and it will return a partially-applied function.
This is easier to understand if we look at an example. Let’s take a look at some Haskell code:
add :: Int -> Int -> Int
add x y = x + y
add is a simple function that takes two arguments and returns their sum. You can call it by writing, for example, add 2 5 which would return 7.
You can also partially apply add. If you write add 2, instead of returning a value, it returns a function that takes a single argument and returns that number plus 2. In effect, add 2 returns a function that looks like this:
add2 y = 2 + y
You could also think of it as taking the original add function and replacing all occurrences of x with 2.
Then we can pass in 5 to this new function:
(add 2) 5 == 7
In fact, in Haskell, (add 2) 5 is equivalent to add 2 5: it calls add 2, which returns a unary function, and then passes in 5 to that function.
A similar function could be constructed in Python like so:
def add(x):
return lambda y: x + y
Then you could call (add(2))(5) to get 7.
Why It’s Useful
To take a simple example, suppose you want to add 2 to every element in a list. You could map over the list using a lambda:
map (\x -> x + 2) myList
Or you could do this more concisely by partially applying the + function:
map (+2) myList
It might seem like this just saves you from typing a few characters once in a while, but this sort of pattern comes up all the time.
This summer I was working on a program that required merging a series of rankings. I had a list of maps where each map represented a ranking along a different dimension, and I needed to find the sum ranking for each key. I could have done it like this:
mergeRanks :: (Ord k) => [Map.Map k Int] -> Map.Map k Int
mergeRanks rankings = Map.unionsWith (\x y -> x + y) rankings
(Note: unionsWith takes the union of a list of maps by applying the given function to each map’s values.)
With partial application, we can instead write:
mergeRanks = Map.unionsWith (+)
This new function uses partial appliation in two ways. First, it passes in + instead of creating a lambda.
Second, it partially applies unionsWith. This call to unionsWith gives a function that takes in a list of maps and returns the union of the maps.
Notice also how mergeRanks is not defined with any arguments. Because the call to unionsWith returns a function, we can simply assign mergeRanks to the value of that function.
Perhaps this example is a bit on the confusing side; I intentionally chose a complex example that has real-world value. Once you grok partial applications, they show up more often than you might think, and you can use them to perform some pretty sophisticated operations.
And I haven’t even mentioned function composition.
Here’s a more complicated usage of partial application combined with function composition that I wrote this summer. See if you can figure out what it does.
In one program of about 500 lines, I wrote about a dozen pieces of code similar to this one.
Pattern Matching
Pattern matching gives us a new way of writing functions. To take the canonical example, let’s look at the factorial function. Here’s a simple Python implementation.
def fac(n):
if n == 0:
return 1
else:
return n * fac(n - 1)
And the same program written in Haskell:
fac n =
if n == 0
then 1
else n * fac (n - 1)
But we could also write this using pattern matching.
fac 0 = 1
fac n = n * fac (n - 1)
Think of this as saying
the factorial of 0 is 1
the factorial of some number n is n * fac (n - 1)
So pattern matching is more declarative rather than imperative–a declarative program describes the way things are rather than what to do.
Why It’s Useful
Wait, isn’t this just a different way of writing the same thing? Sure, it’s interesting, but what can pattern matching do that if statements can’t?
Well, quite a lot, actually.3 Pattern matching makes it trivial to deconstruct a data structure into its component values. Haskell’s pattern matching intricately relates to how Haskell handles data types.
Suppose we want to implement the map function. Recall that map takes a function and a list and returns the list obtained by applying the function to each element of the list. So map (*2) [1,2,3] == [2,4,6]. (Notice how I used partial application there?)
You may wish to take a moment to consider how you would implement map.
Without using pattern matching, we could implement map like this:
map f xs =
if xs == []
then []
else (f (head xs)) : (map (tail xs))
But this is a bit clunky, and we can do a lot better by using pattern matching. Think about how to define map recursively:
The map of an empty list is just an empty list.
The map of a list is the updated head of the list plus the map of the tail of the list.
map f [] = []
map f (x:xs) = (f x) : (map f xs)
So much nicer!
