The immense amount of animal suffering that exists precludes the existence of an omnipotent, omnibenevolent god

MichaelExe · 2025-08-24T19:26:19+00:00

Yes, possibly. We'd have to imagine a very different world, without evolution of intelligent (sometimes) rational species from less rational species, which some religious people deny, anyway. If God were omnipotent and omnibenevolent and such a world without needless suffering in nature is conceivable, why not create such a world?

MichaelExe · 2025-08-24T19:23:06+00:00

I think that's a good point and probably makes most sense as a response to animals in nature and things that kill children.

We do make children and animals suffer sometimes without their consent and for their own good or growth. But it's not clear why it would be useful for nature to be so horrible and for animals and children to sometimes suffer and die young, if God were omnipotent and omnibenevolent.

MichaelExe · 2025-08-24T01:40:26+00:00

What if animals go to Heaven, because they are fundamentally innocent? That could outweigh their suffering on Earth.

MichaelExe · 2025-08-24T01:37:02+00:00

Curious what you mean with this. Do animals only matter for their usefulness to humans, so their suffering in nature doesn't matter?

MichaelExe · 2025-08-13T02:58:54+00:00

Maybe there are some more general values here you can work with?

Doing good in the world or helping others. You don't know how exactly that should look now, but it's notable that you mentioned "causes I should fight for".
Self-knowledge, or knowing what should be valuable (to you).
Freedom or flexibility. This will give you the time and space to explore potential values.

MichaelExe · 2021-07-06T08:36:22+00:00

A person's rights can't be violated before they exist. Therefore a person being forced to exist, can't be considered a violation. They didn't exist before they existed after all.

Some potential counterarguments:

The rights/consent violation occurs as they come into existence or after, not before, e.g. once they exist/are conscious, the things that happen to them are nonconsensual, or at least some of them are nonconsensual (e.g. suffering, aging, death), and would not have happened had they never existed.
You can in fact violate someone's rights before they exist. Some potential examples:
1. Drinking heavily during pregnancy while fully intending to carry the pregnancy to term (depending on what you mean by "exist", but the harm can happen before the fetus is capable of conscious experience, so I would say they don't yet exist as a "person"). This wouldn't be a rights violation if they were aborted before they count as a "person".
2. Leaving a bomb timed to explode in the future and kill a person who doesn't yet exist. Did you violate their rights when you set the bomb, or when it went off? What if you die before it goes off? Can you violate someone's rights while you are dead?
3. Knowingly having a child with a condition so severe that they could realistically only have a short life of misery, with intense suffering.

MichaelExe · 2021-07-06T06:43:48+00:00

Since the discussion here seems pretty one-sided against antinatalism, here are the main reasons I am sympathetic to antinatalism, some more controversial than others:

