Lives not worth living?

By Moritz Stumpe 🔸 @ 2024-10-08T15:29 (+63)

This is my contribution to the animal welfare vs. global health debate week. Thank you to Felix Werdermann, Helene Kortschak, and Vasco Grilo for their feedback.

TL;DR

I think there's significant uncertainty about whether most sentient lives, human or non-human, are truly "net positive" - meaning their positive experiences outweigh their negative ones. This uncertainty has important implications when comparing animal welfare (AW) and global health and development (GHD) interventions. While GHD often focuses on extending human lives, AW interventions have a stronger tendency to reduce the number of sentient lives lived. Factoring in uncertainty about whether most lives are worth living might justify a stronger focus on AW interventions over GHD, especially in areas with extreme suffering.

Context and epistemic status

I currently strongly prioritize AW over GHD, both in my giving and in my active work for Animal Advocacy Africa. My perspective is reasonably summarized by existing work from Rethink Priorities (e.g., their Moral Weight Project and Cross-Cause Cost-Effectiveness Model) and arguments made in this or this post. Since these posts are excellent and I don’t think I can add much substantial value to them, I decided to contribute a different perspective and explore a more uncertain avenue. I hope others find this fruitful.

For clarity, I want to note that my preference for AW over GHD is much more informed by empirical facts and studies than by the more theoretical and tentative arguments I make in this post. Here, I simply want to explore an argument that has been on my mind lately, but which I am highly uncertain about.

I have not researched these topics in depth and am only outlining tentative thoughts below. My goal is to raise a consideration that I think is relevant to how we should allocate resources between AW and GHD. If others find this relevant and helpful, I am happy to explore this topic further. I am equally open to changing my mind and thinking in different directions.

It is uncertain whether most sentient lives are worth living

At the heart of my argument is a question I’ve struggled with for a while: Are most sentient lives - human and non-human - worth living? In other words, do the positive experiences outweigh the negative ones for most sentient beings (i.e., are they “net positive” from a utilitarian perspective)?

I don’t think we have a clear answer, and I think it’s important to properly acknowledge this. For non-human animals, reasoning about whether their lives are net positive or negative faces extreme uncertainties because we know very little about their subjective experiences. For humans, we seem to know more. It is my impression that most people want to live longer and generally consider their lives worth living. But even here, I have my doubts. I will unpack these doubts in the following two subsections, before explaining their implications for this debate.

How rationally can we think about the net value of our own lives?

First, I think it’s extremely difficult for anyone to assess their life satisfaction in terms of net positives or negatives. When I’ve tried to do this myself, I found that I naturally fall into comparing my life to past experiences, future hopes, or the lives of others around me, rather than objectively evaluating my overall well-being. In other words, I think we’re often not asking, “Is my life overall worth living?” but rather, “How does my life compare to what it could be?” I think this is the way most people think about life satisfaction and it’s hard to do otherwise.^[1]

Some people in the EA community have tried to take an objective look at global life satisfaction. In 2022, Vasco Grilo estimated that around 6% of people globally lead net negative lives, based on a neutral point informed by two surveys and assuming comparability of scores across countries. This matches with Will MacAskill’s tentative suggestion that around 10% of the global population lead net negative lives.^[2] I am unsure how much weight to place on these estimates (also considering the factors I outline in the next subsection), but I think these are very important efforts, and I would love to see more work in this area.

Evolutionary Perspectives on Happiness and Dissatisfaction

Second, I have some doubts about the reliability of people’s (including my own!) self-reports about life satisfaction. I find the argument compelling that we are not wired to be consistently happy or satisfied. Evolution has shaped us to continually strive for more, because the ultimate goal from an evolutionary standpoint is survival and reproduction, not happiness. Even when we achieve our goals, we often quickly adapt to our new circumstances and find ourselves pursuing the next goal.

Some perspectives that have pushed me in this direction:

• Buddhist philosophy and meditation practices, such as those discussed by Robert Wright in Why Buddhism is True, emphasize that we are often trapped in cycles of desire and dissatisfaction.
• Daniel Kahneman’s distinction between the experiencing self and the remembering self highlights how we think about our lives in fragmented ways, often placing disproportionate weight on remembered experiences rather than lived ones. From my experience, there is a tendency to think nostalgically about the past, omitting certain hardships or justifying them in terms of the achieved outcomes. Such a positive view of the remembering self often does not match with what the experiencing self would report.
• Arthur Schopenhauer’s philosophy also resonates with me. His concept of the “Will to live” describes a blind, irrational drive that keeps us striving, but never fully satisfied.

These views imply that we form an inaccurate picture of our own lives, overestimating the positive and underestimating the negative moment-to-moment experiences in our lives, when evaluating our lives as a whole. I am aware that this is a tenuous position to take, denying that people (can) accurately evaluate the goodness of their life. As I wrote above, I am very uncertain about this view, but I think there are certain pieces of evidence that point in this direction.

I want to be clear: I’m not arguing that most lives are net negative or not worth living. But I think it’s reasonable to be deeply uncertain about whether most sentient lives, including human lives, are truly net positive, an assumption that seems to be implicit in many interventions and cause areas driven by the EA community.

