Oxford philosopher William MacAskill’s new book, What We Owe the Future, caused quite a stir this month. It’s the latest salvo of effective altruism (EA), a social movement whose adherents aim to have the greatest positive impact on the world through use of strategy, data, and evidence. MacAskill’s new tome makes the case for a growing flank of EA thought called “longtermism.” Longtermists argue that our actions today can improve the lives of humans way, way, way down the line — we’re talking billions, trillions of years — and that in fact it’s our moral responsibility to do so.
In many ways, longtermism is a straightforward, uncontroversially good idea. Humankind has long been concerned with providing for future generations: not just our children or grandchildren, but even those we will never have the chance to meet. It reflects the Seventh Generation Principle held by the indigenous Haudenosaunee (a.k.a. Iroquois) people, which urges people alive today to consider the impact of their actions seven generations ahead. MacAskill echoes the defining problem of intergenerational morality — people in the distant future are currently “voiceless,” unable to advocate for themselves, which is why we must act with them in mind. But MacAskill’s optimism could be disastrous for non-human animals, members of the millions of species who, for better or worse, share this planet with us.
Nearly two decades ago, Oxford philosophy professor Nick Bostrom kicked off this wave of longtermism with the concept of “astronomical waste.” He argues that even people of the unfathomably distant future deserve our ethical consideration, and that if humans manage to colonize space, there could be many, many more of us than there are now. Every second we spend not working toward colonizing other planets, thus, we’re eliminating trillions of potential human lives – lives that deserve saving. “Even with the most conservative estimate,” Bostrom writes, “assuming a biological implementation of all persons, the potential for one hundred trillion potential human beings is lost for every second of postponement of colonization of our supercluster.” Yet another Oxford philosopher (that’s three of them!), Toby Ord, worries gravely about “existential risks,” factors that threaten the existence of humankind. If we don’t deal with threats like nuclear war, engineered pandemics, and self-replicating AI, we’re playing “Russian roulette” with trillions upon trillions of lives.
The infinite growth of humanity means infinite growth of humanity’s problems, and one that is mostly ignored in longtermist circles is our systematic, commercialized cruelty against animals raised as livestock. In the U.S. alone, billions of animals are confined in factory farms and killed for food each year. Things are trending downwards, not upwards, morally speaking: meat consumption in the U.S. is at an all-time high. Developing countries are adopting American-style factory farms to support their growing populations. And even if global society did resolve to end concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs), we definitely do not yet have the technology to make that transition possible at current consumption levels. We simply don’t have enough land to replace all CAFOs with small, sustainable farms that implement more humane practices. Plant-based meat alternatives still occupy a precarious place in our economy. And it’s too soon to tell if cell-cultured meat will be broadly and commercially viable at all. Right now, there’s little reason to be sure that mankind will ever put an end to factory farming.
Even beyond manmade atrocities, trillions upon trillions of animals inhabit the earth currently, and most, if not all of them, suffer to some degree. Prey animals live in fear of their predators, whose very nature leads them to tear their prey limb from limb in a killing that’s anything but merciful. For many species, reproduction is a traumatic experience beginning with forced, painful sex. And animals of all species are subject to disease, starvation, and injury with no aid in sight. There’s no reason that ethicists shouldn’t consider animal suffering as well, even the naturally occurring kind. Truth be told, we don’t even know the full scope of animal suffering, both human-inflicted and not. A recent study suggests that bees and other insects are sentient. Other species could be next.
Now imagine all of that scaled up exponentially: we bring our factory farms, our animal testing, our inuhmane confinements in zoos and aquariums to other planets. We seed earthly wildlife throughout the universe without any way to make natural life more pleasant. The amount of suffering is truly unfathomable.
To his credit, MacAskill does acknowledge factory farming and wild animal suffering as problems in “What We Owe the Future,” but he seems more confident than not that they will ultimately fall by the wayside: “[A]stronomically good futures seem eminently possible, whereas astronomically bad futures seem very unlikely.” I just don’t see many compelling reasons to believe that, and plenty of animal advocates don’t either. All else being equal, the idea of saving trillions of future humans and giving them a chance at happy lives sounds amazing. But if future humans are as destructive as we are, the survival of humanity could be terrible for the universe’s other sentient inhabitants.
If the human race creates more suffering than it alleviates, it would be a mistake to let it grow infinitely. To anyone concerned with doing the most good, that should be obvious. So before we start pouring time and resources into colonizing the universe, let’s sort out our abusive relationship with animals first.
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