Wild animal welfare (WAW) is: A paradigm that sees the wellbeing and experiences of individual animals as the core moral consideration in our interaction with nature An interdisciplinary field of study, largely incubated by Effective Altruism (EA) An EA cause area hoping to implement interventions
Jul 12, 2022·edited Jul 12, 2022Liked by Holly Elmore
Some loose thoughts from a reader who is not involved in EA, philosophy, or the rationalist community...
EA seems like a self-evidently valuable exercise in clarifying our thinking about ethics. WAW seems like accelerating that process in a vertiginous way to where it's hard to have much confidence in anything. As the shrimp cartoon suggests.
We usually think of the interactions between non-human organisms, each other, and their environment as a space where our ethical principles are completely irrelevant, like a naive category error. Our own interactions with animals are a liminal space where most people feel confortable with being uncertain and inconsistent. As a vegetarian opposed to factory farming, I oppose this vagueness: we need to take responsibility and wind down our regime of cruelty. At that point, though, thinking about WAW becomes unavoidable. I’m glad you’re doing this work.
In trying to see and map the macro landscape of life, the experience of suffering begins to look like the overwhelming majority of experience, for organisms generally. Thinking too hard about this seems like a possible pathway to mental illness, or Buddhism.
In Stapledon's "Last and First Men," one of the successive human races learns how to obtain direct sensory access to the past. Their explorations in the human past, and its overwhelming sadness, lead to an epidemic of despair and psychosis that almost destroys them.
In one of her stories, James Tiptree Jr. describes a series of scenes in a man's life which each end in terrible disappointment. At the end, it emerges that his consciousness is somehow being held and farmed by an alien species which extracts and feeds on painful emotions.
From some angles, taking responsibility for the welfare of organisms quite different from us looks like hubris, because of the weakness of our understanding. We struggle to build a coherent account of our own “welfare,” but let’s stipulate that we can identify our own welfare in certain respects. Ethical reasoning involves modeling other people’s subjectivity on our own, a theory of mind. Given the variation of human culture and experience, this can be trickier than it seems. Members of previous generations, who tried really hard to identify and act on their ethical responsibilities, look very misguided to us: Victorian missionaries in the Pacific, etc. etc. The further we get from humans, the more uncertain the concept of welfare would seem to be.
In one possible scenario in which we do take responsibility for the welfare of other organisms, and intervene to improve it, we would evolve into something like gods. In that scenario, we would also take responsibility for the welfare of plants, fungi, microorganisms, and inanimate matter at various scales, and for improving the welfare of the past as well as the future.
As you point out, a possible near-future AGI may overtake us and assume responsibility for our welfare as well as other species’. I suspect that aligning an AI’s values with our own is intrinsically impossible.
> Each year, there are 30 trillion wild-caught shrimp alone! (Rethink Priorities,^)
This statistic both seems unrealistically high and doesn’t seem to match the source.
I’m assuming “wild-caught shrimp” means “shrimp caught in the wild by humans to feed humans”. That means that the average human eats 30 trillion/7 billion = ~4000 shrimp per year or about 10 shrimp per day per human. Given that many humans do not eat any shrimp (either for moral reasons or lack of access), and many people might only eat a few shrimp per month, this implies that some subgroups of people must be eating a huge number of shrimp. This isn’t impossible, but it does seem unlikely. Perhaps the statistic means that many of the shrimp are caught and fed to non-humans, or are caught accidentally in nets? If so, it’s probably worth mentioning that. (And if not, it’s also worth mentioning!)
Beyond that, the source doesn’t seem to mention this statistic at all. It does say “Fishcount.org estimates that between 220 billion and 526 billion decapod crustaceans were slaughtered in aquaculture production in 2015 alone.” However, that refers only to aquaculture of decapod crustaceans (a group that contains shrimp) and not to wild-caught shrimp. It’s not impossible that there are 60x-130x more wild-caught shrimp than aquaculture decapod crustaceans, but it does seem somewhat unlikely.
