This post is largely a personal musing; the substantive content has been discussed elsewhere by many other authors.
One of the things that has most transformed the way I look at the world has been cognitive science, specifically the philosophical understanding that grounds it: Seeing the brain as a collection of cognitive algorithms running on biological hardware. This focus on not just what the brain does but how it might do it is fundamentally transformative.
For as long as I can remember, I had known about the types of psychological facts commonly reported in the news: For instance, that this particular region of the brain controls this particular function, or that certain drugs can treat certain brain disorders by acting in certain ways. And it's basic knowledge to almost everyone on the planet that operations inside the head are somehow important for cognitive function, because when people damage their brains, they lose certain abilities.
While I knew all of this abstractly, I never thought much about what it implied philosophically. I saw myself largely as a homunculus, a black box that performed various behaviors and had various emotions over time. Psychology, then, was like macroeconomics or population biology: What sort of trends do these black boxes tend to exhibit in given circumstances? I didn't think about the fact that my behaviors could be reduced further to particular cognitive-processing steps inside my brain.
Yet it seems pretty clear that such a reduction is possible. Think about computers, for instance. Like a human, a computer exhibits particular behaviors in particular circumstances, and certain types of damage cause certain, predictable malfunctions. Yet I don't think I ever pictured a computer as a distinct inner self that might potentially have free will; there were no ghosts or phantoms inside the machine. Once I had some exposure to computer architecture and software design, I could imagine what kinds of operations might be going on behind, say, my text-editor program. So why I did I picture other people and myself differently? My conceptions reflected how an algorithm feels from inside; I simply stopped at the basic homunculus intuition without breaking it apart.
Picturing yourself as a (really complicated and kludgey) computer program casts life in a new light. Rather than simply doing a particular, habitual action in a particular situation, I like to reflect upon, What sort of cognitive algorithm might be causing this behavior? Of course, I rarely have good answers -- studying that is what cognitive science is for -- but the fact that there is an answer soluble in principle gives a new angle on my own psychology. It's perhaps like the Buddhist notion of looking at yourself from the outside, distanced from the in-the-trenches raw experience of an emotion. And, optimistically, such a perspective might suggest ways to improve your psychology, perhaps by adopting new cognitive rituals. That is, of course, what self-help books have done for ages; the computer analogy (e.g., "brain hacks" or "mind hacks," as they're sometimes called) is just one more metaphor for describing the same thing.
Related is the realization that thought isn't a magical, instantaneous operation but, rather, requires physical work. Planning, envisioning scenarios, calculating the results of possible actions, acquiring information, debating different hypotheses about the way the world works, proving theorems, and so on are not -- as, say, logicians or economists often imagine them -- immediate and obvious; they involve computational effort that requires moving atoms around in the real world. For instance, the fact that you considered an option and then disregarded it is not a "wasted effort," because there's no other way to figure out the right answer than actually to do the calculation. Similarly, you're not at fault for failing to know something or for temporarily holding a misconception; the process of acquiring correct (or at least "less wrong") beliefs about the world requires substantive computation and physical interaction with other people. Changing your opinions when you discover you're in error isn't something to be embarrassed about -- it's an intrinsic step in the algorithm of acquiring better opinions itself.
Sunday, September 20, 2009
Saturday, September 12, 2009
Pain-free Animals?
The current Vegan Outreach newsletter contains a link to a New Scientist piece (as well as an unfortunate editorial) based on a fascinating article: "Knocking Out Pain in Livestock: Can Technology Succeed Where Morality has Stalled?" by Adam Shriver. The moral urgency of such a proposal seems to me obvious, so I was most interested in the discussion of its scientific plausibility.
Shriver presents two example proposals for what might be done. First, we might
I mentioned that Shriver's proposal seems obviously valuable from my perspective, but unfortunately this isn't necessarily the case among the general public. As the New Scientist article notes:
Shriver presents two example proposals for what might be done. First, we might
create knockouts of other mammals (cows and pigs for starters) lacking the AC1 and AC8 enzymes. Interfering with the cAMP cycle in the brain reduces the affective dimension of chronic or persistent pain, rather than pain full stop, but this would still be an improvement over current circumstances. If we could eliminate the sensitization that occurs as a result of painful or traumatic experiences, the animals would still be better off than they are now.Secondly,
Zhou-Feng Chen and colleagues searched the Allen Brain Atlas to find genes that were highly expressed in the ACC but not other areas of the brain [29]. One strong candidate was the peptide P311. The researchers created knockout mice lacking the expression of P311 and found that heat and mechanical sensitivity were normal in the animals. However, they then performed a conditioned place aversion test on the animals and found that the knockouts no longer demonstrated the conditioned place aversion caused by formalin injections, in stark contrast to control rats. Thus, at first glance, it appears that knocking out P311 in mice strongly diminishes the affective dimension of pain while keeping acute responses intact.Since I'm even more interested in wild-animal suffering than farm-animal suffering, in view of the vast difference in numbers of animals involved, my immediate question was whether similar techniques might one day be applicable there. Doing so is a lot trickier, because evolution produced the badness of pain for a reason. Shriver mentions this concern:
Furthermore, P311 is likely to play a similar role in all mammals (Chen, personal communication), so one presumably could engineer other mammals that have a reduced affective dimension of pain while maintaining the sensory dimension of pain.
Since it seems likely that the affective dimension of pain played some role in determining the evolutionary fitness of organisms, we might question whether knockout livestock could really survive up through the point where they are normally slaughtered. However, it appears that the experimental rats were able to survive without complication at least in their cages (Chen, personal communication). This would be a good model for sows or veal calves who spend most of their lives confined in small pens where they can’t do much of anything that would injure or otherwise harm themselves.Producing genetically fit wildlife without pain might require not just knocking out pain but replacing the "pain" - "pleasure" axis with a "less pleasure" - "more pleasure" axis, which could be much more difficult.
I mentioned that Shriver's proposal seems obviously valuable from my perspective, but unfortunately this isn't necessarily the case among the general public. As the New Scientist article notes:
[Alan] Goldberg also contends that public attitudes may make pain-free livestock a non-starter. He and colleague Renee Gardner conducted an online survey on the use of pain-free animals in research and found little public support, even among researchers who experiment on animals (Alternatives to Animal Testing and Experimentation, vol 14, p 145).This underscores the importance of public outreach to change hearts and minds about wild-animal suffering and how it could be prevented.
