Wild Animal Suffering Debunks Utilitarianism
A devastating objection
Utilitarianism
One popular philosophical moral theory is Utilitarianism, which is the idea that the right thing to do in any situation is the thing that maximizes good outcomes and minimizes bad outcomes.
Utilitarianism explains that it’s wrong to murder or assault people because the amount of enjoyment experienced by the murderer/assaulter is greatly outweighed by the bad outcome for the person who is murdered/assaulted. But sometimes the conclusions of Utilitarianism make less sense. For example, Utilitarians believe that you should execute an innocent person to satisfy an angry mob if the total happiness experienced by all the thousands of members of the angry mob outweighs the suffering of the one innocent person.
Technically Utilitarianism in its purest form is merely about maximizing good outcomes and preventing bad outcomes - it doesn’t say which outcomes you should consider good or bad. So it’s conceivable that there could be a Utilitarian who thinks that the Good is great art, and thinks that all actions should be judged on whether they increase or decrease the total production of great art.
But in practice, nearly everyone who believes in Utilitarianism also holds another philosophical position1: Hedonism. In philosophy jargon, Hedonism is the view that pleasure and pain are the only things that have intrinsic value. According to Hedonists, appreciation of great art is good, but it’s only good insofar as it causes you to experience pleasure. Hedonists would say that the pleasure of using heroin is just as good as the pleasure of contemplating great art.
Wild Animal Suffering
Utilitarians care a lot about animals, and it’s clear why. If pleasure and pain are the only things with intrinsic value, then it would be strange to privilege human welfare over animal welfare. Animals clearly can experience pleasure and pain. And many animals have horrible lives with a lot of pain. Factory farmed animals have lives of terrible suffering.
Many people - not just Utilitarians - can agree that factory farming is wrong. We intuitively know that it is wrong to abuse animals.
However Utilitarians believe that wild animal suffering is an even greater moral emergency than factory farmed animal suffering. To the Utilitarian, there is no moral distinction between a human being choosing to harm an animal and an animal harming another animal. Many people oppose factory farming on the grounds of animal rights: choosing to torture a creature is a violation of that creature’s rights. But Utilitarians don’t believe in rights they believe in welfare.
There are more large mammals in factory farms than in the wild, but when we extend our consideration beyond just large mammals and consider all kinds of animals, there are far more animals in the wild than in farms. That means that there are far more animals suffering and dying in the wild than on farms. So Utilitarians think that wild animal suffering is an even bigger problem than factory farming. (Some Utilitarians have concluded that life in the wild involves more pain than pleasure, have inferred that life in the wild is morally bad, and have concluded that all wildlife ought to be exterminated.)
The debate du jour on philosophy substack revolves around shrimp. Hundreds of billions or trillions of shrimp are killed per year, and they all probably feel pain. Since Utilitarians only care about pleasure and pain, rather than more human-exclusive goods like art, honor or life satisfaction, Bentham et al have concluded that helping shrimp is the morally best thing you can do, better than helping your family friends, starving African children or any other humans. They have raised thousands of dollars for a shrimp anaesthetization charity.
Wild Animal Suffering is a Devastating Objection to Utilitarianism
I think that wild animal suffering disproves Utilitarianism. Take a minute to think about how absurd this result is. Utilitarians are not merely claiming that it’s pemissible to donate to shrimp anaesthetization charities, they’re claiming it’s morally better to donate to shrimp charities than to needy humans. Furthermore, since donating to shrimp charities reduces suffering more effectively than anything else you could do, it is (according to Utilitarians) not morally permissible to give charity to anything other than shrimp. In fact, it’s not morally permissible to do anything with your life other than work in order to obtain money to give to shrimp charities. This should be considered a reductio ad absurdum of Utilitarianism or at least Hedonist Utilitarianism.