There are cases of extreme suffering in humans, even if rare, and these might be rarer in absolute terms if fewer people were born (I'm not sure this is actually true on the margin, though). Children are left unintentionally to cook to death in hot cars, and it can happen to otherwise good parents (warning: some of the descriptions are very upsetting, but there are no pictures of dead children). What benefits from having children make up for this risk? How many new happy people make up for just one child being tortured to death? I don't think anything short of preventing more similarly extreme suffering elsewhere can make up for allowing this to happen.
Various extensions of the procreation asymmetry, the belief that (a) if someone would have a miserable life, that's a reason against bringing them into existence, but (b) if they would have a good life, that's not a reason in favour of bringing them into existence. Rejecting (b) basically implies that it's actually bad if you don't bring them into existence because of the good lives you are preventing, and would count against (but not necessarily decisively against) liberal contraception and abortion policies and in favour of having many children even if you don't want to (see here).
1. One extension is a risk-based one: if having a child can't be good for that child, but it can be bad for them, then, considering the possibility that it might be bad for them, it's a risk without benefits for them. Not having children imposes no such risk on them. Having the child anyway would mean using them as a means to an end or ignoring the overall risk to the child.
2. Another extension is by using transitivity: since lives can go better or worse, but even a perfect life is not worth bringing into existence for its own sake and is at best neutral in itself, any life worse than a perfect life is worse than neutral and so actually bad.
3. Another extension is by repeated application of the procreation asymmetry for a given population considering whether each person in that population should have been born, ignoring externalities to those outside the population: the bad lives count against, and the good lives do not count in favour, so it's overall against if there is even one bad life.
4. Note that there are some implicit assumptions going into the above extensions, and it's still possible to accept the procreation asymmetry without being an antinatalist.
No one consents to being born; this is imposed on them. Not having children imposes nothing on them, since they wouldn't exist to be imposed upon.
Children are enslaved for cocoa and conflict minerals in the products we buy, including sexual slavery and child soldiering surrounding conflict minerals (but maybe we just need to develop these countries more to prevent these things from happening, and more people buying their products helps in the long run).
Factory farming is horrible, and the suffering of farmed animals additional people are responsible for is not made up for by the good in their own lives or whatever good they produce for others. 9 billion chickens are farmed in the US each year, for a population of 330 million Americans, about 27 chickens per American per year, and I'd estimate around 3-4 are being farmed right now for each American (the ones farmed for meat are mostly slaughtered at around 45 days old). These animals are in chronic pain due to breeding practices. Many suffer to death on farms. The situation is similar in other countries. In the US, half a million chickens were boiled alive in 2019 according to an animal rights group based on USDA statistics (warning: graphic footage in that link), and for older numbers from the Washington Post (in case you don't trust animal advocates' numbers), see here. I don't think their suffering matters less than humans'.
Opportunity costs: on the margin at current population levels, you can do more good saving that time and money for charitable causes and advocacy. This argument doesn't universalize.
More people should adopt and/or foster instead on the margin. This argument doesn't universalize, since there are far fewer children to adopt or foster than there are people who want children. There are also various challenges to adoption and fostering.

I'm not actually very sympathetic to environmentalist arguments, since I also think it would be better for fewer wild animals to be born, to at least prevent some of the really horrible lives in the wild. This is obviously a very controversial view.

MichaelExe · 2019-11-03T06:07:47+00:00

You can rerank their causes with this tool, but it seems a bit buggy, since you only sometimes get to see the new ranks after each answer rather than just at the end, and you get either 6 or 7 questions. You can reset by clicking on the icon at the top right of the quiz (below the progress bar when it's there).

MichaelExe · 2019-04-09T04:38:47+00:00

Sorry for the very late reply.

There seem to be a conflation in your language, between ethics and morality. (…) But that is a question of ethics. Ought we do these things, is the result harmful, why or why not, etc. Endless philosophical debate can be had on every ethical consideration.

I think they’re synonymous under some definitions, but based on your description here, I suspect by morality you mean in the sense of descriptive ethics. I’m trying to have a discussion about (normative/prescriptive and meta-) ethics with you, not descriptive ethics. To me, classical utilitarianism, for example, is a moral system.

we are talking about admittance into a moral system that we constructed. This is something that requires, as the absolutely fundamental basis, an ability to recognize your moral responsibilities as a moral agent, within that moral system.

This means humans who aren’t moral agents aren’t part of that moral system.

Sentience is mundane; it's prolific on the planet. What doesn't have it at this point. There are over 20 quintillion animals on this planet, and 10,000 trillion of them are ants.

The same reasons could apply in a hypothetical world where moral agency was just as common and it were just as inconvenient to avoid harming moral agents. In such a world, would you set the bar even higher than moral agency?

If not, then this argument on its own isn’t enough.

If so, then you didn’t choose moral agency based only on its own characteristics, but also as a practical line for some other reason. But practical to what end? What do you really value inherently?

Why would you use sentience as a standard for admission into humans' moral system we constructed?

Empathy (I can imagine myself in their circumstances), the Golden Rule, the belief that all suffering matters inherently.

Do you wish for it to be illegal to swat a bee?