Thursday, July 16, 2009
Ham and Eggonomics, Part 2
Below are some quotes from and comments on Ch. 8 of the Ham and Eggonomics book introduced in Part 1.
The authors begin with a discussion of the fallacy that "my individual purchases don't matter." They give a nice illustration:
Of course, the analogy to food purchases isn't quite accurate. In practice, as discussed here, an individual's purchasing choice is extremely unlikely to change the number of animals raised, because food is produced and sold in bulk units. However, in the event that a consumer does have an effect, that effect will be huge. Thus, in ignorance of whether a particular purchase is the one that "breaks the camel's back," the expected values of each purchase do add in the same way as the rulers. (To the extent that this reality may be de-motivating for potential vegetarians, perhaps it's better not to mention it too much?)
Pages 3-4 contain a nice discussion of the relevance of elasticities to the question of how an individual's purchases affect the quantity supplied by the market. The authors argue that the supply curves for beef, and to a lesser extent milk, are likely inelastic, while those for pork, and probably also chicken and eggs, are probably relatively elastic. More elastic supply means a bigger change in production when consumer behavior changes. Thus, for instance, abstaining from eating 1 kilogram of chicken has a bigger expected impact on the kilograms of chicken produced than abstaining from 1 kilogram of beef has on the kilograms of beef produced, other things being equal. As far as demand elasticity, the studies that the authors have done suggest a slightly bigger kilogram-for-kilogram impact of abstaining from chicken, pork, veal, and milk relative to beef or eggs. The total results--combining information about supply elasticities and demand elasticities--are shown in Figure 8.2 (see this document for the Chapter 8 figures), which I've reproduced below in sorted order:
If [someone] gives up Total Consumption of ... the Product Falls By ...
One Pound of Milk 0.56 lbs
One Pound of Beef 0.68 lbs
One Pound of Veal 0.69 lbs
One Pound of Pork 0.74 lbs
One Pound of Chicken 0.76 lbs
One Egg 0.91 egg.
Of course, this is not the end of the story. Other (often more important) factors to consider when deciding on dietary purchases include the quality of the lives of animals of different types, and the number of animals required to produce a given quantity of meat, counting both the animals themselves and their parents. Pages 5-6 explain Bailey's own views on the quality of life of various farm animals on a scale of -10 to 10 (see Figure 8.4).
In particular, Bailey thinks some farm animals have lives worth living. Looking at only the non-breeder animals, these are cows (+6), AWA-certified pork (+4), broiler chickens (+3), and cage-free hens (+2). On broiler chickens, Bailey says they "have a life worth living, but because of their leg problems and confined environment, do not fare as well as beef cattle" (p. 5). I'm more skeptical that broilers on average enjoy their lives, but even if they do, I would still be wary of giving them positive welfare because the painfulness of slaughter has to be considered. I personally wouldn't want to live even a mildly pleasant life for only 45 days if it meant that I would afterwards endure slaughter. This is probably true even if I were given electrical stunning and definitely true if I were one of the birds for which the stunning was not effective.
I assume Bailey has included the painfulness of death in his numbers, but it would be good to make this explicit. Otherwise, many readers will just imagine what a broiler chicken looks like during a typical moment of its life, multiply that by ~42 days of life, and conclude that the total experience is positive. An explicit mention of the relevance of lengths of lives would be helpful as well; indeed, this consideration makes Bailey's numbers seem a little odd. How can a beef cow, which lives for 402 days (see the "Beef" section here) have only twice the total happiness (+6 instead of +3) of a broiler chicken that lives 42 days? If Bailey's calculations do involve multiplication of his welfare numbers by lifespan, I missed that part of the text. In any event, doing straight multiplication in that way would still be misleading because it ignores the painfulness of death at the end of a life, unless stress during transport and slaughter has been implicitly incorporated into the per-day average.
Pages 6-7 discuss the impacts of farming on wild animals. In my view, this is the most important part of the calculation, especially if we give more than vanishingly small probability to insect sentience. Of course, if insects' short lives aren't worth living, then it's not clear that pesticide use in crop production represents a net harm (though whether it is or not, the chemicals could still potentially be made less painful).
As they did in Chapter 6, the book authors comment on the possibility that bigger wild animals also suffer enormously:
The authors continue with a discussion of the consideration, How many animals does it take to produce a given quantity of meat? This is the primary variable of interest in my own calculations of suffering per kilogram of meat, but the book authors do a more thorough job, by including numbers of parent animals that need to be raised, as well as the efficiency of production under various conditions. An example of the latter is that cage-free hens produce fewer eggs per week than caged hens.
In fact, this last point is rather important to the question of whether to purchase cage-free eggs (or, at least, whether to encourage others to do so). As the authors explain (p. 11), if you believe that both caged and cage-free hens suffer and that cage-free hens suffer at least ~2/3 times as much as caged hens, then for efficiency reasons, caged-hen eggs entail less total suffering than cage-free-hen eggs. However, Bailey's personal opinion (see Figure 8.4) is that cage-free hens have net happy lives, in which case cage-free eggs would clearly be preferable.
The chapter continues with interesting discussions of public attitudes toward factory farming as assessed by a nationwide telephone survey, as well as how one could compute willingness-to-pay for animal welfare by different consumers. The Appendix describes the mechanics of how elasticities can be used when assessing changes in the quantity of a good supplied, as well as the detailed calculations of how many animals need to be raised to produce a given amount of meat.
Toward the end of the main chapter, the authors make a disturbing comment, though perhaps not one that comes as a surprise:
I hope to get a chance to read more of the book at some point; it contains lots of high-quality and thoughtful discussion. Thanks to the authors for writing it!
The authors begin with a discussion of the fallacy that "my individual purchases don't matter." They give a nice illustration:
Suppose that we take 5,280 [one foot] rulers and placed them in a straight line, end to end. This line of rulers would then be one mile long. It would appear as one long line, and if you could view the entire mile of rulers from above, you would not be able to see one single ruler. If you removed one ruler, the line would grow shorter; there is no doubt as to that. Viewed from above, removing one ruler would not appear to have any effect on the line—but again, it does.
