Your daughter vs 1 million strangers vs 1 trillion insects
Any claim that pennies or bugs matter more than people is ipso facto preposterous. That’s not how value works. That’s not how any of this works!
recently gained some viral traction when he argued that the welfare of insects matters more than the welfare of humans. Naturally, a number of people wrote in response objecting to this stance, including one such Corsaren, who wrote an extremely thoughtful and persuasive article…
…that also happens to be driving me crazy. Though it sounds ridiculous, I actually agree more with the guy who’s defending bugs over the guy who’s defending us! And somehow I mostly agree with both authors, yet still feel the need to wave my hands around and throw up a frankly excessive amount of exclamation points.
BULLDOG: Bugs matter more than people. Just look at the numbers.CORSAREN (sort of): Numbers don’t matter.ME: Yes numbers matter! That’s not how any of this works!
Like so many debates in life, I think there’s some disagreement going on regarding the actual facts, coupled with some amount of talking-past-each-other. In a nutshell:
- Our favorite philosophical canine is presenting a variant of the utilitarian “Repugnant Conclusion” which I believe is true in principle (though you can argue whether it applies to bugs).
- Corsaren is pointing out that not all of morality can be framed in purely utilitarian terms, which is also true.
- Utilitarians and non-utilitarians alike keep weakening their own arguments by taking things a step too far.
When utilitarians take things too far
Michael Lewis’s book Going Infinite, which catalogues Sam Bankman-Fried’s fall and rise, not only shows us the personality of this brilliant crypto-mogul and financial scammer, but also reveals the personality of an entire culture—a particular variety of “Effective Altruism” that had sprung up in Berkeley and has struck many on the outside as strange. SBF had surrounded himself with like-minded individuals from this community (EAs) that would adopt an extremely utilitarian mindset. Here’s one example of this sort of mindset at play, from FTX’s community therapist, George Lerner:
The EAs didn’t need his empathy; the EAs thought that even they shouldn’t care about their feelings. In their single-minded quest to maximize the utility of their lives, they were seeking to minimize the effect of their feelings. “The way they put it to me is that their emotions are getting in the way of their ability to reduce their decisions to just numbers,” said George. “They’d ask: Should I have an affair? Well, let’s run the cost-benefit analysis. EAs love that approach.”
(Disclaimer: This does not represent all EAs. At its core, Effective Altruism is about improving the efficacy of charities, encouraging people to donate more, and improving how we select which charities to donate to, all borne from a desire to help people. There are plenty of EAs who would take a hardline stance against adultery (whether from a deontological stance or virtue ethics, religion or rule utilitarianism, or even a simple repulsion at the thought of such acts).)
It’s hard to love someone who says, “I think I love you too but I might cheat on you; I need to run the numbers first.” It’s hard to trust a parent who sabotages your education, even if it’s for a supposedly good cause. It’s hard to rely on the promise of someone who second-guesses their every decision and holds no principled view of oathkeeping as inviolable. In pursuing the goals of Effective Altruism via maximally utilitarian means, it’s hard to say how much long-term harm SBF incurred to EA’s own causes.
Yet numbers do matter. Cost-benefit analyses are a good thing. It’s right to pull the Trolley Problem lever, it’s right to care about each other, and it’s right to even care about bugs.
When deontologists take things too far
Here are some possible arguments against Bentham’s stance that the pain of bugs are worth more than pain that humans feel:
- Insects have not earned the just deserts of moral consideration because they are either incapable or unwilling to act as moral agents should.
- The neural complexity of insects is so low, insects don’t reach the minimal threshold for experiencing true pain.
- Insects do feel real pain, but a human has ninety billion times as many neurons as an ant. Plausibly the amount of pain an ant feels is billions of times less, and it would take thousands of more bug-filled planets for them to finally matter more than humans.
- Humans not only experience greater pain, but we experience it for longer and carry those memories in a way that insects do not (so again, you’d need more bug planets).
- Pattern identity means that the majority of insects share exactly identical experiences that are essentially meaningless duplicates, carrying zero moral value, because any unique experience can only occur at most once (and each of their experiences have already been recorded into the annals of history, irreversible and eternal).
I think all of these are worth debating. Unlike this one:
- Insects feel non-zero pain, but I don’t care because I’m a human and they’re insects and insects are outside the zone of moral agents relative to me.
That is not exactly what Corsaren is arguing, and I apologize for the uncharitable summary. But it’s also not completely not what he’s saying:
But what this does mean is that, on occasion, it is possible for our moral obligations to come in conflict. It may be right for me to do everything in my power to save the life of the woman I love, even if that means letting millions suffer and sacrificing every penny of economic value in existence. And it can be equally right for you to try and stop me.
On the one hand, this is complete nonsense.
On the other hand, I sort of completely agree, and this sentiment is basically the essence of my post on Hannah-Jones and secondary virtues.
