Utilitarianism Hurts - A Case Study

From Cluster Headaches to Cockroach Cannibalism

As you know, I've repeatedly railed against utilitarianism on this blog and in Losing My Religions. Some think this is just an academic/philosophical debate, but it has real-world consequences.

A relatively recent example is the fawning attention (and $$$ - much much more than One Step for Animals' budget) for an organization focused on shrimp "welfare."

Honestly, when I first heard about this, I thought it was a joke - someone doing a mocking reductio ad absurdum for concern about nonhuman animals. But of course, I was mistaken. This is just another part of a movement dedicated to one-upping each other's expected value such that they will actively promote arguments against washing your face.

I would happily bet against shrimp having the conscious, subjective ability to suffer (see excerpts from Ed Yong below). Yet even if they did, it would be the faintest hint of a negative experience.

"But the numbers!"

The biggest change in my life since my most recent near-death experience was realizing how philosophically mistaken I have been in the previous decades. This only fully crystallized while I was writing the "Biting the Philosophical Bullet" chapter of Losing.

The short version relevant here: No number of individuals stubbing their toes offsets a single individual suffering a cluster headache.

But this is the shrimp organization's whole purpose. They are dedicating many resources on the chance that a lot of shrimp may be suffering some relatively small amount, and this matters more than individuals we know are suffering so intensely that they actively want to die.

To my mind, this is absurd at best, but really damn close to "immoral" in the same way talking about honey is "immoral." The time and money they are spending could be addressing real and tractable suffering.

If the numbers are what matter, why not focus on bacteria?

Panpsychism can't be disproven, so we should actually be focused on electrons!

I'm not saying I know for sure what should be done, but I'm pretty darn sure that an individual suffering intensely matters quite a bit more than having the bigger expected value on some EA forum.

From 2022:

tl;dr: Being able to sense things that are harmful – nociception – developed early in evolutionary history. Only much later, when animals became long-lived and limited in reproduction, did the extra, very expensive neural hardware evolve to allow for the conscious, subjective experience of suffering. That allowed those long-lived animals to learn in a way that assisted them later in their long life.

This ability to suffer and learn used the nociception system already in place*.

Our "pain" relieving medicines mostly work on our system of nociception, not our mental processes that turn those signals into pain (opioids might be an exception). So our "pain" medicines will work on other animals' nociception pathways, too, regardless of if they actually experience subjective suffering.

If this isn't enough to dispel the idea that "pain" and morally-relevant suffering are the same, please see this much deeper explanation, the most honest, good-faith deep exploration out there (even though I disagree with the author's conclusions).

This is important for several reasons.

The first is that many empathetic people (including many vegans) are inclined to equate "pain" with "suffering" and see "suffering" everywhere. I know a vegan who heard of a robot "escaping" and felt a twinge of moral sympathy for the robot.

Indeed, I have watched vegans spend more time trying to "prove" that bees are being exploited by the honey industry than actually trying to decrease factory farming.

And, of course, some Effective Altruists harp on insects in an attempt to "one up" everyone else's expected value.

Both groups are filled with people utterly invested in their position and who spend their time trying to bury anyone who has doubts.

This is not only a huge waste of time and energy, it makes vegans and EAs look nuts. Sorry to be blunt, but both vegans and EAs have image problems. It isn't enough to be "right." What matters is being effective, and that involves concern for appearances.

* In addition to the Open Philanthropy report, please check out and/or share these (repeated) excerpts from Ed Yong's wonderful An Immense World:

We rarely distinguish between the raw act of sensing and the subjective experiences that ensue. But that’s not because such distinctions don’t exist.

Think about the evolutionary benefits and costs of pain [subjective suffering]. Evolution has pushed the nervous systems of insects toward minimalism and efficiency, cramming as much processing power as possible into small heads and bodies. Any extra mental ability – say, consciousness – requires more neurons, which would sap their already tight energy budget. They should pay that cost only if they reaped an important benefit. And what would they gain from pain?

The evolutionary benefit of nociception [sensing negative stimuli / bodily damage] is abundantly clear. It’s an alarm system that allows animals to detect things that might harm or kill them, and take steps to protect themselves. But the origin of pain [suffering], on top of that, is less obvious. What is the adaptive value of suffering? Why should nociception suck? Animals can learn to avoid dangers perfectly well without needing subjective experiences. After all, look at what robots can do.

Engineers have designed robots that can behave as if they're in pain, learn from negative experiences, or avoid artificial discomfort. These behaviors, when performed by animals, have been interpreted as indicators of pain. But robots can perform them without subjective experiences.

Insect nervous systems have evolved to pull off complex behaviors in the simplest possible ways, and robots show us how simple it is possible to be. If we can program them to accomplish all the adaptive actions that pain supposedly enables without also programming them with consciousness, then evolution – a far superior innovator that works over a much longer time frame – would surely have pushed minimalist insect brains in the same direction. For that reason, Adamo thinks it's unlikely that insects feel pain. ...

Insects often do alarming things that seem like they should be excruciating. Rather than limping, they'll carry on putting pressure on a crushed limb. Male praying mantises will continue mating with females that are devouring them. Caterpillars will continue munching on a leaf while parasitic wasp larvae eat them from the inside out. Cockroaches will cannibalize their own guts if given a chance.