Of course, the analogy to food purchases isn't quite accurate. In practice, as discussed here, an individual's purchasing choice is extremely unlikely to change the number of animals raised, because food is produced and sold in bulk units. However, in the event that a consumer does have an effect, that effect will be huge. Thus, in ignorance of whether a particular purchase is the one that "breaks the camel's back," the expected values of each purchase do add in the same way as the rulers. (To the extent that this reality may be de-motivating for potential vegetarians, perhaps it's better not to mention it too much?)
Pages 3-4 contain a nice discussion of the relevance of elasticities to the question of how an individual's purchases affect the quantity supplied by the market. The authors argue that the supply curves for beef, and to a lesser extent milk, are likely inelastic, while those for pork, and probably also chicken and eggs, are probably relatively elastic. More elastic supply means a bigger change in production when consumer behavior changes. Thus, for instance, abstaining from eating 1 kilogram of chicken has a bigger expected impact on the kilograms of chicken produced than abstaining from 1 kilogram of beef has on the kilograms of beef produced, other things being equal. As far as demand elasticity, the studies that the authors have done suggest a slightly bigger kilogram-for-kilogram impact of abstaining from chicken, pork, veal, and milk relative to beef or eggs. The total results--combining information about supply elasticities and demand elasticities--are shown in Figure 8.2 (see this document for the Chapter 8 figures), which I've reproduced below in sorted order:
If [someone] gives up Total Consumption of ... the Product Falls By ...
One Pound of Milk 0.56 lbs
One Pound of Beef 0.68 lbs
One Pound of Veal 0.69 lbs
One Pound of Pork 0.74 lbs
One Pound of Chicken 0.76 lbs
One Egg 0.91 egg.
Of course, this is not the end of the story. Other (often more important) factors to consider when deciding on dietary purchases include the quality of the lives of animals of different types, and the number of animals required to produce a given quantity of meat, counting both the animals themselves and their parents. Pages 5-6 explain Bailey's own views on the quality of life of various farm animals on a scale of -10 to 10 (see Figure 8.4).
In particular, Bailey thinks some farm animals have lives worth living. Looking at only the non-breeder animals, these are cows (+6), AWA-certified pork (+4), broiler chickens (+3), and cage-free hens (+2). On broiler chickens, Bailey says they "have a life worth living, but because of their leg problems and confined environment, do not fare as well as beef cattle" (p. 5). I'm more skeptical that broilers on average enjoy their lives, but even if they do, I would still be wary of giving them positive welfare because the painfulness of slaughter has to be considered. I personally wouldn't want to live even a mildly pleasant life for only 45 days if it meant that I would afterwards endure slaughter. This is probably true even if I were given electrical stunning and definitely true if I were one of the birds for which the stunning was not effective.
I assume Bailey has included the painfulness of death in his numbers, but it would be good to make this explicit. Otherwise, many readers will just imagine what a broiler chicken looks like during a typical moment of its life, multiply that by ~42 days of life, and conclude that the total experience is positive. An explicit mention of the relevance of lengths of lives would be helpful as well; indeed, this consideration makes Bailey's numbers seem a little odd. How can a beef cow, which lives for 402 days (see the "Beef" section here) have only twice the total happiness (+6 instead of +3) of a broiler chicken that lives 42 days? If Bailey's calculations do involve multiplication of his welfare numbers by lifespan, I missed that part of the text. In any event, doing straight multiplication in that way would still be misleading because it ignores the painfulness of death at the end of a life, unless stress during transport and slaughter has been implicitly incorporated into the per-day average.
Pages 6-7 discuss the impacts of farming on wild animals. In my view, this is the most important part of the calculation, especially if we give more than vanishingly small probability to insect sentience. Of course, if insects' short lives aren't worth living, then it's not clear that pesticide use in crop production represents a net harm (though whether it is or not, the chemicals could still potentially be made less painful).
As they did in Chapter 6, the book authors comment on the possibility that bigger wild animals also suffer enormously:
Animal rights groups tend to romanticize the life of animals in the wild, but anyone who has watched wildlife documentaries can attest to the cruelty of nature. We ask you, the reader, would you rather be a Wildebeest in Africa who must constantly roam for food, always in pursuit by lions and crocodiles, or would you rather be a cow in the U.S., or a hog in the U.S.? (pp. 6-7)
The authors continue with a discussion of the consideration, How many animals does it take to produce a given quantity of meat? This is the primary variable of interest in my own calculations of suffering per kilogram of meat, but the book authors do a more thorough job, by including numbers of parent animals that need to be raised, as well as the efficiency of production under various conditions. An example of the latter is that cage-free hens produce fewer eggs per week than caged hens.
In fact, this last point is rather important to the question of whether to purchase cage-free eggs (or, at least, whether to encourage others to do so). As the authors explain (p. 11), if you believe that both caged and cage-free hens suffer and that cage-free hens suffer at least ~2/3 times as much as caged hens, then for efficiency reasons, caged-hen eggs entail less total suffering than cage-free-hen eggs. However, Bailey's personal opinion (see Figure 8.4) is that cage-free hens have net happy lives, in which case cage-free eggs would clearly be preferable.
The chapter continues with interesting discussions of public attitudes toward factory farming as assessed by a nationwide telephone survey, as well as how one could compute willingness-to-pay for animal welfare by different consumers. The Appendix describes the mechanics of how elasticities can be used when assessing changes in the quantity of a good supplied, as well as the detailed calculations of how many animals need to be raised to produce a given amount of meat.
Toward the end of the main chapter, the authors make a disturbing comment, though perhaps not one that comes as a surprise:
There is evidence to believe that many Americans simply do not care very much about the well-being of farm animals. In our conversations with 300 individuals from three cities in the U.S., one-third told us that they would rather not know how farm animals are raised. They simply want to continue consuming their delicious, safe, and inexpensive food without worrying about whether the animals that provide that food suffer. (p. 17)
I hope to get a chance to read more of the book at some point; it contains lots of high-quality and thoughtful discussion. Thanks to the authors for writing it!
