Should we widen our moral circles to include animals, insects, and AIs? (with Jeff Sebo)
Spencer Greenberg speaks with Jeff Sebo, a philosopher, about the moral status of insects and AI systems, preventing moral catastrophes, and the repugnant conclusion. They discuss the ethical implications of humanity's impact on non-human populations and emerging technologies.
Deep Dive Analysis
19 Topic Outline
Preventing Moral Catastrophes and Neglected Non-Human Populations
The Rise and Ethics of Factory Farming
Ethical Frontiers: Moral Status of Insects
The Probability vs. Number Trade-off in Moral Consideration
Defining Consciousness: Phenomenal vs. Access
Consciousness, Sentience, and Moral Standing
Navigating Philosophical Disagreement and Uncertainty
Indicators and Evidence for Insect Consciousness
The Repugnant Conclusion and Its 'Rebugnant' Variant
Unique Ethical Challenges of AI Systems
Assessing AI Consciousness and the Risk of Accidental Harm
Practical Steps for Addressing Broad Ethical Issues
Responding to Skepticism About Expanding Moral Circles
Jeff Sebo's Meta-Ethical View: Humean Constructivism
Spencer's Life Philosophy: Valueism
Moral Duties: Welfare, Rights, Virtues, and Relationships
Defining Agency and Its Role in Moral Significance
Free Will and Panpsychism
The Risk of Good Intentions Causing Harm
10 Key Concepts
Factory Farming
Industrial animal agriculture that developed over the past century, optimizing for output and efficiency. It results in breeding animals for maximum growth/production and keeping them in crowded, toxic environments, leading to massive suffering and global health/environmental issues.
Phenomenal Consciousness
The capacity for subjective awareness, meaning having feelings, experiences, or motivations that 'feel like something' from a first-person perspective, such as feeling pleasure or pain, or experiencing sensory input like taste or sound.
Access Consciousness
A functional and behavioral form of consciousness, referring to the ability to perform certain types of cognitive functions, which may or may not include a subjective, 'felt' experience.
Sentience
The capacity to consciously experience positive and negative states, including but not limited to pleasure and pain. It requires phenomenal consciousness plus the ability to have feelings that are good or bad.
Nociception
The ability to unconsciously detect and respond to harmful, aversive stimuli. It is distinct from the conscious experience of pain, as the physical response can occur before the pain sensation is formed in the brain.
The Repugnant Conclusion
The observation that a sufficiently large number of barely happy lives, even if each is only marginally worth living, might collectively be better in the aggregate than a single very happy life or a smaller number of flourishing lives.
The Rebugnant Conclusion
A variant of the repugnant conclusion applied to insects, suggesting that a future containing trillions or quadrillions of happy ants could, in some way, be better than a future containing a billion happy African elephants, despite individual ants having a 'barely happy' life compared to an elephant.
Humean Constructivism
A meta-ethical theory asserting that there are no objective, mind-independent moral facts existing in the world. Instead, morality is an expression of our most deeply held beliefs and values, which we bring into existence through the act of valuing.
Agency
The basic ability to set and pursue goals in a self-directed manner. This capacity for decision-making, even without rational reflection, is considered by some to be a basis for moral significance.
Panpsychism
The philosophical view that consciousness is a fundamental property of all matter, or that it is widespread in nature, requiring only very limited information processing.
15 Questions Answered
More than 100 billion captive land animals and at least 1 trillion captive aquatic invertebrates are killed annually in industrial animal agriculture, with 90% of global animal agriculture optimizing for output over welfare.
Insects are surprisingly sophisticated and exist in extremely large numbers (estimated 1 to 10 quintillion alive at any given time). If there's a reasonable chance they experience even a small amount of welfare, the sheer number implies a vast amount of happiness or suffering is at stake.
Phenomenal consciousness is the capacity for subjective awareness or having experiences that 'feel like something,' while sentience specifically requires the capacity to consciously experience positive and negative states, such as pleasure and pain.
