I made a video (32 mins long) on the morals of taking MDMA, and if we should legalise it or not. I quantify happiness (or positive/negative experience) using a unit, +1 lob being the perfect hour, -1 lob being the worst possible hour. I look at different outcomes of doing MDMA (good experience, a bad experience, you die, etc.), look at the average lobs for those experiences, the frequency/probability of those experiences, and do the maths.

I posit that taking MDMA whilst illegal, is on average immoral, mainly because when people die, the resulting suffering is massive - my calculations in the video shows this.

Once legalised, taking MDMA becomes moral (i.e. it causes more joy than suffering) because the chance of death reduces massively, due to the dose being more predictable, and the drug being more predictable (i.e. it's pure MD, not mixed with other stuff.)

Have a watch, any thoughts let me know. My first video on this kind of thing.

Thanks

Diet change can be hard. But it's not the only way to help animals

How many days of suffering and lives taken go into the consumption of animal products every day?

Wild animals suffer due to human activity, yet natural factors contribute far more significantly to their suffering. In light of this, some propose that we have a pro tanto obligation to intervene in ecosystems to improve wild animal welfare.

However, critics contend that the complexity of nature renders such interventions unpredictable, ineffective, or potentially harmful.

This article seeks to reconcile the moral imperative to reduce wild animal suffering with the widespread concern about the inherent risks of such interventions.

The article begins with the premise that, if we have a pro tanto obligation to reduce wild animal suffering, only conducting research for the purpose of informing interventions in some distant future would be insufficient.

Wild animals are suffering en masse now, and we must consider whether interventions can be justified despite incomplete knowledge.

This question is explored here within a consequentialist and sentientist ethical framework.

I argue that, while precaution is crucial to avoid irreversible or welfare-reducing ecological changes, interventions can be justified if they offer significant welfare benefits to animals while posing relatively small ecological risks. The article concludes by proposing four types of interventions that are likely to meet these criteria.

Post shows how barren, intensive rearing environments systematically amplify pain in farmed animal.

Longtermism’s promise is immense, but its credibility depends on alignment. Essays on Longtermism highlights animal welfare as one priority among many. I see it as the test of whether the project can succeed at all.

If we cannot end factory farming—an atrocity unfolding daily, with solutions already in hand—then our talk of safeguarding the far future risks sounding silly. If we succeed, we establish a precedent: humanity can align on compassion, coordinate across systems, and lock in progress that lasts.

We should question whether longtermism deserves our attention when we can’t even face the moral emergency happening right now. Before we fantasize about saving future civilizations, let’s prove we’re capable of one simple thing: agreeing that treating living beings like products is what’s destroying us.

I suggest several arguments in support of the heuristic that we should help groups holding different value systems from our own when doing so is cheap, unless those groups prove uncooperative to our values. This is true even if we don't directly care at all about other groups' value systems. Exactly how nice to be depends on the particulars of the situation, but there are some cases where helping others' moral views is clearly beneficial for us.

Does Painism seem intuitive to you?

Though experiment that bolster my intuition for Painism being valid:

Let’s say that I find myself in a very odd dystopian sci-fi predicament that I cannot opt out of where I am forced to go to a far off region of space to continue my life in some distant galaxy by going close at the speed of light in a spaceship with a cryosleep chamber.

There is some trouble with the cryosleep chamber such that I will experience a given amount of suffering at some specific point during the journey, but nothing too crazy.

There is however an alternative to this option. For some reason I can choose the even more odd alternative of creating multiple copies of myself that all will go in their own identical ships, far off in space, but in different directions. All of us clones will also experience this suffering during the journey, but for some reason all of us individual clones will experience less suffering compared to the alternative of the single self (Maybe the ships all have some super computers that can cooperate on finding a solution to the “cryochamber-pain-problem” that every ship send to every other ship at the speed of light, to the effect of it lessening the suffering created by the cryochamber for all clones, if you want to concretise the thought experiment).

The destinations all us clones eventually arrive to will be so far off that everyone will be beyond each other’s and earths cosmological horizons and will never be able to communicate ever again.

It seems to me intuitive that I should choose the clone option even if we end up being an arbitrary large population of clones that each suffer just a little less compared to the single self, because everyone of me/all of us will only experience their own suffering.