Saturday, July 4, 2009
Ham and Eggonomics, Part 1
Bailey Norwood is a professor of agricultural economics at Oklahoma State University. Much of his recent research on food preferences and farm-animal care is of interest to the animal-welfare community. For instance, one of his papers examines economic impacts of switching to vegetarian diets, giving consideration to the supply-and-demand interrelationships of the chicken, pork, beef, and corn markets.
One of Norwood's recent projects is a website called Ham and Eggonomics, which includes an associated blog. In the page's own words:
The page features the a book with the same name as the site. The book is in draft form, and "comments are welcome," so I'll make a few remarks on Chapters 1 and 6 below. In Part 2, I comment on Chapter 8.
Chapter 1 lays out the slant from which the authors approach animal welfare: Namely, the economics of revealed preferences, rather than philosophical prescription.
Needless to say, I don't agree with this approach, because it conflates prescription about what should be done with description of the desires held by an arbitrary group of agents (adult Americans, in rough proportion to their voting / purchasing power). I demur at the suggestion that "animals matter because people care about them" (Ch. 1, p. 5). But my objection here is no different from my disagreement with the standard economic approach in general, and I'm glad the authors make their bias explicit. In addition, I appreciate the authors' aim to make reasoned decisions based on academic research into the costs and benefits of particular actions, without being afraid to upset standard ideological positions. (We merely differ on what to measure when assessing costs and benefits.)
The tone of the book is very "mainstream":
This may ultimately prove beneficial, because the message is not off-putting to majority of Americans in the way that much animal-rights literature is.
I largely agree with the authors that "the study of animal welfare is, for all practical purposes, the study of farm animal welfare" (Ch. 1, p. 4) because farm animals vastly outnumber those used in labs or for fur. Indeed, I would go further and say that the study of animal welfare is, for all practical purposes, the study of chicken welfare, because the number of pigs and cows slaughtered is tiny by comparison.
I do wish this point were recognized more by animal-welfare organizations, which -- even when they recognize the importance of farm animals -- often continue to focus resources on, say, welfare standards for veal calves and sows. Even the authors of Ham and Eggonomics fall into this, by giving roughly equal time to welfare questions about the raising of cows, pigs, and chickens. Really, the only animals people should think about when discussing land-based factory farms are broiler chickens and laying hens.
The above statement ignores fish and crustaceans, which may also suffer in huge numbers. And of course, it ignores wild animals. The book authors are not silent on this point, however:
The authors go on to cite my piece on wild-animal suffering on p. 19. (The blog mentions it as well.) They suggest an interesting conclusion, one that I probably agree with:
This is perhaps unsurprising: Evolution does not optimize an objective function of cumulative happiness minus pain. (Of course, neither do almost all breeders of farmed animals.) Human engineers with the specific goal of reducing suffering and promoting wellbeing ought to be able to do better, unless they are too incompetent to succeed at the task. In practice, incompetence may very well prevail with respect to wild animals at the moment (evolution, for all its "blind, pitiless indifference," may do a better job at currently evolved optima), but this needn't be the case indefinitely, as human technology and intelligence progress.
One of Norwood's recent projects is a website called Ham and Eggonomics, which includes an associated blog. In the page's own words:
This website is intended to be an information source for consumers about the food they eat, with specific emphasis on the welfare of farm animals. Finding good, useful information is difficult. Scientists are objective but often to timid to make general statements. Food industries have their obvious bias. Even authors who write books about food generally distort and sensationalize the truth to scare consumers.
Ham and Eggonomics states the facts plainly and is not scared to tackle an issue head-on. The website only desires to provide you with the information you require for your food choices, and has no desire to tilt your political leanings or recruit you into a specific cause.
The page features the a book with the same name as the site. The book is in draft form, and "comments are welcome," so I'll make a few remarks on Chapters 1 and 6 below. In Part 2, I comment on Chapter 8.
Chapter 1 lays out the slant from which the authors approach animal welfare: Namely, the economics of revealed preferences, rather than philosophical prescription.
Whereas ethicists and philosophers will argue about the morality of treating animals in certain ways, the economic approaches assumes that each person is entitled to their own view of animal welfare. (Ch. 1, p. 11)
The economic approach is to instead treat peoples’ views on animal welfare as preferences. That is, instead of arguing with you about what is right or wrong, or trying to persuade you to adopt a particular system of moral beliefs, we simply ask you, and your fellow citizens, what you think is right and wrong and make that the goal of society. For example, if instead of animal welfare we were dealing with the contentious issue of abortion, we would not try to persuade you to be for or against abortion. Instead, we would poll the public, and if a majority of Americans was against abortion, we might would conclude that public policy should outlaw abortion. That is just an example, an example to illustrate that we seek to determine how animals should be raised, based on the moral and ethical beliefs of you and your fellow citizens. (Ch. 1, p. 3)
Needless to say, I don't agree with this approach, because it conflates prescription about what should be done with description of the desires held by an arbitrary group of agents (adult Americans, in rough proportion to their voting / purchasing power). I demur at the suggestion that "animals matter because people care about them" (Ch. 1, p. 5). But my objection here is no different from my disagreement with the standard economic approach in general, and I'm glad the authors make their bias explicit. In addition, I appreciate the authors' aim to make reasoned decisions based on academic research into the costs and benefits of particular actions, without being afraid to upset standard ideological positions. (We merely differ on what to measure when assessing costs and benefits.)
The tone of the book is very "mainstream":
In this book, we offer no grand moral philosophy that makes your food choices straightforward. We do not believe ourselves so smart and knowledgeable that we can dictate to you the choices you can make. We can, however, help you understand the consequences of your choices, and help you better form your views on farm animal welfare. (Ch. 6, p. 20)
This may ultimately prove beneficial, because the message is not off-putting to majority of Americans in the way that much animal-rights literature is.
I largely agree with the authors that "the study of animal welfare is, for all practical purposes, the study of farm animal welfare" (Ch. 1, p. 4) because farm animals vastly outnumber those used in labs or for fur. Indeed, I would go further and say that the study of animal welfare is, for all practical purposes, the study of chicken welfare, because the number of pigs and cows slaughtered is tiny by comparison.
I do wish this point were recognized more by animal-welfare organizations, which -- even when they recognize the importance of farm animals -- often continue to focus resources on, say, welfare standards for veal calves and sows. Even the authors of Ham and Eggonomics fall into this, by giving roughly equal time to welfare questions about the raising of cows, pigs, and chickens. Really, the only animals people should think about when discussing land-based factory farms are broiler chickens and laying hens.