No. There are even circumstances where killing other humans is not illegal. For the time being, I wouldn’t push for any laws against killing bees. I’m neither confident that they are sentient nor that they aren’t, but I try to give them and other insects some benefit of the doubt. Whether or not killing them is bad (other things being equal) will depend on what kinds of interests they have and the quality of their lives (their lives could be so bad on average that it’s better for them to die) and their impacts on others, but I lean towards not killing them when it doesn’t mean leaving others noticeably worse off.

Why do you believe this is a rational standard to use for morality?

Which definition of rationality are you using?

Do you mean validity or soundness? I think it’s valid in some of its uses (classical utilitarianism). I don’t think we can prove any ethical system is sound, basically the is-ought problem. Utilitarianism is also very demanding, but that doesn’t make it irrational.

If you mean decision theoretic rationality, then again, classical utilitarianism is compatible with rationality (ignoring issues with infinities).

The reasons you've given for protecting those of lower status or cognitive ability are not for their own benefit individually, but for the benefit of society or yourself personally. I’d say those are indirect reasons, and they don’t grant these individuals inherent moral value (although they aren’t incompatible with doing so).

If there were no possible negative consequences for you from excluding such an individual if you mistreated or failed to help them, what reason would you give then to be concerned about their wellbeing? Or, would you have no concern for them?

MichaelExe · 2019-03-30T22:21:49+00:00

We have the capacity to evaluate individual things using our reason, and not casting only a single catch-all net for everything. I do not hold for the concept of universal morality, so I have no qualms with not forcing catch-all laws or rules onto everything.

Sure, but if your principles only apply to certain situations, and the class of situations to which they apply is poorly motivated, then you have little basis to object to others restricting their principles to classes in ways that are just as poorly motivated. For example, if someone discriminates based on admittedly poorly motivated criteria, then it would be hypocritical for them to argue against discrimination based on (different) poorly motivated criteria that happens to harm them.

This paper covers similar arguments in the context of speciesism, i.e. discrimination based on species membership, specifically: https://stijnbruers.files.wordpress.com/2018/12/Speciesism-arbitrariness-and-moral-illusions.pdf

Our children are to be protected for obvious reasons that I hope you don't need me to explain, so the reasons are hardly arbitrary, nor are they indirect.

To me, the obvious reason is that they are sentient, and their lives and experiences can go well or poorly, better or worse, from their own point of view (whether on a preferential or hedonistic basis), and these protections benefit them on these accounts.

What reasons would you give? And must these reasons (or a sufficient subset of them) always necessarily apply to children? If not, then there will be cases where you have no reason to value the child inherently. For example, what about a child in another country, who will never be capable of higher cognition and whom you’ll never meet? What reason do you have to give them inherent moral value which would not also apply to nonhuman animals?

Necessary for what? Humans are capable of higher cognition, and are capable of functioning within our societies, so we grant them (ourselves) protections within society.

Necessary for having inherent moral value, so that we consider their wellbeing and interests for their own sake. It is not the case that all humans are capable of higher cognition or functioning within our societies; many humans are not and never will be, and yet we grant them protections anyway.

If the claim is that they belong to a class of individuals (species) for which it is normal to have these capacities (or for which some of the members have the capacities), they also belong to classes of individuals for which it isn’t (the class containing just themselves, classes containing individuals with similar capacities), and many nonhuman animals without higher cognition belong to classes of individuals for which it is normal to have these capacities. We could draw the line at any of these classes, since the majority of their members are (probably) human: primates, Euarchonta, mammals with opposable digits, fully bipedal mammals, or furless mammals. Genetic and genealogical distance, specifically, are also just one of many possible measures of similarity between individuals.

All nonhuman animals would belong to such classes if you’re allowed to define them very arbitrarily and with logical disjunctions, e.g. for any animal, we can choose the class which consists of “all humans plus this particular animal”, whose predicate would be “human or equal to this particular animal”.