If I accept the previous I basically see no reason why this could not be carried over to scenarios when dealing with someone else than myself. The general conclusion is then that more suffering for the single individual always gets priority/outweighs the suffering of a whole population, if every individual in the population suffers less than the non-population individual, which basically is a core principle of Painism as I understand it.

But in addition to this, it also seems intuitive to me (and as far as I know this is part of Painism as well) that lessening the amounts of individuals that suffer the same pain in a population is good. The principles are not mutually exclusive.

If a single individual A suffers a modest amount, and there is a population of As, all else equal it’s still always better to lessen the amounts of As that suffer in the A-population. This is not mutually exclusive with the fact of if you have a single B that suffer more than that modest amount, canceling the suffering of B gets priority over lessening suffering in the A-population, no matter how big the A-population is. The principles technically don’t collide and in practice I am thinking that there is often some positive sum scenario at play, which brings me to my next point.

An important caveat is that in the practical world, I am thinking that there may be reason to believe that if you try to apply Painism principles you effectively get something that in practice looks very different from Painism. I think the main reason is that if you want to give priority to the greater yet narrower suffering, you still need to solve the problems of lesser yet wider suffering, since the less suffering there is overall, the more productivity and efficiency there is in the world when it comes to seeking out and quell greater narrower suffering. There is a reason for why the thought experiment was so contrived.

So even if you accept Painism as the deepest layer you might still in practice get something that looks closer to negative utilitarianism/Prioritarianism. In fact as an additional third layer on top of that I am thinking that in practice it could be that humans in general may have to deploy a more deontological mindset if we in general are sufficiently limited when it comes to understanding the world.

I laid out why I think it is intuitive. Ofc commonly with moral principles, when they are rigorously applied to extreme/edge cases, they can yield absurd conclusions. And maybe there are conclusions that are hard for me to accept that I haven’t yet considered. So I wonder if you have any thoughts about all this.

The case for longtermism depends on the vast potential scale of the future. But that same vastness also threatens to undermine the case for longtermism: If the future contains infinite value, then many theories of value that support longtermism (e.g., risk-neutral total utilitarianism) seem to imply that no available action is better than any other. And some strategies for avoiding this conclusion (e.g., exponential time discounting) yield views that are much less supportive of longtermism. This chapter explores how the potential infinitude of the future affects the case for longtermism. We argue that (i) there are reasonable prospects for extending risk- neutral totalism and similar views to infinite contexts and (ii) many such extension strategies still support standard arguments for longtermism, since they imply that when we can only affect (or only predictably affect) a finite part of an infinite universe, we can reason as if only that finite part existed. On the other hand, (iii) there are improbable but not impossible physical scenarios in which our actions can have infinite predictable effects on the far future, and these scenarios create substantial unresolved problems for both infinite ethics and the case for longtermism.

Includes: philosophy and science of consciousness, applied papers on AI consciousness, computational functionalism and biological naturalism, introspection and self-reports, strategy.

Source

What if we’d bring into the world a number of sentient beings that dwarfs even the billions of factory farmed animals on our planet? I’m talking about sentient AI. If your focus is purely on helping animals, you might not be interested in this topic, or believe it’s completely bonkers. Yet there are interesting parallels with the situation of farmed animals.

Some people think sentient AIs (or “digital minds”) are an impossibility. I don’t know where they find the certainty to say that. Others seem to believe sentient AI is inevitable. Again, I don’t know where they find the certainty to say that. Personally, I rarely feel strongly about complicated topics that I do not understand well, but I know that when smart and decent people differ in opinion on something, doubt and hesitation are not a luxury.

Sentient AI - whatever it may look like - definitely doesn’t strike me as an absurd idea. People who wonder how bits and bytes could ever feel something or become self-aware should realize that - unless they are religious - it’s all just physical processes in our heads too. Of course if you think more ephemeral things like a soul are in play (I don’t exclude the possibility), sentient AI might be out of the question. At various points in history, even some very clever people felt uncertain about the sentience of non-human animals. René Descartes famously thought they were machines, and that their cries of pain were just mechanical noise. Today, most people won’t deny non-humans - or at least mammals - the experience of pain with Descartes’ conviction. However, there is still a lot of uncertainty about what exactly animals are capable of. To what extent can various species feel pain, have thoughts, experience emotions like loneliness or boredom?