The above statement ignores fish and crustaceans, which may also suffer in huge numbers. And of course, it ignores wild animals. The book authors are not silent on this point, however:
It would also be foolish romanticism to believe that the lives of all domesticated animals are inferior to their ancestors or to modern animals that live in the wild. Domesticated animals live without the fear of predators and have ample supply of food and water; one need only turn their television to the Discovery channel to see that wild animals live in constant fear of being mauled and are no strangers to hunger and starvation. (Ch. 1, p. 9)
Some animal rights groups are even opposed to the owning of animals as pets. They only wish animals to exist in their wild state, which as any avid watcher of nature shows can attest, has its own distinct forms of cruelty. Wild animals, though adapted to their environment, face many obstacles to receiving adequate nutrition, and most face constant pursuit as prey. In our opinion, wild animals do not have a high level of well-being. (Ch. 6, p. 19)
The authors go on to cite my piece on wild-animal suffering on p. 19. (The blog mentions it as well.) They suggest an interesting conclusion, one that I probably agree with:
It is possible, and to us likely, that the only manner in which animals can enter this world and for their species as a whole to experience more happiness than suffering is for them to be under the stewardship of humans. Whether they are pigs destined for slaughter or dogs destined for doting, nature’s hand has no choice but to be cruel, while humans have the choice to become compassionate stewards. If an animal species is to exist, between [sic.: better] for them to exist under the care of humans, generally speaking. (Ch. 6, p. 19)
This is perhaps unsurprising: Evolution does not optimize an objective function of cumulative happiness minus pain. (Of course, neither do almost all breeders of farmed animals.) Human engineers with the specific goal of reducing suffering and promoting wellbeing ought to be able to do better, unless they are too incompetent to succeed at the task. In practice, incompetence may very well prevail with respect to wild animals at the moment (evolution, for all its "blind, pitiless indifference," may do a better job at currently evolved optima), but this needn't be the case indefinitely, as human technology and intelligence progress.
Friday, July 3, 2009
Vegans who (Sadly) Support Wilderness
The forum of the Vegane Gesellschaft Österreich or Vegan Society Austria features an interesting discussion of wild-animal suffering from September-October 2008. Here is the link to the first page in German. Below I've copied some comments that I thought were worth highlighting, converted to English using Google Translate.
The topic was raised by "mars mensch":
Some respondents suggested that wild animals may not need help:
I like the reply that mars mensch gave (p. 1):
Some further posters expressed the view that humans should leave wildlife alone:
I appreciated this sentiment from "Mercy" (p. 1):
Famine and disease are "natural" in humans, yet most people seem to care about preventing them. Why is there a difference when these occur in animals, apart from the difficulty of the task?
mars mensch offered a nice concluding thought (p. 4):
The topic was raised by "mars mensch":
I'm vegan because I do not want the animals to suffer. I think veganism and animal rights, the idea is to spread a very effective way the suffering of farm animals (and perhaps humans) to be reduced.
But what about wild animals? I can hardly anything on the Internet can find. There are most probably suffering in wilderness. Wild animals suffer from all kinds - hunger, thirst, cold, disease, parasites, injuries, .. depending on the type and probably also fear, grief, stress, sexual frustration ..
Somehow, nobody seems to be wondering about it. I do not think of people suffering caused is worse than "natural", as some seem to perceive. Suffering is suffering.
So the question is: What can be done against the suffering in the wilderness do I have to honestly have no clue.
here are two interesting links on the topic, but also without any real answers:
http://utilitarian-essays.com/wild-animals.pdf
http://www.felicifia.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=161
Some respondents suggested that wild animals may not need help:
I think animals are in the wilderness pretty well. You can provide for themselves or a family, have an enormous amount of space to move and they die at some point. The fact that they are not always made great must simply accept, as people in affluent societies, which have sufficient food and shelter often beyond problems. (Heavy Heavy Low Low, p. 1)
but the few animals are still wild eg: on an island, does not need our help, because the suffering or death keeps everything in balance. (The Andi, p. 1)
I like the reply that mars mensch gave (p. 1):
I think some here have a rather romantic idea of the transformed nature or seem to think that nature is good and man is the source of the evil in the world. This is also anthropozentisch and is not true. Nature is cruel.
Animals are not perfectly adapted to the environment. Many survive the winter because they do not starve or freeze. Dry periods and droughts regularly delete almost complete populations. Diseases and parasites are widespread. There are predators, etc., etc.
We encourage vegans to get us to that calves are taken away from their mothers. But also in the freedom of pups lose their parents and vice versa.
I really do not know what one against the suffering of wild animals can do, but we should in any case, start thinking about it. Perhaps the best thing you can do at the moment, to disseminate that anything should do.
Some further posters expressed the view that humans should leave wildlife alone:
And I personally will not if I now beginning with a game to feel compassion, precisely because it is free in nature can live and also the natural circumstances is exposed!
For me, this is just nature and wilderness: The life enjoy, with all its vagaries and dangers [...] I've also someday read a quote from someone: A world without suffering is a dead world! So somehow related to the natural sorrow which is not vermeitbar has this quote already in my opinion. (leather, p. 2)
when Veganism is not yet a matter of principle, suffering-free world to create (yes this is absolutely not in the range of our options), but only a question of our behavior to be corrected, so that we are sentient beings do not expect further suffering and cruel treated, just because we are stronger than they are. in their nature but we have already sufficient interfered - I personally think that the wildlife rather want us to leave, instead of us even in their affairs. (spaghetti, p. 2)
I appreciated this sentiment from "Mercy" (p. 1):
Whenever I am on television reports about natural disasters can see, such as earthquakes, floods, forest fires, then I think to the animals as victims! Of course, I also find the fate of the people who are affected gaaanz awful, no question, but then I always think that anyone who cares for the animals?
Famine and disease are "natural" in humans, yet most people seem to care about preventing them. Why is there a difference when these occur in animals, apart from the difficulty of the task?
mars mensch offered a nice concluding thought (p. 4):
Human rights are sometimes divided into several generations:It's nice to get a sense of how people in the animal-rights movement respond to the idea of wild-animal suffering. Though some are uninterested, there are probably more sympathetic souls among this community than the general population. Raising the topic in forums like this does seem to be a good way of making people think about the issue.