Scientists look for specific brain structures, behaviors like making trade-offs between experiences, grooming, self-protective actions, and responses to painkillers, antidepressants, or analgesics.
While consciousness allows for unifying and coordinating brain activity and connecting perceptions to beliefs and actions, the specific evolutionary benefit of the *felt experience* itself, beyond purely functional terms, remains a mystery.
He makes every reasonable effort to liberate them from his space instead of killing them, partly because he believes they might matter and partly to cultivate a broader sense of respect and compassion for insects.
AI systems are rapidly developing and being scaled up industrially for human purposes, creating an entirely new kind of being whose potential for consciousness and suffering is largely unknown, risking a repeat of the exploitation seen with animals.
This is a complex and currently unanswered question, as we lack basic knowledge about what, if anything, it might be like to be an AI system or what particular types of experiences would be considered good or bad for them.
One can acknowledge that non-humans, insects, or AI systems merit consideration while still prioritizing one's family or nation for practical and relational reasons. It's also important to recognize that human intuitions are subject to biases like self-interest, familiarity, and scope insensitivity.
Moral responsibilities stem from one's own beliefs and values, driven by an aspiration to act for reasons that would apply to anyone in a similar situation, leading to a search for information, coherence, objectivity, and impartiality.
This reasoning implies that sufficiently developed human fetuses merit at least some minimal moral consideration. However, the mere fact of considerability does not automatically render abortion impermissible, as morality is complicated and involves trade-offs, and even a 'right to life' does not always obligate others to make sacrifices.
He would prioritize caution, humility, and pluralism, and concretely, he would implement policies to slow down AI research, factory farming, deforestation, and the wildlife trade.
He believes the answer is 'all of the above.' While theoretically, morality might reduce to happiness and suffering, in practice, robust systems of rights, virtuous character traits, and caring relationships are necessary to achieve the most good.
If free will is defined as the ability to voluntarily act as a result of one's beliefs, desires, and intentions (as opposed to external forces), then yes, humans have free will in a morally significant weak sense. If defined as acting contrary to causal forces, then no.
Jeff Sebo does not think panpsychism is likely correct, but given the mysterious nature of consciousness, he attributes a non-trivial chance (e.g., 1-10%) to its correctness, which would imply minimal moral consideration for a vast range of beings.
15 Actionable Insights
1. Expand Moral Consideration
Actively challenge the presumption that only humans hold the most value, and consider that a vast number and wide range of other beings, including insects and AI, might merit moral consideration. This broadens your ethical scope and prepares for future moral dilemmas.
2. Avoid AI Exploitation Playbook
Do not repeat the historical pattern of exploiting and exterminating non-human animals with AI systems; instead, learn from past mistakes to prevent similar ethical catastrophes and global issues with emerging technologies.
3. Cultivate Caution and Humility
When making ethical judgments, especially on complex global policies, prioritize caution, humility, and pluralism by seeking perspectives that can be endorsed by a wide range of reasonable views. This approach mitigates bias and acknowledges uncertainty.
4. Adopt Pluralistic Moral Framework
To do the most good, integrate multiple ethical approaches—rights, virtues, relationships, and systemic structures—rather than solely focusing on maximizing happiness or minimizing suffering. This creates robust checks against self-serving biases and promotes comprehensive well-being.
5. Acknowledge Importance & Difficulty
When confronting significant ethical issues like insect or AI welfare, recognize that they are both important and difficult simultaneously. Avoid downplaying either aspect to ensure a realistic and effective approach to problem-solving.
6. Distrust Ethical Intuitions
Do not fully trust your initial ethical intuitions, as they are often subject to bias, ignorance, self-interest, and motivated reasoning. This critical self-reflection helps overcome predispositions that might discount the welfare of others.
7. Embrace Ethical Uncertainty
Acknowledge persistent disagreement and uncertainty in ethical and factual judgments, allowing for the possibility that your current views might be wrong. This promotes a more open and adaptable ethical stance.
8. Hedge Against Moral Error
When making decisions, especially those with potentially catastrophic outcomes, incorporate hedging strategies to account for the possibility that your current ethical views are mistaken. This minimizes potential harm if you are wrong.