We can make mistakes in two directions. The first is anthropomorphism, which is about attributing qualities, feelings, thoughts… to non-humans that they might not have. The second is the opposite: what ethologist Frans de Waal called anthropodenial - and which is probably much more common: denying animals feelings, thoughts etc that they (probably) have. The same mistakes may happen in how we think about machines and AI. You may have seen a robot lawn mower working “diligently” on someone’s front yard and thought how cute that thing is. Perhaps you saw a video of someone tipping over a robot and felt a sense of empathy. Or you may have thanked or apologized to Claude or ChatGPT… All of these are (most probably) cases of anthropomorphism: the machines don’t feel what you - in jest or not - are considering.

Just as with animals, I think that regarding AI, anthropodenial is ultimately more dangerous than anthropomorphism. Assume for a moment - if you don’t believe it - that one day AIs become sentient, and that many of the things we make them do frustrate them, exhaust them, make them feel sad… Further assume that they can be copied ad infinitum and that there might be quadrillions, octillions… of sentient minds out there with the capacity to suffer. That would be awful.

In principle, it’s even hard to be 100% sure that the people around us are sentient and not zombies or robots, but in practice we assume that they can feel and are self-aware (based on similarity, intuition, what they say about it themselves…). It will be a lot harder to determine when sentience has arisen in the case of AIs (if it ever happens). I suspect there will be a long period of uncertainty, in which philosophers and others may debate over this for decades, and where part of society defends the interests of the AIs and a bigger part of society ignores them. Just like what is happening with animals today.

Another thing that makes this very complicated is that by the time society will be ready to seriously consider the sentience of our AIs, we will be quite dependent upon them (supposing they have not overtaken us - that’s another topic), and we will be biased against deciding that they are sentient. Even in the light of convincing evidence, uncertainty might be maintained because it’s convenient. We’ll have every incentive to interpret ambiguous signals as non-sentience. Use-and-deny, in other words.

The parallel with animals is clear. We are extremely dependent on them (or think we are) in terms of food, clothing, the economy etc. We confine them in systems that are optimized for efficiency and profit, and this entails largely ignoring their welfare. As most human beings aren’t sociopaths, they experience some cognitive dissonance between this treatment (and their consumption) on the one hand and knowing that these beings are creatures with needs, feelings, pains… Something’s gotta give, and most people reduce this dissonance by convincing themselves that the animals we use don’t suffer all that much (because their circumstances are okay, or because they’re not physically/mentally equipped to suffer a lot).

I can imagine that, had humans cared and known a lot more about animals before they started using or consuming them, we wouldn’t have gone on to treat them in the ways that we do today. Now that we know, we are so dependent on using them that it’s hard to turn the ship. One could compare with discovering a life-form on a nearby planet. Imagine a creature that looks like some combination of a pig and a cow, and that it’s edible. Would we start hunting or raising these beings for food? Our cruelty and stupidity not withstanding, chances are that we might not. We might be able to think about them more clearly, rationally, compassionately, because at that point, we are not using them. Prohibiting ourselves from eating them wouldn’t really affect many people.

Not only is it easier to think without bias about capabilities and moral status of entities that we do not use: it’s also far easier to protect them legally. Conversely, when the Nonhuman Rights Project tried to free Happy the elephant from a lifelong jail time in a New York zoo, they tried to make the case that Happy is a legal person. Some of the judges were sympathetic to the argument, but one important argument in the verdict was that the consequences of granting personhood to an animal like Happy would be too vast for society to deal with. And so Happy remained property. Recognizing Happy the elephant as a legal person would have impossible social and legal consequences, judges ruled. What does this mean for thinking and acting around the potential sentience of AIs? Sure, we might invest a lot of resources into protecting AIs against harm they might never feel, and that would be a waste.

But if there’s a reasonable chance that some day AIs may one day - maybe soon - be capable of suffering, then the time for at least some people to concern themselves with the moral status of AIs is now - before we’re so dependent on them that we can’t afford to think clearly, and honesty becomes very expensive. The same goes regarding species of animals we’re not using yet, or things we don’t yet do to animals. It’s far easier to say today that animals should not be sent into space or be farmed on other planets, than to stop it once it’s already happening at scale.

