I'm a long-term vegetarian animal rights supporter and I support the publication of work like this, even though many people take it as a sort of anti-vegetarian propaganda, because I think this is how we make progress in understanding issues!

Very often in academic philosophy people write papers that say "relatively widespread position X seems to have weird consequence Y", which then provides possible evidence against X, possible evidence in favor of Y, or an opportunity to think about why the implication might be unsound. That helps clarify how we think about things. (Toby Ord wrote a similar paper about opposition to abortion where he pointed out that spontaneous abortion, especially before people are aware of the pregnancy, is much more common than induced abortion, so maybe many abortion opponents should be concerned with medical research on how to prevent it. While Ord seemingly thought the modus tollens side of this argument was stronger, ... maybe they should!)

Although I don't embrace the act/omissions symmetry that the theory here is based on, I support the modus ponens side of the argument that wild animals' suffering is a horrific thing that it would be good to find a way to mitigate. This has led to some pretty long flamewars in the past; I remember a particular incident when the "Tetrapod Zoology" blog discovered David Pearce, a transhumanist who sees it as urgent (and feasible) to re-engineer nature to eliminate all suffering. Fireworks ensued.

Overall, I don't think this argument is particularly new. I heard substantially the same point presented as an anti-vegetarian argument at least 15 years ago. At the time I thought "predators aren't moral agents, accidents aren't moral agents, there's no wrongdoing here, there's no problem". But now I think there is a problem after all, even if it isn't our "responsibility" or "obligation" to solve it.

His comparison of very low estimates of livestock population (a 2004 estimate of 17B chicken compared to the 2009 estimate of 50B https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poultry_farming#World_chicken_... ) to the entire wild animal population is a particularly negligent simplification, and the cherry-picked stats and inexplicable use of scientific notation for 60B and common notation for 17B show his motive for it.

The fact is, chickens would not exist if not for human captivity/breeding, so it is irrelevant to compare 17 or 50 Billion to 60 billion wild "land bird" populations. The comparison should be to zero chickens. These chickens would not spontaneously be wild fowl of another species under any circumstances.

> "Ethical consequentialist vegetarians believe that farmed animals have lives that are worse than non-existence."

Nonsense. There are plenty of "ethical consequentialist" vegetarians who don't care about animal welfare but believe eating meat is unethical because it harms the environment or exacerbates human poverty and hunger.

> From the abstract: "Ethical consequentialist vegetarians believe that farmed animals have lives that are worse than non-existence."

This article assumes that people are vegetarians because they are sad for farm animals... Absolutely untrue. The largest concentrated majority of vegetarians in the world are vegetarians for religious reasons, under the belief that eating animals is an act of violence we have a moral responsibility to avoid.

Vegetarianism is not about making sure animals have good lives, it's about not eating them or participating in the intentional destruction of them by humans as much as possible. Stopping nature from taking its course in the world outside of human action is not a concern of vegetarians. Moving them to farms seems to be something very much against what a vegetarian would do.

Nice trolling. Wild animals don't experience 24/7 discomfort from a confined, crowded unnatural space before ultimately marched to a mechanized execution. The last possible confused thought the numb animal has: "well that fucking sucked".

Suffering in the wild is not sustained or imposed to support a cheap-ass burger industry.

Vegetarians want animal welfare taken seriously, and environmental concerns guiding the regulations around animal agriculture.

In response to the point about animal non-existence, the vegetarian could argue that favoring non-existence might motivate the livestock industry to address environmental and animal welfare concerns. Respect is earned and more meat sold to the "mostly vegetarian" crowd as a result, and less young people flocking to vegetarianism after watching the latest meat-bad doco. A means to an end for the vegetarian rather than a fixed philosophical position.

The argument he makes hinges on the empirical suffering of wild animals vs. domestic.

As he admits, there is not sufficient evidence to conclude that wild suffering is indeed greater, so the case is not strong.

That said, I do happen to identify with the sort of vegetarian logic here. If there were strong evidence that wild animal suffering were much greater than domestic, that would be very important to me.

So I agree with his conclusion that more research into the lives of wild (and domestic) animals should be a priority.

However, given what I know of the literal sausage factory that is industrialized food production, I fear the suffering of domestic animals is very great, and unlikely to be topped.

Isn't this effectively the same argument pro-slavery advocates used? "(Slaves|Animals) would live brutal, worse off lives if they weren't owned by their masters. Therefore (vegetarians|abolitionists) want more suffering in the world."