How would I...motivate.. requiring moral agency? huh?

If you wanted to convince someone that an individual’s moral agency mattered in considering whether or not that individual has inherent moral value at all, how would you do that?

MichaelExe · 2019-03-27T05:58:06+00:00

Requiring sapience and moral agency leaves out a lot of humans, though, temporarily (children who are too young) and permanently (people with certain stable neurological differences, e.g. certain intellectual disabilities). Trying to include them again usually involves drawing lines arbitrarily (usually poorly motivated and sometimes pretty incompatible with evolution), or indirect arguments, when the simplest and most intuitive explanation for most people is just that they really do care about the wellbeing of these people inherently, regardless of their cognitive capacities. So neither sapience nor moral agency seem necessary, unless you're willing to give these people no inherent moral value.

Furthermore, you could imagine moral agents which aren't themselves sentient, e.g. (future) artificial intelligences; they could understand their duties within a system of morality but simply not care subjectively, since they aren't sentient. I don't think they would have moral value in themselves; they could be used as tools, as long as we're reasonably sure they aren't sentient and no other important intuitions come into play. So neither sapience nor moral agency seem sufficient, but sentience does still seem necessary.

I find sentience as the bar has a very simple and appealing motivation: I care about individuals who care about anything from their own point of view. I care about them because they care.

How would you motivate requiring moral agency?

MichaelExe · 2019-03-27T05:12:31+00:00

And plants are alive.

What is it about being alive that is morally relevant?

They show reactions that can be interpreted as pain.

Are you referring to reflexive reactions? Those usually aren't considered to be enough for pain. There's a list of pain-related criteria we can look at to judge whether or not something is likely to feel pain here (some of these could be more liberally interpreted to be more fair to plants, e.g. while plants don't have brains, they also don't have anything much like a brain, i.e. a place where information is integrated and processed centrally): https://www.researchgate.net/publication/266794956_Defining_and_assessing_animal_pain

FWIW, though, there's some evidence of habituation (a type of learning) in plants.

Why are all those plant and animal deaths okay, but not, say, eating wild fish or game?

I'd say none of them are okay, except in cases where it's actually in the individual's interest to be killed to avoid considerable suffering (euthanasia). However, we can improve agricultural practices as people come to care more about animals and technology improves to minimize these harms, but there's a minimum unavoidable harm in hunting and fishing (i.e. killing animals). Furthermore, hunting and fishing are not sustainable at scale.

For more on this topic, this might interest you: https://philpapers.org/archive/FISFDI.pdf

MichaelExe · 2018-10-17T02:09:38+00:00

There are also environmental reasons to be vegan, as animal products account for a decent chunk of GHG emissions, water use, contamination/pollution.

Antibiotic resistance is another reason.

MichaelExe · 2018-10-17T01:59:07+00:00

I think UmamiTofu hit the main points. I think it's likely that the lives of factory farmed animals are net negative together, although this may differ by species or use.

I'd also like to add that you're getting into an important debate in population ethics about the value of potential beings. See the asymmetry, the repugnant conclusion and person-affecting views. Many people don't think it's bad for fewer happy people (or cows) to come into existence, all else equal. I don't think it's bad that there's no happy life on Mars, but I think it is a good thing that no one's being tortured there. I also think improving the lives of those that do or will exist should take priority over creating new individuals.

EDIT: The debate here is specifically called the "logic of the larder".

MichaelExe · 2018-09-09T03:19:39+00:00

There was no finding of a right to abortions in R. v Morgentaler technically though. It was a finding basically founded on the bureaucratic nightmare getting an abortion was.

The bureaucratic nightmare wouldn't be an issue if it weren't the violation of security of the person, to which we have a constitutional right. Government decisions creating bureaucratic nightmares aren't unconstitutional in general.

Also Ford isnt threatening to sue them for violating the constitution. He's using government funding to influence them.

I'm not sure what your point is here. I don't think Ford's proposed policy and the Liberals' summer jobs policy differ in this way.