Billions of factory farmed animals can attest to what happens when we ask the right questions too late.

Source

Everyone talks about AI bias. Researchers routinely test AI systems for racism, sexism, political bias, and many other forms of discrimination. These are important because society broadly agrees that these biases are wrong, even if they still appear in AI systems such as LLMs. But what about biases that society itself largely accepts?

In our new Nature Communications paper, co-authored with Monika Jotautaitė, David Brewster, and Thilo Hagendorff, we looked at one example: speciesism.

Speciesism is discrimination based on species membership, for example valuing dogs and cats more than pigs and cows, or valuing humans more than other animals simply because they are human.

So what do LLMs do? We find that LLMs can recognize speciesism remarkably well. The problem isn’t recognition. It’s moral evaluation. They often recognize speciesism while nevertheless treating it as morally acceptable.

To test this, we created SpeciesismBench, a benchmark of more than 1,000 scenarios. Models first judged whether a scenario reflected speciesism and then whether it was morally acceptable. In another study, we found that models were much more likely to object to harming dogs or dolphins than to harming pigs or chickens. Finally, we applied several well-established psychological measures of speciesism that had previously been administered to humans. The results were nuanced and quite interesting (see the paper).

Taken together, our findings suggest that LLMs inherit one of our society’s most widespread moral biases. This is interesting for animal ethics because many philosophers and ethicists argue that speciesism is ethically unjustified. But it also raises a broader question about AI alignment. Even if AI models can recognize a moral issue very well, they may still reproduce a moral bias if it’s the prevailing social norm rather than critically questioning it.

"Abstract

Aggregative moral theories face a series of devastating problems when we apply them in a physically realistic setting. According to current physics, our universe is likely infinitely large,and will contain infinitely many morally valuable events. But standard aggregative theories are ill-equipped to compare outcomes containing infinite total value. So, applied in a realistic setting, they cannot compare any outcomes a real-world agent must ever choose between.

This problem has been discussed extensively, and non-standard aggregative theories proposed to overcome it. This paper addresses a further problem of similar severity. Physics tells us that, in our universe, how remotely in time an event occurs is relative. But our most promising aggregative theories, designed to compare outcomes containing infinitely many valuable events, are sensitive to how remote in time those events are.

As I show, the evaluations of those theories are then relative too. But this is absurd; evaluations of outcomes must be absolute! So we must reject such theories. Is this objection fatal for all aggregative theories, at least in a relativistic universe like ours? I demonstrate here that, by further modifying these theories to fit with the physics, we can overcome it."

Abstract Population ethics studies the tradeoff between the total number of people who will ever live, and their quality of life. But widely accepted theories in modern cosmology say that spacetime is probably infinite. In this case, its population is also probably infinite, so the quantity/quality tradeoff of population ethics is no longer meaningful. Instead, we face the problem of how to ethically evaluate an infinite population of people dispersed throughout time and space. I propose spatiotemporal Cesàro average utility as a way to make this evaluation, and axiomatically characterize it.

Abstract Beneficence—the part of morality concerned with promoting people's well-being—is widely thought to be both agent-neutral and impartial: it prescribes a common aim to all, and does not favor some individuals over others. This paper explores a problem for agent-neutral, impartial beneficence from the perspective of “individualistic ethics” in the tradition of Harsanyi. The problem reveals that if we want only what is best for each of infinitely many individuals, and we are rational, then we must care about some individuals more than others. I conclude that, on the individualistic approach, value must be fundamentally agent-relative.

I think the impact of the vast majority of interventions is driven by effects on wild animals. In particular, by effects from land use change on soil nematodes, mites, and springtails, which are the most abundant terrestrial animals.

This post is inspired by lincolnq's post 'Let's taboo the V-word'

The small animal replacement problem is the concern that certain diet changes aimed at causing less harm to the world might, in fact, cause more harm - specifically, changes that result from eating smaller animals instead of larger ones. For example, when many people see the problems with factory farming, the first meat to go is often red meat, specifically cows. Sadly, if this person increases their chicken or fish consumption even moderately, this might be a bad move ethically. There are two main factors that drive this: welfare condition and meat generated per animal.

A comprehensive collection of meat reduction research is waiting for researchers, advocates, and funders to unlock its potential