Utilitarianism is not the only philosophical moral theory in town. Competitors include Libertarianism, Kantianism, Virtue Ethics, and Natural Law theory. According to Libertarianism, the morally relevant thing is not welfare but rights. Animals have rights; it is wrong to torture them. But wild animal suffering is not a violation of animal rights because wild animals are simply living in nature - they are not being acted upon by any moral agent. Therefore factory farming is wrong but wild animal suffering is not a moral emergency.
When we try to figure out which moral theory is the true one, we must investigate each theory to its logical conclusion. If Libertarianism says that wild animal suffering is not a moral emergency and Utilitarianism says that wild animal suffering is the world’s greatest moral emergency, that’s a huge point in favor of Libertarianism and against Utilitarianism.
Spending your entire life as a slave to shrimp is clearly morally wrong because it is a waste of your life. The exclusive concern for shrimp rather than more lofty ideals flies in the face of morality.
Utilitarian
has pointed out that the Utilitarian view on shrimp implies that a superintelligence with the correct moral priorities would exterminate humanity - and Shtein endorses this.Exterminating humanity is not morally good. It is evil.
In addition to Hedonism, nearly all Utilitarians also hold Unitarian Universalism, the theory that tribal distinctions are illusory and should be denied and/or diminished.
I’ve repeatedly argued that if the shrimp-welfare people are right, the correct conclusion is to destroy all life on Earth
Well, you've got a flair for the dramatic! Some thoughts:
This Shrimpified Repugnant Conclusion doesn't stand alone, just like the regular repugnant conclusion doesn't. It looks pretty strange when you pull just the one line out, but the point of my post was that reasoning based only on that conclusion is wrong! It's understandable, but misguided.
You're a theist, right? The problem of evil looks really bad for theism. Like, it seems super unlikely that a God could exist who allows a ton of really awful things to happen all the time. So should we all be atheists? Well, not necessarily! There's lots more evidence and argument to consider—fine tuning and anthropics and psychophysical harmony and whatever else. And then any atheist will also have their whole own class of contradictions and uglinesses to deal with—the cold indifference of the universe and so on.
Just like you can be a theist despite the problem of evil, you can be a utilitarian despite the problem of shrimp suffering. Maybe God is just weird, and maybe the moral structure of the world is just weird.
> When we try to figure out which moral theory is the true one, we must investigate each theory to its logical conclusion. If Libertarianism says that wild animal suffering is not a moral emergency and Utilitarianism says that wild animal suffering is the world’s greatest moral emergency, that’s a huge point in favor of Libertarianism and against Utilitarianism.
This is absolutely right! But (moral) Libertarianism has a host of its own problems to deal with—for example, it implies that it would be permissible to walk by a child drowning in a pond if I simply decided I didn't want to save her. In fact, it seems like it totally ignores *any* ethical obligations simply on the grounds of "nah, don't wanna." I think that's a bigger problem than a conclusion that boils down basically to: "when many billions of things suffer terribly, it's very extremely bad, to the point that even humanity's concerns become secondary."
Same goes for "Kantianism, Virtue Ethics, and Natural Law theory," and whatever else. Utilitarianism wins a lot of very fundamental fights that make each of these alternatives extremely unappealing. Bentham's Bulldog goes through some: https://benthams.substack.com/p/utilitarianism-is-true
> I think that wild animal suffering disproves Utilitarianism.
Nah. It's an unintuitive result! It provides some evidence against it! But you'd need a much much larger case to really *disprove* it.
> Spending your entire life as a slave to shrimp is clearly morally wrong because it is a waste of your life. The exclusive concern for shrimp rather than more lofty ideals flies in the face of morality.
This is question-begging! You're assuming the "face of morality" doesn't care about shrimp.
Ok, last point I want to make: it's ok to be fairly doubtful of utilitarianism on Shrimp Repugnance grounds. But they shouldn't bear on pseudo-utilitarian frameworks like Richard Chappell's Beneficentrism: https://www.goodthoughts.blog/p/beneficentrism. If you're really very uncomfortable with shrimp welfare, just... donate to other utilitarian causes. Plenty of good global health charities out there!