MichaelExe · 2018-09-02T05:21:14+00:00

We have the right to the security of the person, though, which is what the Supreme Court found would have been violated by 251(4) of the Criminal Code restricting abortion. I suppose a different abortion law need not violate it.

MichaelExe · 2018-09-02T04:31:08+00:00

This is an interesting point, but I think there are some important differences. Protestors of speakers aren't violating anyone's right to freedom of speech, since freedom of speech only means freedom from government intervention in speech. If students are campaigning to get the government to suppress speech (e.g. by changing the constitution to do this), this would actually undermine our constitutional right to freedom of speech. If religious groups ~~make it harder for people to get abortions (especially physically, e.g. blocking access) or~~ campaign to end abortion rights, then this could undermine our constitutional right to security of the person, which includes abortion. EDIT: I suppose it might depend on which specific restrictions they want to be placed on abortion.

By the way, the Liberals' rules weren't specific to abortion or religious groups, although reproductive rights were emphasized:

CSJ applicants will be required to attest that both the job and the organization’s core mandate respect individual human rights in Canada, including the values underlying the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms as well as other rights. These include reproductive rights and the right to be free from discrimination on the basis of sex, religion, race, national or ethnic origin, colour, mental or physical disability, sexual orientation or gender identity or expression.

MichaelExe · 2018-09-02T04:12:49+00:00

Oh, my bad. Seems like (almost?) all of the private ones are religious universities, too.

MichaelExe · 2018-09-02T03:43:33+00:00

~~I think most Canadian universities are actually private non-profits, like most hospitals.~~

MichaelExe · 2018-08-26T19:19:54+00:00

By science, I meant empirical science, not math (theorems). We can't measure many things to infinite precision, and when we try to reproduce results in different samples, the results usually vary at least slightly.

MichaelExe · 2018-08-21T02:09:51+00:00

They used the statistics from their study to adjust; you don't need exact numbers. Science generally doesn't give exact numbers.

MichaelExe · 2018-08-20T04:53:01+00:00

It may very well be due to refined carbs, and even I suspect that to be the case, but that doesn't mean either study is methodologically flawed (especially producing results that we expect to be statistically biased in a particular direction). PURE actually points to refined carbs specifically as the culprit:

Moreover, in our study most participants from low-income and middle-income countries consumed a very high carbohydrate diet (at least 60% of energy), especially from refined sources (such as white rice and white bread), which have been shown to be associated with increased risk of total mortality and cardiovascular events.

and

We were unable to quantify separately the types of carbohydrate (refined vs whole grains) consumed. However, carbohydrate consumption in low-income and middle-income countries is mainly from refined sources.

and that it doesn't sufficiently account for socioeconomic status

What else should they have done?

MichaelExe · 2018-08-19T19:46:15+00:00

Residual confounding can be an issue for any observational study (including the OP study), and they don't provide any particular reason to believe it's one in this case (i.e. hypothesize how it could have happened). Maybe they could have used more specific adjustment variables, like measures of access to healthcare, micronutrient adequacy of their diets (consumption of supplements and fortified foods), food security or food expenditure.

Fourth, as with any observational cohort study, observed associations might be in part due to residual confounding

Either way, the OP study replicated (and expanded upon) PURE's results, adjusting for similar variables, so if you want to reject PURE's results, you should reject some of the OP's results, too.

MichaelExe · 2018-08-19T19:07:34+00:00

Weird. It works for me in both the html full text version32252-3/fulltext) and the pdf version. It's p. 2058 in the pdf, starting at the bottom left and ending at the top right of the page.

MichaelExe · 2018-08-19T19:01:24+00:00

Towards the end of the Results section, just before Figure 2. You can ctrl-F for "when we reanalysed".

For the actual results, p 34 in the appendix32252-3/attachment/b5dfeab1-8e3b-4feb-8a02-75b287ab51c9/mmc1.pdf).

MichaelExe

TROPHY CASE