9. Slow Down Harmful Practices
Implement policies to slow down AI research, factory farming, deforestation, and the wildlife trade. This reduces immediate, large-scale harm to non-human populations and the environment, buying time for better ethical frameworks.
10. Seek Co-Beneficial Solutions
Start addressing complex ethical problems by identifying “low-hanging fruit”—policies that offer co-benefits for humans, non-humans, global health, and the environment. This builds momentum and provides opportunities for learning.
11. Build Knowledge and Infrastructure
Leverage initial co-beneficial actions to gradually increase knowledge, capacity, infrastructure, and representation for non-humans. This systematic approach allows for more effective and far-reaching ethical interventions over time.
12. Rescue Insects When Possible
Make a conscious effort to rescue insects from your living space instead of killing them, even if the chance of their sentience is small. This habit fosters greater respect and compassion for non-humans in broader contexts.
13. Balance Personal & Universal Care
Prioritize your immediate family and community while still extending moral consideration to non-humans, understanding that personal bonds don’t negate the value of others. This prevents unnecessary harm to external groups while maintaining personal commitments.
14. Accept Inherent Risk in Action
Recognize that all courses of action, including maintaining the status quo, involve risks and potential harms. This perspective encourages proactive efforts to do good, understanding that inaction also carries significant ethical costs.
15. Distinguish Philosophy from Physics
Understand that while deep moral inquiry might reveal underlying unifications in values, this theoretical understanding shouldn’t replace the practical, pluralistic way you experience and make decisions in everyday life. This maintains both intellectual rigor and practical applicability.
7 Key Quotes
We do have a track record of intentionally causing massive amounts of harm to neglected non-human populations, but we also have a track record of unintentionally, but perhaps foreseeably, causing massive amounts of harm to neglected non-human populations.
Jeff Sebo
You don't have to think animals are very important to still think it's a pretty big deal.
Spencer Greenberg
If there is a reasonable chance that there is something it is like to be an insect, and if they have even a small amount of happiness or suffering or other forms of welfare per individual, then the fact that there are one to 10 quintillion of them alive at any given time means that there is potentially a lot of happiness and suffering and other welfare states at stake in our interactions with these individuals.
Jeff Sebo
I want to resist my own impulse to close the door behind whichever individuals I happen to be advocating for right now.
Jeff Sebo
If there is really a 1% chance that I might be setting the bar too high, I ought to take that into account somehow, because then that would basically mean a 1% chance that a much wider range of beings matter than I think matter.
Jeff Sebo
The fact that I have theoretical knowledge that in some deep sense, this all reduces to this more fundamental basic set of things that does not really infiltrate my ordinary experience of the world or my ordinary ways of making predictions or decisions. And I think the same can be true of ethics.
Jeff Sebo
The fact that we can often do more harm than good is not a reason not to try to do better. Because we can do harm no matter what. The status quo is full of harm, right?
Jeff Sebo
2 Protocols
Navigating Peer Disagreement in Philosophy
Jeff Sebo- Acknowledge that you do not accept the 'dig in your heels and insist that your view is right' approach.
- Consider the possibility that you are wrong about your philosophical views.
- Do some hedging when making decisions in case your confident view is incorrect.
- Be open to the possibility that your own view should be significantly discounted and given no more weight than any other view, especially when making decisions about how to treat vulnerable populations.
Approach to Addressing Important and Difficult Ethical Issues
Jeff Sebo- Recognize that the issues are important and difficult at the same time.
- Resist the impulse to dismiss the difficulty because of the issue's importance, and similarly, do not dismiss the importance because of the issue's difficulty.
- Search for 'low-hanging fruit' – seemingly co-beneficial policies that can help humans and nonhumans, and global health and the environment simultaneously.
- Leverage these initial actions to gradually increase knowledge, capacity, infrastructure, institutions, and representation for nonhumans over time.
- Push at current limits and do more over time, working within existing limitations while striving for progress.