This is a great reductio ad absurdum of utilitarianism. However, I find it very worrying that the so-called "effective altruism" movement takes this kind of thing seriously. Look up the EA-affiliated "Foundational Research Institute" -- it's an entire pseudo think tank whose philosophy is based on negative utilitarianism, the idea that all that matters is minimizing suffering, and we should do so by any means necessary (not excluding the extinction of all life). There are other organizations that support habitat destruction on utilitarian grounds, such as "Sentience Politics" and "Animal Ethics", but FRI is the brains of the operation, so to speak. (Animal Ethics is the propaganda wing, and Sentience Politics is trying to make it policy.) Brian Tomasik, who is cited in the OP, is the founder of FRI and has written a lot about "wild animal suffering" on his blog. His conclusions are very counter-intuitive; for example, he thinks forest fires are good because they reduce the number of suffering animals in existence. That said, his articles on the possibility of sentience in reinforcement learning algorithms are pretty interesting!

If some bird is killed by a crocodile it is not my concern. If I eat a chicken it is.

Is this a big troll? The author moves directly from

> "reducing harm to these animals without reducing their numbers"

to

> "support reducing the number of wild animals, for instance through habitat destruction or sterilisation"

WHY at all would that make sense?

It's a giant IF they believe reducing harm is better than non-existence.

So... er, ok... the author is saying (to put it succinctly) that IF an existence of suffering as a farmed animal is better than non-existence, then clearly vegetarians should want to

> "support reducing the number of wild animals, for instance through habitat destruction or sterilisation"

It doesn't follow logically at all.

What a stupid paper. The whole point of "ethical consequentialist vegetarianism" is to allow for an untouched wild domain where animals can suffer in a way consistent with environment and evolution. Becoming a human vegetarian is, after all, consistent with environment and evolution. We can be vegetarian from an evolutionary position and we maybe should be vegetarian from an environmental position (i.e. our high population)

Wrong title if you base your argument on something "compared to free range live stock".

I read just a little further and also have to nitpick, that good times can be experienced before reaching adolescence.

it is still an interesting argument.

I'm the guy who thinks that suffering and pleasure are additive inverses.

This is the kind of argument your anti-social prick brother gives at Christmas dinner for attention, and they gave him a prize for it? Really!?

Most elaborate troll post I've read in a while, I upvoted it.

I've made a similar argument here. The goal of elimination of suffering leads to a future very different from the world we inhabit today, but definitely better for it. A world of limited beings who all suffer is amenable to improvement on many levels.

https://www.exratione.com/2016/06/the-hedonistic-imperative-...

Suffering is not only human, however. The natural world from which we evolved continues to be as bloody, terrible, and rife with disease as it ever was. Higher animal species are certainly just as capable of experiencing anguish and pain as are we humans, and the same is true far further down into the lower orders of life than we'd like to think is the case. We ourselves are responsible for inflicting great suffering upon animals as we harvest them for protein - an industry that is now entirely unnecessary given the technologies that exist today. We do not need to farm animals to live: the engineering of agriculture has seen to that. The future of paradise engineering could, were we so minded, start very soon with an end to the farming and harvesting of animals. That would be followed by a growing control over all wild animal populations, starting with the lesser numbers of larger species, in order to provide them with same absolute control of health and aging that will emerge in human medicine. Taken to its conclusions, this also means stepping in to remove the normal course of predator-prey relationships, as well as manage population size by controlling births in the absence of aging, disease, and predation.

Removing suffering from the animal world is a project of massive scope, as where is the line drawn? At what point is a lower species determined to be a form of biological machinery without the capacity to suffer? Ants, perhaps? Even with ants as a dividing line, consider the types of technology required, and the level of effort to distribute the net of medicine and control across every living thing in every ecosystem. Or consider for a moment the level of technological intervention required to ensure a sea full of fish that do not prey upon one another, and that are all individually maintained in good health indefinitely, able to have fulfilling lives insofar as it is possible for fish. General artificial intelligences and robust molecular manufacturing technologies, creating self-replicating machinery to live alongside and inside every living individual in a vast network of oversight and enhancement might be the least of what is required.

At some point, and especially in the control of predators, the animal world will become so very managed that we will in essence be curating a park, creating animals for the sake of creating animals, simply because they existed in the past - the conservative impulse in human nature that sees us trying to turn back any number of tides in the changing world. It seems clear that the terrible and largely hidden suffering of the animal world must be addressed, but why should we follow this path of maintaining what is? What good comes from creating limited beings for our own amusement, when that same impulse could go towards creating intelligences with a capacity equal or greater than our own? Creating animals, lesser and limited entities that will be entirely dependent on us, to be used as little more than scenery, seems a form of evil in a world in which better can be done.

Given this, my suspicion is that when it comes to the animal kingdom, the distant future of paradise engineering will have much in common with the goals of past religious movements and today's environmentalist nihilists, those who preach ethical extinction as the best way to end suffering. Animals will slowly vanish, their patterns recorded, but no longer used. If animals are needed as a part of the world in order to make the human descendants of the era feel better, then that need can be filled through simulations, unfeeling machinery that plays the role well enough for our needs. The resources presently used by that part of a living biosphere will instead be directed to other projects.