(Farmed) animal welfare interventions have a stronger tendency to reduce the number of sentient lives lived than global health interventions

Given this uncertainty about whether most lives are net positive, I think there’s an important consideration when comparing GHD and AW interventions. While GHD interventions mostly aim to extend or save human lives, AW interventions more often aim to reduce the number of sentient lives - for example, by reducing the number of animals bred and raised for factory farming.

I realize that this is a gross simplification, and that not all GHD and AW interventions fall neatly into these categories. For instance, some GHD as well as AW interventions are simply aimed at improving lives but do not have clear effects on the number or duration of lives lived, and are therefore not as relevant to the question I am discussing here. StrongMinds’ community-based therapy intervention or the Open Wing Alliance’s work to move laying hens out of battery cages seem to fall into this category. But at a high level, it seems that AW interventions are more focused on reducing the number of potentially net-negative lives (like those of factory-farmed animals), while GHD interventions are focused on increasing the number of human life-years. Think about GiveWell’s current estimate that the Against Malaria Foundation averts a human death for USD 3,000 to 8,000 versus Animal Ask’s estimate that digital and mass media meat reduction campaigns spare 3.7 animals per USD.

This difference likely stems from the belief that human lives are typically net positive, while farmed animal lives are net negative. However, this difference in focus may also reflect taboos or cultural sensitivities. There’s significant societal discomfort around the idea that some human lives may not be worth living or may be net negative. Topics such as antinatalism or euthanasia remain highly controversial (ask Peter Singer), and interventions aimed at preventing lives in the human context are often considered morally fraught or politically untenable. By contrast, the intensive suffering of factory-farmed animals and the stark reality of their existence seem to make it more palatable to focus on preventing their lives rather than improving their living conditions. Thus, the difference in prioritization between human and animal lives may not only be a matter of cost-effectiveness but also a reflection of cultural and ethical considerations that make it easier to justify preventing negative lives in the animal context than in the human one. How to navigate such issues is a critical consideration, but it is a more practical one which I am not focusing on in this post.

Uncertainty around whether most sentient lives are worth living may warrant a stronger focus on animal welfare interventions

If we accept that it is less clear than commonly thought that most sentient lives are worth living, I think this could lead us to put a stronger focus on AW interventions. Generally, we should of course rely on estimates of where we can improve well-being most effectively - whether it be the well-being of a net positive or negative life, what matters is the absolute change. It is very plausible to me that certain interventions that improve human or non-human lives are more effective than interventions that simply reduce the number of really bad lives. But clear numeric estimates and comparisons can be extremely hard to make. On a high strategic level with so much uncertainty, I think that considerations like the one I am outlining here could carry some weight. They could even be included in existing quantitative estimates, and I would appreciate readers bringing such efforts to my attention if they exist.

Factoring in my uncertainty around the directionality of the net value of sentient lives, interventions that increase the number or duration of lives lived could look worse, all else being equal. People may underestimate the uncertainty surrounding whether the lives saved through GHD interventions in low-income countries are net positive or net negative. This uncertainty, if properly accounted for, could decrease the perceived cost-effectiveness of GHD interventions. Considering the above-mentioned tentative estimates that up to 10% of the global population may lead net negative lives (which may be a conservative estimate, given the uncertainties I have outlined), it’s plausible that some GHD interventions may prolong such lives and therefore have net negative welfare effects.

Considering the reverse case, I think that interventions that reduce the number of farmed animals run a very small risk of preventing potential net positive lives. In my view, the suffering of factory-farmed animals likely represents one of the most extreme examples of negative experiences and I expect such animals to largely lead net-negative lives. A counterpoint is that reducing the number of animals may be less favorable if future welfare reforms continue to improve the lives of farmed animals. Acknowledging uncertainty around when (if ever) populations of animals will have positive lives may mean we should place more weight on improving animal conditions rather than reducing their numbers.

Of course, other interventions could also look more appealing when factoring in the considerations outlined above, such as efforts to reduce s-risks (large-scale suffering in the future), but I’m not aware of any case where the impact seems as clear-cut as with factory-farmed animals. I would welcome readers pointing me toward such cases and challenging my view that AW interventions benefit the most from incorporating this uncertainty.

Conclusion

To summarize, I think that there is huge uncertainty around whether most sentient lives are worth living and suggest that we may not be adequately hedging our bets against this uncertainty in our prioritization decisions. Acknowledging that we don’t know whether most sentient lives are net positive could, I think, lead to a greater focus on AW interventions.

While I’ve mostly focused on farmed animals in this post, I think similar reasoning applies to certain wild animal suffering interventions as well (e.g., the use of contraceptives in wild animal populations).

I hope this post encourages others to reflect on these uncertainties and to contribute their own thoughts. I would love to be challenged on this perspective and think more deeply about this.

1. ^{^}

   For instance, consider the measurement taken by the World Happiness Report, one of the leading publications on subjective well being. They ask respondents:

   “Please imagine a ladder, with steps numbered from 0 at the bottom to 10 at the top. The top of the ladder represents the best possible life for you, and the bottom of the ladder represents the worst possible life for you. On which step of the ladder would you say you personally feel you stand at this time?”

   If someone rates their life as a 7/10 on that scale, does that imply their life is net positive? I think this is far from clear and cannot be decided based on this measurement. The question encourages relative rather than absolute judgments about life’s value and I think that this captures an intuitive way of thinking for most people.

2. ^{^}

   As quoted from What We Owe the Future in Vasco Grilo's post.