This sort of design pattern comes in handy when you’re operating over data structures. To take a real-world example, I recently wrote a function that operated over an intersection of three values:
scoreIntersection (Intersection x y z) = whatever
I could pass in the Intersection type and pattern matching made it easy to pull out the three values into the variables x, y, and z.
Summary
Haskell has a number of language features that appear strange to someone with an imperative-programming background. But not only do these language features allow the programmer to write more concise and elegant functions, they teach lessons that you can carry with you when you use more imperative programming languages.
Many modern languages partially or fully support some of these features; Python, for example, supports lazy evaluation with generator expressions, and it’s possible to implement pattern matching in Lisp. And I’m excited to see that Rust supports sophisticated pattern matching much like Haskell.
If you want to learn more about Haskell, check out Learn You a Haskell for Great Good! Or if you’ve already dipped your toes into the Haskell ocean and want to go for a dive, Real World Haskell can teach you how to use Haskell to build real programs.
P.S. This site is relatively new, so if you see a mistake, please leave a comment and I’ll try and fix it.
Notes
I realize this is a terrible way to implement a spam classifier. ↩
Note on Haskell Syntax
The $ operator groups expressions, so
length $ filter blacklisted $ words text
is equivalent to
length (filter blacklisted (words text))
The words function splits a string into a list of words. words
text is roughly equivalent to Python’s text.split(). ↩
Well, technically nothing, because every Turing-complete language is computationally equivalent. Anything that can be written in Python can also be written in assembly; that doesn’t mean you want to write everything in assembly. ↩
The : operator is a cons–given a value and a list, it prepends the value to the head of the list. ↩
If you are a United States citizen and you want to do as much good as possible with your vote, then how should you use it? (These principles apply outside the US as well, but my analysis focuses on US elections.)
Expected Value of Voting
For those who care about maximizing the welfare of society, the importance of voting increases as the population increases. Below is the mathematical justification for this claim. These calculations assume that you know the correct person to vote for. If you wish to avoid math, you can skip to the next section.
If the purpose of morality is to maximize the happiness of sentient beings, as I often claim, then whether free will exists is irrelevant. In fact, whether free will exists does not matter as long as morality focuses on the consequences of actions, rather than their motives.
The traditional argument goes: if free will is an illusion, then we are not in control of our own actions, which means we cannot be held responsible for them. So it doesn’t matter what actions we take, right? We can run around killing people, right? Well, no. Our actions still matter just as much as they ever did: they affect the outside world whether they are the product of free will or the result of deterministic processes. Others are still affected by our actions. We still feel emotions, even if those emotions arise deterministically.
We have an obligation not to cause suffering. Furthermore, we have no reason to limit this obligation to members of the human species–any sort of suffering is morally relevant, and the importance of the suffering derives not from who experiences it but from how severe it is [1]. If animals can suffer then their suffering deserves equal consideration.
Many non-human animals (including most vertebrates) are definitely capable of suffering–physically, and often emotionally. True, most animals cannot know the range of suffering that humans can, but they still feel pain, discomfort, and distress, and they experience such feelings as acutely (or at least approximately as acutely) as humans do. (For those who doubt that mammals and other vertebrates feel pain to the extent that humans do, see Do Animals Feel Pain?.) We owe it to all animals–human and non-human–not to inflict painful experiences upon them. Furthermore, we have an obligation to prevent the suffering of animals in the wild.
Practical Considerations
If we grant that the suffering of all beings holds equal value, then what must we do to remain consistent with our morals?
It has been well-established that factory farms–through which nearly all domesticated animals (excluding pets [2]) are raised–cause animals a great deal of suffering. This essay will not go into details, as facts about such animals’ treatment are readily available (in many books as well as on the web; I recommend Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation, an excerpt of which may be found here). All that need be said here is that animals on factory farms experience an enormous, almost incomprehensible amount of suffering for their entire lives.
So-called “free range” or “cage-free” farms, while they often improve conditions, still create considerable suffering. It is difficult to find farms that raise animals humanely, and even certified “humane” farms create conditions that I would not wish for any sentient being to endure (for example, castrating animals without anesthetic). It may be possible to find happily-raised animals in stores, but I warn the reader to be skeptical of any products that claim to be humane. For more information, see “The Truth Behind Labels: Farm Animal Welfare Standards and Labeling Practices.”