I agree that animal welfare is important though and this post was very informative about the cause. Thank you!
Some loose thoughts from a reader who is not involved in EA, philosophy, or the rationalist community...
EA seems like a self-evidently valuable exercise in clarifying our thinking about ethics. WAW seems like accelerating that process in a vertiginous way to where it's hard to have much confidence in anything. As the shrimp cartoon suggests.
We usually think of the interactions between non-human organisms, each other, and their environment as a space where our ethical principles are completely irrelevant, like a naive category error. Our own interactions with animals are a liminal space where most people feel confortable with being uncertain and inconsistent. As a vegetarian opposed to factory farming, I oppose this vagueness: we need to take responsibility and wind down our regime of cruelty. At that point, though, thinking about WAW becomes unavoidable. I’m glad you’re doing this work.
In trying to see and map the macro landscape of life, the experience of suffering begins to look like the overwhelming majority of experience, for organisms generally. Thinking too hard about this seems like a possible pathway to mental illness, or Buddhism.
In Stapledon's "Last and First Men," one of the successive human races learns how to obtain direct sensory access to the past. Their explorations in the human past, and its overwhelming sadness, lead to an epidemic of despair and psychosis that almost destroys them.
In one of her stories, James Tiptree Jr. describes a series of scenes in a man's life which each end in terrible disappointment. At the end, it emerges that his consciousness is somehow being held and farmed by an alien species which extracts and feeds on painful emotions.
From some angles, taking responsibility for the welfare of organisms quite different from us looks like hubris, because of the weakness of our understanding. We struggle to build a coherent account of our own “welfare,” but let’s stipulate that we can identify our own welfare in certain respects. Ethical reasoning involves modeling other people’s subjectivity on our own, a theory of mind. Given the variation of human culture and experience, this can be trickier than it seems. Members of previous generations, who tried really hard to identify and act on their ethical responsibilities, look very misguided to us: Victorian missionaries in the Pacific, etc. etc. The further we get from humans, the more uncertain the concept of welfare would seem to be.
In one possible scenario in which we do take responsibility for the welfare of other organisms, and intervene to improve it, we would evolve into something like gods. In that scenario, we would also take responsibility for the welfare of plants, fungi, microorganisms, and inanimate matter at various scales, and for improving the welfare of the past as well as the future.
As you point out, a possible near-future AGI may overtake us and assume responsibility for our welfare as well as other species’. I suspect that aligning an AI’s values with our own is intrinsically impossible.
> Each year, there are 30 trillion wild-caught shrimp alone! (Rethink Priorities,^)
This statistic both seems unrealistically high and doesn’t seem to match the source.
I’m assuming “wild-caught shrimp” means “shrimp caught in the wild by humans to feed humans”. That means that the average human eats 30 trillion/7 billion = ~4000 shrimp per year or about 10 shrimp per day per human. Given that many humans do not eat any shrimp (either for moral reasons or lack of access), and many people might only eat a few shrimp per month, this implies that some subgroups of people must be eating a huge number of shrimp. This isn’t impossible, but it does seem unlikely. Perhaps the statistic means that many of the shrimp are caught and fed to non-humans, or are caught accidentally in nets? If so, it’s probably worth mentioning that. (And if not, it’s also worth mentioning!)
Beyond that, the source doesn’t seem to mention this statistic at all. It does say “Fishcount.org estimates that between 220 billion and 526 billion decapod crustaceans were slaughtered in aquaculture production in 2015 alone.” However, that refers only to aquaculture of decapod crustaceans (a group that contains shrimp) and not to wild-caught shrimp. It’s not impossible that there are 60x-130x more wild-caught shrimp than aquaculture decapod crustaceans, but it does seem somewhat unlikely.
I agree that animal welfare is important though and this post was very informative about the cause. Thank you!