"Rights of the first" generation "refer to the classic civil and political freedom and participation rights, as established by the French Revolution were formulated. They are inter alia in the UN civil pact, or even in the European Convention on Human Rights established. The pact includes a civil general prohibition of discrimination as well as basic defensive and rights (right to life, prohibition of torture and inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, prohibition of slavery and forced labor), the vital for the protection of human dignity are more then Civil freedom and political participation rights (personal freedom and security, thought, religion, expression, assembly, freedom of association, etc.) and justice-related rights (equality before the law, presumption of innocence, fair trial, etc.). The national and international protection for civil and political rights are still the most developed.
Rights of the second "generation" include Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (in short: WSK-human rights or social rights), which since the 19th Century in the wake of the industrial revolution emerged. The central point of reference of these rights is the UN social pact, which includes rights and labor, social security, nutrition, housing, water, health and education anchored. Long time these rights were not "real" human rights, but rather as a political target views, which - in contrast to civil and political rights - legally not sufficiently identifiable and judicially reviewable hardly had. Since the 1990s, however, the content and the violation of human rights, social events significantly concretised. Social human rights are now widely deemed to be politically and are by their nature as enforceable (tangible justiciability). "Http://www.fes.de/handbuchmenschenrechte/03-menschenrechte-einstieg.html
Maybe it will be in the animal rights as well give something. Only defensive rights against the people, or the right not to be imprisoned and tortured, as response to factory farming, etc. And then to also claim rights to help those whose suffering is not caused by humans. If the species boundaries in ethics exceeded only once, it's just logical.
Thursday, June 4, 2009
Caring about Animal Suffering
What are some examples of experiences that lead people to give serious concern to the suffering of animals? For Peter Singer, as he describes in Animal Liberation, it was logical argument by vegetarian friends that persuaded him to think about the issue. For Josh Balk, it was watching a video containing scenes of animals being killed. For Jon Camp, it was a college ethics course. Some people discovered animal cruelty by being stuck in traffic behind trucks bringing animals to slaughter. Many others have been affected by Vegan Outreach leaflets. In my own case, I simply needed to realize that animals could feel pain, a point that somehow escaped me until I came across an online excerpt from Animal Liberation (pp. 10-12, 14-15).
I ask this question because it seems to me that serious attention to animal suffering is one area that is perhaps most lacking from the mainstream intellectual sphere of moral concern. Everyone in the modern western intelligentsia seems to care about racism, homophobia, poverty, disease, and other conventional issues, yet many still fail to think twice about eating a turkey sandwich for lunch. I worry about how animals might fare in a post-human technological society -- not because I think many people would favor deliberate harm to animals, but simply because decisions with vast consequences for animal suffering might be made without giving animals a second thought.
The worst source of animal suffering is undoubtedly predation, disease, and death in the wild. A serious solution to this problem appears far off. Therefore, it may be that animal-welfare supporters can best address the wild-animal problem by promoting concern for animal suffering generally, both to ensure that animal welfare does have a place within the scope of concern of future humans and to hasten the development of technologies that might address the issue.
It's important, though, that utilitarians promote the right kind of concern for animals. Many in the animal-rights movement feel that animals inherently deserve to live in nature without disturbance from man; it would be a terrible tragedy to promote "animal liberation" in such a way as to increase the number of people demanding preservation of animals in their natural state because this is "the way things are supposed to be." Similarly, it's important that concern for animal suffering be linked with a mindset of cost-effectiveness analysis, lest well meaning people spend their lives opposing a few circuses and zoos while billions of farmed chickens suffer, to say nothing of the orders of magnitude more wild animals.
What are some ways to promote this kind of utilitarian concern for animals? I think Vegan Outreach brochures, as well as ads by The Humane League, are impressive and have strong economies of scale. They're very good for opening people up to concern for animals, although they aren't sufficient for the subset of the population -- animal activists and other philosophically minded thinkers -- who already agree that animal suffering matters and who are ready for the next step: Applying that concern to wild animals.
Some have suggested that in-vitro meat may reduce speciesism, on the grounds that many people resist giving moral consideration to animals precisely because of the undesirable consequences of doing so on their food choices. Perhaps the possibility of producing meat without factory farming would free people up to care more about animals than before, just as the advent of industrial technologies to replace slave labor may have facilitated moral opposition to slavery. That said, this approach seems less direct and less obviously helpful than veg outreach. Maybe if fewer people confront the dilemma of eating factory-farmed animals, there will be less of a "hook" for people to latch on to concern for animal suffering at all. (In this model, ethical vegetarianism is like a gateway drug to caring about suffering in nature.)
I think videos can be effective, and I find watching them to be one of the most effective ways to trigger the release of chemicals in my brain that motivate me to want to do something to prevent animal suffering. Perhaps one could make a video that includes images of brutality in nature. An important challenge would be finding a way to avoid leaving people feeling merely depressed, or leading them to conclude that concern for animals is hopeless because the suffering of wild animals is overwhelming and intractable. Indeed, arguments about "how far do you go with concern for animals?" are often used as reductios against vegetarianism. It may be that talking about the possibility of insect suffering will entirely put off many people who are just beginning to consider the idea of extending some moral concern to chickens. Different audiences are at different stages. Committed animal-welfare supporters definitely need to hear about insects, but for the majority, we should probably stick to chickens for now. :)
I ask this question because it seems to me that serious attention to animal suffering is one area that is perhaps most lacking from the mainstream intellectual sphere of moral concern. Everyone in the modern western intelligentsia seems to care about racism, homophobia, poverty, disease, and other conventional issues, yet many still fail to think twice about eating a turkey sandwich for lunch. I worry about how animals might fare in a post-human technological society -- not because I think many people would favor deliberate harm to animals, but simply because decisions with vast consequences for animal suffering might be made without giving animals a second thought.
The worst source of animal suffering is undoubtedly predation, disease, and death in the wild. A serious solution to this problem appears far off. Therefore, it may be that animal-welfare supporters can best address the wild-animal problem by promoting concern for animal suffering generally, both to ensure that animal welfare does have a place within the scope of concern of future humans and to hasten the development of technologies that might address the issue.