In light of these considerations, we hold an obligation to avoid animal products, especially food. Of course, reducing the quantity of meat one eats–while not as good as removing it entirely from one’s diet–does a great deal of good. For those who wish to prevent animal suffering but find it difficult to do so, there are a lot of resources out there that can help you. I recommend The Ultimate Vegan Guide by Erik Marcus.
Of all the animal products we consume, chicken and fish suffer the greatest total harm. A cow or a pig can feed many more people than a chicken or fish, so not as many have to be raised and killed in cruel conditions. And when industrial fishing boats capture fish, they end up killing many times more fish than they actually intend to harvest, simply by accident (Foer 49). Together, chicken, eggs, and fish probably account for over 95% of the suffering that the food industry creates. For more information on this subject, see “How Much Direct Suffering Is Caused by Various Animal Foods?”
One should avoid animal products not only to reduce suffering, but to make a statement. We will make serious progress toward reducing animal suffering when caring seriously about animals becomes a widely-accepted position. As it is, people who concern themselves with the suffering of non-human animals are considered radicals and often looked down upon–many consider it rude to even bring up the fact that you’re vegan. Every person who joins this “radical” position helps push it toward the mainstream; and the more mainstream the position becomes, the easier it will be to reduce animal suffering. Similarly, it is important to behave respectably when it comes to animal welfare issues; if you behave respectably, your position will get more respect. Incendiary organizations such as People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals can hurt the credibility of the animal welfare movement.
Other actions we can take include political action (such as lobbying for stricter legal standards for factory farms) and donating to charities that support animal welfare. Effective Animal Activism continually invests effort into identifying the most effective animal welfare charities, and they publish their recommendations on the front page of their website.
I frequently hear people give reasons why they cannot be vegetarian or vegan. It goes beyond the scope of this essay to address them all, but it is worth saying this: (a) extensive research has shown that a vegan diet can be healthy for humans in every stage of their lives (see this report by the American Dietetic Association); (b) I have never heard someone raise a problem that could not be solved by searching online for five minutes or less. (For example, a common complaint goes, “I can’t get enough protein.” Myriad sources in bookstores and on the Web explain how to eat adequate protein with a plant-based diet.) I recommend Vegan Health as a quick source on how to maintain a healthy diet.
The Importance of Animal Suffering
Given the sheer volume of factory-farmed animals, the meat industry represents one of the most serious problems facing the world today. Most people–including many vegetarians–grossly underestimate the importance of this issue.
Non-human animals clearly have many differences from humans: they cannot vote, they cannot attend school, and they cannot in most ways participate in human society. However, many species can suffer just as we can, and as such deserve moral consideration.
The day has been, I am sad to say in many places it is not yet past, in which the greater part of the species, under the denomination of slaves, have been treated by the law exactly upon the same footing, as, in England for example, the inferior races of animals are still. The day may come when the rest of the animal creation may acquire those rights which never could have been witholden from them but by the hand of tyranny. The French have already discovered that the blackness of the skin is no reason a human being should be abandoned without redress to the caprice of a tormentor. It may one day come to be recognised that the number of the legs, the villosity of the skin, or the termination of the os sacrum are reasons equally insufficient for abandoning a sensitive being to the same fate. What else is it that should trace the insuperable line? Is it the faculty of reason or perhaps the faculty of discourse? But a full-grown horse or dog, is beyond comparison a more rational, as well as a more conversable animal, than an infant of a day or a week or even a month, old. But suppose the case were otherwise, what would it avail? The question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?
Any fair-minded ethical theory must grant that suffering is equally significant no matter who experiences it, and that includes non-human animals.
Humans living in factory farm-like conditions would probably suffer worse than other animals because out higher reasoning capacities would create additional forms of suffering. However, the great majority of human suffering in such a situation would arise in the very same manner in which animal suffering arises: continual physical pain and discomfort, inability to form social connections, and severely limited emotional freedom. Considering the tens of billions of animals raised in such conditions for their entire lives, it should be no surprise when I claim that factory farming represents one of the greatest evils in existence.
