One Reason Why Humans Matter More Than Animals

An ounce of meaning outweighs a ton of pain.

Photo by Jongsun Lee on Unsplash

There is a lot of wild animal suffering. Every minute, there are animals starving to death or dying of disease or being eaten alive.

Factory farming seems morally wrong because we are doing harm to the animals, not merely allowing harm to be done to them. The moral argument against factory farming is a matter of rights.

While many people are sympathetic to the moral argument against factory farming, I think most people would think it was absurd to try to mitigate wild animal suffering. I suspect that few people would support efforts to force wolves to eat tofu and many people would be against it on the grounds that it is a repugnant case of tampering with nature.

There is something un-heroic and un-eudaimonic about forcing wolves to eat tofu, especially when such an activity requires a lot of your own time and effort which you could have directed to more worthy pursuits.

Utilitarians think wild animal suffering is a big problem

Technically Utilitarianism is just the view that one ought to do the thing which brings about the greatest value. Technically that is compatible with a broad range of views on which things are valuable and which courses of action will be most effective. However, people today who call themselves Utilitarians almost invariably hold to another particular set of views in addition to Utilitarianism. They’re not just Utilitarians, they’re Hedonist, Unitarian Universalist, Utilitarians.

• Hedonism - This is the philosophical view that pleasure is the only good and pain is the only bad. Not to be confused with the colloquial sense of “hedonist” meaning a person who only cares about their own pleasure. A person who believes in the philosophical view called hedonism may be highly altruistic; they would help other people to gain pleasure and avoid pain. Utilitarian substacker Bentham’s Bulldog takes his name from Jeremy Bentham, an 18th century English philosopher who promoted the Hedonistic Utilitarian philosophy. Modern Utilitarians may pay lip service to the idea that there are values other than pain and pleasure, but in practice, all of their projects revolve around pleasure and pain.

• I’m calling these beliefs “Unitarian Universalism” because as best I can tell, these are some of the core tenets of Unitarian Universalism, the reason why many modern Westerners believe these things is due in part to the legacy of mainline Protestantism, and Unitarian Universalism is one of the purest distillations of the ideas of mainline Protestantism.

  • All tribes are really the same. Therefore conflict between tribes is bad. If you think your tribe is better that’s probably just your bias talking. People who are partial to their own tribe are kind of dumb and quaint. People who understand that all tribes are really the same are enlightened.

  • You ought to reject your intuitions, or at least you ought to be highly skeptical of your intuitions. This is related to left-wing ideas of subconscious bias. The idea is that our intuitions are not reservoirs of deep wisdom honed by millennia of evolution, but rather are annoying cognitive errors which we ought to consciously reject. In practice, people who hold this view, in their efforts to avoid bias, tend to embrace absurd views simply because they are absurd. They get a thrill out of embracing positions that are repugnant to intuition, such as the position that fish sex ought to be stopped and that marine life ought to be exterminated.

Utilitarians don’t believe in rights, so they think that one unit of wild animal suffering is just as bad as one unit of factory farmed animal suffering. As discussed above, they also believe that pleasure and pain are the only values. It follows that wild animal suffering is one of the worst things on Earth. Under Utilitarian Hedonist assumptions, it follows that shrimp welfare charities do more good than pretty much any charity that donates to humans.

Humans matter more than shrimp

Suppose you were being tortured. You have a cyanide pill which you could take to kill yourself, but there is a possibility that you will be rescued. You hope you can endure the torture, survive, escape and return home where you will live many more years of eudaimonia and meaning.

I think it would be a good thing to resist the torture and not give up on life. It would be a good thing even if the pain of the torture outweighed the pleasure you would get later in life in a strict hedonic calculation. I have never been tortured, I’m sure everyone has a breaking point and I would not harshly judge anyone who failed to endure and took the suicide pill instead. But I believe that in the calculation of a good life, a bit of meaning outweighs almost any amount of physical pain.

Whether or not we would be able to do it, I think it would be a good thing to spit in your captor’s face, refuse to allow your spirit to be broken, and go on to escape and live a life of meaning.

Shrimp can experience pleasure and pain but they cannot have lives of meaning. This has something to do with the fact that shrimp cannot conceive of their lives as a whole and therefore cannot have preferences about what they would like the full stories of their lives to be.

1. The person who refuses to break under torture seeks a small amount of meaning at the cost of a lot of pain.

2. If it is good for a person to seek a small amount of meaning at the cost of a lot of pain, then meaning must greatly outweigh pain in moral decision-making.

3. Shrimp can experience pain but they cannot have meaningful lives.

4. If meaning greatly outweighs pain in moral decision-making then one ought to pursue meaning in one’s own life (or help other persons to have meaningful lives) rather than helping shrimp to avoid pain.

5. Conclusion: If it is good to refuse to break under torture, then one ought to pursue meaning in one’s own life (or help other persons to have meaningful lives) rather than helping shrimp to avoid pain.

Moral #1: Most people today who call themselves Utilitarians are not merely Utilitarians. In addition to Utilitarian philosophical positions they almost always also believe Hedonist and Unitarian Universalist philosophical positions. Under those assumptions, it follows that we should spend a lot of time helping wild animals and shrimp.

Moral #2: Contra Hedonic Utilitarians, meaning matters and it matters a lot more than pain. It is good to refuse to break under torture. It is good to live a meaningful life. Since people can have meaningful lives and shrimp cannot, it is generally better to help people rather than shrimp.