But first I want to take these words at face value to explain what happens when we too strongly deny utilitarianism:
Imagine a meteor headed to the Earth, its blast estimated to kill millions. The meteor can be diverted by intercepting its trajectory with a spaceship currently orbiting the planet, which NASA’s on-call space-controller can easily do—but his wife is on board the ship, currently hibernating.
Nobody else knows that this is even an option; the space-controller can hide evidence after-the-fact so neither him nor his wife will ever face any recrimination for their choice.
What should the space-controller do? What should he want to want to do? Which decision would he be able to live with?
There is only one sad, terrible, tragic answer to this question. I’m not sure what Corsaren’s answer would be; he only described “letting millions suffer”, not letting millions die. But if it’s true he’d choose to save the millions from the meteor, then that’s him making a utilitarian calculation. If two strangers isn’t enough, but one million strangers is, that implies a threshold that can be crossed with great enough numbers.
Maybe Corsaren would indeed let them die instead of his wife, but this still leads to inconsistencies. What if instead of a wife, it was a brother-in-law? Instead of a daughter, a nephew or niece? If all of them deserve the preferential treatment over the million dead, how about second cousins and nephews- or uncles-in-name-only, friends that were informally adopted by the family? How about a young man who was fostered for one month, or a sibling you love but who’s committed serious crimes? I know of edge cases that would take me too long to describe here. Rather than maintaining a circle of who’s in and who’s out in this game of utmost priority, it’d honestly be preferable (though no less discomforting) to assign different thresholds for different people, what sizes of meteors you wouldn’t be willing to sacrifice them for.
We might not want to assign such thresholds because it feels awful, inhuman and cold. But not assigning numbers would just be running away from the problem. Morality is, at least sometimes, an undeniable numbers game.
I agree with Corsaren and with Bentham’s Bulldog
(Alternative subtitle: Here’s the part with nuance.)
The real world is full of uncertainty, lies, self-serving biases, and self-serving jerks. There’s no such thing as a utilitarian calculation with a 100% guaranteed payoff. In the real world, there’s a chance that the spaceship isn’t going to deflect the meteor after all. It’s unlikely that such a momentous decision would come down to one person (though it’s happened before; a billion thanks to Stanislav Petrov for saving our world from nuclear holocaust). Let the astronaut’s spouse argue for her life, while the million on Earth argue for theirs.
As Corsaren explains, utility is agent-neutral. Principles like “God, family, country” (or “family, friends, neighbors” or “family, family, and eff the rest”) are agent-relative. Secondary virtues that operate on an agent-relative basis facilitate societal functions and lead to better outcomes. The astronaut deserves a spouse to argue for her life the same way anyone deserves a competent legal defense when taken to court: It’s not literally true that everyone deserves a defense (because some people really are irredeemably evil). But it’s true that we’re better off operating on the assumption that everyone deserves a defense, no matter who they are.
So for most people in most cases, utilitarianism is not the most useful way to view our moral obligations (except in one major respect: We should all be pledging to donate more to charity! Or to raise taxes and vote for representatives who will increase funding for global charitable initiatives), and Corsaren is right to point out the relevance of agent-relativism.
At the same time, I find it completely plausible that Bentham’s Bulldog might be factually correct about the whole bugs thing.
To be honest, I find this a pretty clear cut issue; our contrary intuitions are totally untrustworthy, and the importance of insects is intuitive when you actually think about it rather than just blindly deferring to popular judgments.
If you accept that adding more happy people to a universe can sometimes be preferable even it slightly brings down the average happiness, then by mathematical proof by induction, you have to accept that there are giant possible worlds full of fairly happy people that are preferable to tiny utopias full of only the most ecstatic and fulfilled people. For some reason, this logical result is known as the “Repugnant” Conclusion (RC).
If we assume insects as moral agents capable of leading what would be described as fairly happy and pattern-distinct lives (which is a big assumption!), then the RC implies that a universe with enough trillions of insects will be preferable to a universe with only a small number of humans. Which… fine then! We should be completely comfortable with this result (after verifying our assumptions).
Yet we shouldn’t accept every argument by big numbers.
SBF predicted big-number ethical gains to his financial malfeasance, but misjudged the likelihood of misfiring.
Many utilitarians have argued that a large enough number of pinpricks can outweigh any amount of torture, which isn’t actually true, though it seems to mirror the logic above. (I’ve argued against this one myself before, and will do so again.)
Philosophical “fanaticists” argue that risky options are always preferable when their gains become large enough, which I’ve also argued against (in short: there’s no natural law that demands we must use expected value for decisions instead of, say, sample means).
Pascal’s Wager argues that the infinitely great and terrible prospect of hell should force anyone to convert to Christianity and pray to God, but I’ve argued that this is equally and oppositely counter-balanced by the infinitely great and terrible prospect of hells designed by possible Gods who abhor the sort of person who accepts Pascal’s Wager.
And so on.
I say: Don’t ignore the insects. But also, don’t expect them to become the biggest political question of tomorrow.
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