Wild-Animal Suffering
That said, the single most important source of suffering that we know of must be wild-animal suffering. Due to the sheer number of wild animals, they experience far more suffering than animals in factory farms.
Unfortunately, it does not look like we can do much about it right now, as we are not very good at predicting the impact of our actions. It is likely that our efforts to help will only make the situation worse. So consider this an open problem. We ought to spend time considering what we can do to alleviate the suffering of wild animals without inadvertently creating more. Perhaps we do not yet know what to do, but we have not spent much time considering the problem.
For now, we should stop using animal products, help promote moral sentiments that give consideration to animal suffering, and consider donating to effective animal-welfare charities.
Notes
[1] When I spoke to a friend of mine about the subject of this essay, he argued that human well-being is necessarily more important because humans have a greater impact on the global well-being than other species. If this is true, it does not give greater _inherent_ value to human happiness, but rather gives them greater value because they create more significant _side effects_.
If a single human becomes more happy, his happiness spreads to other people–and hence, increasing a human’s happiness by X amount generally does more good than increasing a non-social animal’s happiness by X amount. But the added impact from a human’s happiness still does not compare to the extraordinary amount of suffering a human can prevent by taking on a few minor inconveniences (as described later in this essay).
[2] Factory farms represent the biggest source of suffering that humans inflict upon animals. This essay does not address the exploitation of animals for clothing, experiments, zoos, etc., because the sheer number of animals in factory farms far exceeds the number of animals in zoos and laboratories. And this essay excludes pets because we treat pets much better than most animals.
References
Foer, Jonathan S. Eating Animals. New York, NY: Hachette Book Group USA, 2010. Print.
Why should one adopt utilitarianism rather than some other moral philosophy? This essay explains four simple principles from which the utilitarian position follows.
First, the purpose of morality is to do what is good and prevent what is bad. I hope no one disagrees with this.
Second, I define good in relation to myself by my interests or preferences. The things that I value for myself–physical health, intellectual engagement, human connection–I consider to be good for me. The things I want to avoid, I consider bad.
Third, all beings who hold interests deserve moral consideration. While I cannot experience anything beyond my own consciousness, I still must recognize the existence of consciousness outside of myself. Even though I cannot directly experience the good that others feel, I must acknowledge that good exists for others just as much as it does for myself. I hold certain interests and other sentient beings hold their own interests; I ought to respect their interests just as much as I respect my own [1]. I want to do the most good possible–even if the good affects others and not myself.
Fourth, an interest holds value in proportion to the strength of the interest. My desire for life overrides my desire for an adrenaline rush, so I do not jump off of a cliff. Similarly, different beings’ interests may be compared by considering the strengths of their interests.
Those who do not accept this claim have no way of judging one particular good as more significant than another. However, I cannot deny that some of my interests are more important than others, and it is worth violating a lesser interest to serve a greater one (e.g. giving up my temporary happiness by cleaning the dishes so that I can use them later). From this fact, it follows that some people have some interests that outweigh other people’s interests. For this reason, tyranny of the majority is unjustifiable, as the minority’s stronger preferences outweigh the majority’s weaker preferences. (For a more detailed explanation of why it is possible to judge one good as more significant than another, see “Measuring Happiness.”)
This is not to say it is always easy to determine which interests matter most. Doing so is often difficult, but rarely (if ever) impossible.
Utilitarianism is simply the combination of these four simple premises. Good is defined by individuals’ preferences; all beings capable of having preferences deserve moral consideration; some preferences take precedence over others. From these principles, one may determine (or at least approximate) the most ethical choice in every situation.
Notes
[1] Here, "respect" simply means an acknowledgement that the interest holds value. Some interests promote the general good more than others; for example, a desire to provide for one's family does more good than a desire to indiscriminately murder people. If someone wanted to commit murder, I would try to prevent him from doing so, but only because the potential victim's desire to live overrides the potential murderer's desire to kill, and not because his interests do not hold value.