It's important, though, that utilitarians promote the right kind of concern for animals. Many in the animal-rights movement feel that animals inherently deserve to live in nature without disturbance from man; it would be a terrible tragedy to promote "animal liberation" in such a way as to increase the number of people demanding preservation of animals in their natural state because this is "the way things are supposed to be." Similarly, it's important that concern for animal suffering be linked with a mindset of cost-effectiveness analysis, lest well meaning people spend their lives opposing a few circuses and zoos while billions of farmed chickens suffer, to say nothing of the orders of magnitude more wild animals.
What are some ways to promote this kind of utilitarian concern for animals? I think Vegan Outreach brochures, as well as ads by The Humane League, are impressive and have strong economies of scale. They're very good for opening people up to concern for animals, although they aren't sufficient for the subset of the population -- animal activists and other philosophically minded thinkers -- who already agree that animal suffering matters and who are ready for the next step: Applying that concern to wild animals.
Some have suggested that in-vitro meat may reduce speciesism, on the grounds that many people resist giving moral consideration to animals precisely because of the undesirable consequences of doing so on their food choices. Perhaps the possibility of producing meat without factory farming would free people up to care more about animals than before, just as the advent of industrial technologies to replace slave labor may have facilitated moral opposition to slavery. That said, this approach seems less direct and less obviously helpful than veg outreach. Maybe if fewer people confront the dilemma of eating factory-farmed animals, there will be less of a "hook" for people to latch on to concern for animal suffering at all. (In this model, ethical vegetarianism is like a gateway drug to caring about suffering in nature.)
I think videos can be effective, and I find watching them to be one of the most effective ways to trigger the release of chemicals in my brain that motivate me to want to do something to prevent animal suffering. Perhaps one could make a video that includes images of brutality in nature. An important challenge would be finding a way to avoid leaving people feeling merely depressed, or leading them to conclude that concern for animals is hopeless because the suffering of wild animals is overwhelming and intractable. Indeed, arguments about "how far do you go with concern for animals?" are often used as reductios against vegetarianism. It may be that talking about the possibility of insect suffering will entirely put off many people who are just beginning to consider the idea of extending some moral concern to chickens. Different audiences are at different stages. Committed animal-welfare supporters definitely need to hear about insects, but for the majority, we should probably stick to chickens for now. :)
Monday, May 4, 2009
Formalizing "Shorter Programs"
In a separate discussion, my friend Carl said:
For purposes of illustration, consider this fictional scenario. My friend Joe calls me in the evening with a worried tone in his voice. He says, "I've got something to tell you. I was just brushing my teeth, when I heard a voice. It said, 'Joe, I have an important message. You need to write a special number on your toothpaste tube, or else your toothpaste will cease to work properly. That number is 2835023981. Do as I say and all will be fine.' Then the voice disappeared."
Now, there are lots of hypotheses we can imagine here. In particular, I'll consider 10^10 + 1 of them:
(0) My friend imagined the whole thing. Writing a number on the toothpaste tube will accomplish nothing.
(1) In fact, my friend needs to write a number on the tube, but that number is not the one he was told, but rather 0000000001.
(2) My friend needs to write not the number he was told, but 0000000002.
...
(2835023981) My friend needs to write the number he was told, 2835023981.
...
(10^10) My friend needs to write not the number he was told, but 1000000000.
Obviously, there are lots more hypotheses to consider -- e.g., that my friend needs to write a number bigger than 10^10, that it needs to include decimals, that he needs to write it on his forehead instead of his toothpaste tube, that he needs to eat green cheese instead of writing a number, and so on. But just these 10^10 + 1 hypotheses give a sense of the literally exponential number of potential complicated scenarios.
How does MDL evaluate each of these hypotheses? One suggestion I can imagine is as follows.
(0) This hypothesis just involves ordinary physics -- things like Maxwell's equations, or perhaps rules of string theory -- plus maybe some physical constants. Given those initial conditions, it would be possible in principle to compute the entire history of the universe, including the evolution of humans, the birth of my friend, and my reception of his phone call. (If the "data" to be explained here are my personal observations, then perhaps the program would also have to specify who I am. It could then compute the pattern of perceptual inputs I receive throughout my lifetime, including the auditory waves from the speaker of my phone with my friend's voice.)
(1) This hypothesis involves mostly ordinary physics, including all of the same information as before. However, it includes an extra specification that, contrary to ordinary physical law, my friend should start getting cavities unless he writes 0000000001 on his toothpaste.
(2) Ditto as above, except with 0000000002.
...
(10^10) Ditto as above, except with 1000000000.
I think this illustrates what Carl meant about a shorter program being contained within astronomically many longer programs.
However, there's a problem here. It may be that computing program (0) would allow one successfully to determine my pattern of observations, including my friend's delusion of hearing a voice and the specific sequence of neuron firings that caused him to pick the number 2835023981. But I don't have the computing power or time to test whether that's the case. For all I know, the laws of physics could predict that my friend would imagine he had to write the number -17.6 on his mirror instead. For practical purposes, the level of abstraction here is too fine-grained to be useful for ordinary humans. It's like trying to predict the stock market by modeling quark-level interactions in traders' brains.
So we move to a higher-level model, perhaps psychological. For example,
(0) The human brain is prone to certain kinds of imagined experiences. In order to explain all sorts of psychological phenomena throughout history, this hypothesis has a probability distribution over types of malfunctions that tend to produce weird sensations. Joe's experience corresponds to malfunction #611 combined with #28, plus a specific association with toothpaste and the number 2835023981.
Even this explanation assumes a more sophisticated model of psychology than we currently possess, but I think it gets at the idea of trying to explain the observation using fewer bits than just restating the entire account of what happened. In contrast, hypothesis (2835023981) still has to model most of human psychology, but it also includes the stipulation that "There is indeed an exception to ordinary laws of dental hygiene that will give Joe cavities unless he writes 2835023981 on his toothpaste, and moreover, this information will be communicated to Joe by a pattern of sound waves in his bathroom."
