Tragedy never ends

“There is no other hell.”

[UPDATE]: The post was re-published on my blog.

Note: reading Brian Tomasik’s The Horror of Suffering, Magnus Vinding’s You Are Them and/or Simon Knutsson’s How Could an Empty World Be Better than a Populated One? would be a better investment of your time.

In any case, consider the idea of effective altruism and contributing yourself (e.g. via your career).

“If we imagined that from now on, animals started emitting a red light every time they suffered, then from space, Earth would no longer be a blue planet, but a red and glowing one.” — The ethics of wild animal suffering, Ole Martin Moen

People are optimists, to one degree or another, even those who think they aren’t. Combined with our self-centered awareness, it’s no wonder the world normally doesn’t seem as bad as it is. Not at all.

“Bad” is always arguable; yet if anything can be characterized as bad, suffering (involuntary, uncompensated, long-lasting, intense: specify as you may) is (the only thing?) on the list. Couldn’t then we reasonably agree that badness of the world depends primarily on the amount and intensity of misery it contains?

How much suffering is out there? One may wish to stay blissfully unaware. As transhumanist philosopher David Pearce writes,

Extreme suffering is the plight of billions of sentient beings alive today, whether in our factory-farms, in a Darwinian state of nature, or a depressed neighbour.

The “Darwinian state of nature” (wild nature that is) is probably the biggest contributor. Richard Dawkins once gave a stark perspective:

The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation. During the minute that it takes me to compose this sentence, thousands of animals are being eaten alive, many others are running for their lives, whimpering with fear, others are slowly being devoured from within by rasping parasites, thousands of all kinds are dying of starvation, thirst, and disease.

(“It must be so.” — Dawkins continued; as non-human suffering gains more recognition, others become less acceptive: see e.g. Brian Tomasik’s Medicine vs. Deep Ecology analogy, Oscar Horta’s Zoopolis, Intervention, and the State of Nature, and Effective Altruism Foundation’s recently started Wild-Animal Suffering Research group. For a transhumanist approach to the issue, read Pearce’s The Antispeciesist Revolution, A Welfare State For Elephants?, Reprogramming Predators (if you’re about to ridicule, actually read it), and more.)

Stefan Torges presenting the cause

Exploited animals

While suffering resulting from blind natural processes is understandable (but still isn’t any less urgent), our tolerance of our own industrialized animal abuse is … telling.

CO2 stunning is widely used by the industry and often promoted as “humane”.

Consider the most salient case — factory farming. Each year tens of billions of land animals alone are slaughtered by the industry. Before bled to death (hopefully, quickly stunted beforehand), most of those animals (whose bodies, by the way, are optimized for anything but the animals’ wellbeing) live in torturous conditions (battery cages, gestation and veal crates, untreated tumors, etc.) and undergo painful procedures like being castrated, debeaked or dehorned without anesthesia or being separated from a newborn.

As if we were 100% sure they are completely insentient, not-even-dark-inside “automatons”. For a mistake here amounts to an ethical catastrophe: imagine systematically subjecting billions of sentient organisms to extreme deprivation and pain… Evidently, humans have been practicing this for years.

A fear of initial inconveniences, innate speciesism, and carnist culture keep us excusing the crime (when it gets acknowledged at all). Arbitrary (one’s pet is someone else’s food), unnecessary (see e.g. “alternative” sources of B12, protein, vitamin D & calcium, omega-3s; consider plant and synthetic clothing, demand animal-free testing), harmful (directly to the animals and consumers’ health; indirectly through exacerbating food insecurity, climate change, and antibiotic resistance). Enlightened aliens would justifiably question supposed sanity of humanity. Hopefully our descendants will be equally perplexed.

Cows enjoying free movement. Keeping cows indoors year-round is a standard practice of intensive dairy farming.

Human suffering

Even if one gives in to the speciesist intuition and regards only human suffering, “better never to have been” is still a reasonable heuristic.

Every year millions of humans die from cancer, hundreds of millions languish from depression, tens of millions mangle their bodies in car ‘accidents’ alone; disasters strike, relationships break, unrealized goals and self-loathing haunt people for years; pain relief is still a privilege of developed countries, unprecedented 20+ millions are literally slaves, 10% are chronically hungry, hundreds of millions of extremely poor struggle for survival… “There is no other hell”, as one Russian song goes.

How many more miserable beings one needs anyway to see that the price for allowing the Darwinian world is too high to justify one’s occasional pleasures (or even a hypothetical blissful life)? I fear, even orders of magnitude more victims would not shaken one’s convictions: our ancestral wetware is simply unable (your admirable aspiration would not be enough) to grasp those numbers (ref. scope insensitivity). Suffering of someone else (“someone else”?) is already a mere hint of the real urgency of the qualia.

Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas is often used to provoke a moral discussion. The short story describes a town utopian wellbeing of which people depends on keeping one child in perpetual misery. Many ostensibly despise such a society. The horror is that our world is far worse than that — both in terms of the number of suffering minds and the amount, quality, and persistence of wellbeing.

Like certain experiences induced by psychedelic substances, badness of firsthand suffering escapes our imagination. Yet to those who are at the moment under a crushing pain, suffering is as real and urgent as anything can be. Again, such minds are abundant and do need immediate help.

Do our lives reflect that occasional realization? Alas. It’s remarkably hard to not follow attitudes, demands, and expectations of our societies and predispositions of our Darwinian minds in general. Hence many of us who acknowledge relative absurdity of our day-to-day concerns are still stuck irrationally with akrasia. (See Can Humanism Match Religion’s Output? for a possible solution in the form of dedicated communities. Examples of some efforts can be found in this FB group (requires “joining” to see posts).)