Of course, the other hypotheses seem even worse in description length. For instance, hypothesis (5928342301) has to model most of human psychology and then specify, "There is an exception to ordinary laws of dental hygiene that will give Joe cavities unless he writes 5928342301 on his toothpaste. Moreover, a pattern of sound waves in Joe's bathroom will give him a false message, telling him that the number is actually 2835023981." Here, we're encoding two ten-digit numbers instead of one, plus some extra linguistic information.
Carl, is this roughly the kind of reasoning that you had in mind? What should we do about the fact that, in practice, I don't have a good enough theory about the distribution of human mental abnormalities to say that Joe's experience corresponds to malfunctions #611 and #28? My actual description of his experience -- for instance, an email message I might send to you, written to be as short as possible but still understandable -- would require almost as many extra bits as hypothesis (5928342301) does, no?
Finally, here's a slightly tangential question that I'm also curious about. Basic Solomonoff induction, were it computable, would give us a prior distribution over finite or infinite binary strings. How would we transform our experiences of the world, like Joe's phone call, into binary strings in order to apply these prior probabilities? Or would we apply Solomonoff induction in a way that doesn't require predicting digits of binary strings?
With respect to Occam assigning exponentially diminishing probability to special miracles, I tend to think of this in terms of the broad set of hypotheses to be considered: if my probabilities are to sum up to 1 I can't coherently assign all my 'the world is a lie' probability mass to whatever hypothesis has been brought to my attention in the last five minutes. The code of a short program can be contained in astronomically many ways within a larger program. An indifference principle gets you going from there.By "short program," Carl is presumably referring to something like the minimum description length (MDL) principle for explaining our observations. I'm curious to know how exactly he's envisioning its application, though.
For purposes of illustration, consider this fictional scenario. My friend Joe calls me in the evening with a worried tone in his voice. He says, "I've got something to tell you. I was just brushing my teeth, when I heard a voice. It said, 'Joe, I have an important message. You need to write a special number on your toothpaste tube, or else your toothpaste will cease to work properly. That number is 2835023981. Do as I say and all will be fine.' Then the voice disappeared."
Now, there are lots of hypotheses we can imagine here. In particular, I'll consider 10^10 + 1 of them:
(0) My friend imagined the whole thing. Writing a number on the toothpaste tube will accomplish nothing.
(1) In fact, my friend needs to write a number on the tube, but that number is not the one he was told, but rather 0000000001.
(2) My friend needs to write not the number he was told, but 0000000002.
...
(2835023981) My friend needs to write the number he was told, 2835023981.
...
(10^10) My friend needs to write not the number he was told, but 1000000000.
Obviously, there are lots more hypotheses to consider -- e.g., that my friend needs to write a number bigger than 10^10, that it needs to include decimals, that he needs to write it on his forehead instead of his toothpaste tube, that he needs to eat green cheese instead of writing a number, and so on. But just these 10^10 + 1 hypotheses give a sense of the literally exponential number of potential complicated scenarios.
How does MDL evaluate each of these hypotheses? One suggestion I can imagine is as follows.
(0) This hypothesis just involves ordinary physics -- things like Maxwell's equations, or perhaps rules of string theory -- plus maybe some physical constants. Given those initial conditions, it would be possible in principle to compute the entire history of the universe, including the evolution of humans, the birth of my friend, and my reception of his phone call. (If the "data" to be explained here are my personal observations, then perhaps the program would also have to specify who I am. It could then compute the pattern of perceptual inputs I receive throughout my lifetime, including the auditory waves from the speaker of my phone with my friend's voice.)
(1) This hypothesis involves mostly ordinary physics, including all of the same information as before. However, it includes an extra specification that, contrary to ordinary physical law, my friend should start getting cavities unless he writes 0000000001 on his toothpaste.
(2) Ditto as above, except with 0000000002.
...
(10^10) Ditto as above, except with 1000000000.
I think this illustrates what Carl meant about a shorter program being contained within astronomically many longer programs.
However, there's a problem here. It may be that computing program (0) would allow one successfully to determine my pattern of observations, including my friend's delusion of hearing a voice and the specific sequence of neuron firings that caused him to pick the number 2835023981. But I don't have the computing power or time to test whether that's the case. For all I know, the laws of physics could predict that my friend would imagine he had to write the number -17.6 on his mirror instead. For practical purposes, the level of abstraction here is too fine-grained to be useful for ordinary humans. It's like trying to predict the stock market by modeling quark-level interactions in traders' brains.
So we move to a higher-level model, perhaps psychological. For example,
(0) The human brain is prone to certain kinds of imagined experiences. In order to explain all sorts of psychological phenomena throughout history, this hypothesis has a probability distribution over types of malfunctions that tend to produce weird sensations. Joe's experience corresponds to malfunction #611 combined with #28, plus a specific association with toothpaste and the number 2835023981.
Even this explanation assumes a more sophisticated model of psychology than we currently possess, but I think it gets at the idea of trying to explain the observation using fewer bits than just restating the entire account of what happened. In contrast, hypothesis (2835023981) still has to model most of human psychology, but it also includes the stipulation that "There is indeed an exception to ordinary laws of dental hygiene that will give Joe cavities unless he writes 2835023981 on his toothpaste, and moreover, this information will be communicated to Joe by a pattern of sound waves in his bathroom."
Of course, the other hypotheses seem even worse in description length. For instance, hypothesis (5928342301) has to model most of human psychology and then specify, "There is an exception to ordinary laws of dental hygiene that will give Joe cavities unless he writes 5928342301 on his toothpaste. Moreover, a pattern of sound waves in Joe's bathroom will give him a false message, telling him that the number is actually 2835023981." Here, we're encoding two ten-digit numbers instead of one, plus some extra linguistic information.
Carl, is this roughly the kind of reasoning that you had in mind? What should we do about the fact that, in practice, I don't have a good enough theory about the distribution of human mental abnormalities to say that Joe's experience corresponds to malfunctions #611 and #28? My actual description of his experience -- for instance, an email message I might send to you, written to be as short as possible but still understandable -- would require almost as many extra bits as hypothesis (5928342301) does, no?
Finally, here's a slightly tangential question that I'm also curious about. Basic Solomonoff induction, were it computable, would give us a prior distribution over finite or infinite binary strings. How would we transform our experiences of the world, like Joe's phone call, into binary strings in order to apply these prior probabilities? Or would we apply Solomonoff induction in a way that doesn't require predicting digits of binary strings?
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