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by Stephen Robcraft
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Animal welfareExistential risk
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New-ish to the community and trying to resolve the following question - where do existential risks that threaten the future of [insert any non-human species] fit into discussions about prioritisation?

Though it's rarely presented in this way, I understand most conversations/conclusions about priority areas to consider:

Humans

  • Immediate causes of human suffering and/or loss of life
  • Long-term risk to the ongoing existence of human life

Animals

  • Immediate causes of non-human suffering and/or loss of life

I understand that some long-term risks to the ongoing existence of human life will also impact on non-humans, but suppose that there are some risks that exist only for (some or all) non-humans.

As well as direct answers to my question, I'm wondering if anyone can point me in the direction of further reading/discussion about this, so I might:

  1. Update my understanding - it's likely I've just missed or misinterpreted some of the discussion about this
  2. Consider the argument for/against prioritising animal x-risk - I instinctively feel it is odd that this doesn't figure in most attempts at prioritising cause areas that I have seen. This seems a little incoherent with (1) the focus on longtermism within the EA community and (2) the fairly wide moral circle drawn by EA community

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Toby Tremlett🔹

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When we worry about human extinction, it isn't that we put a disvalue on extinction itself. Rather, human extinction is bad because there will be no future human-generated value (for example, no future human happiness, no future human flourishing etc...)  

When we care about animal extinctions, it generally isn't for this reason. It is quite hard to say exactly why we care (Jeff McMahan [pg 277] points out that if we think extinction in itself is bad, then we should prefer a planet filled with the only first amoebas to one like ours). 

If, as is the case for many EAs, the reason to care about any extinction is because it leads to less future value (let's say happiness for simplicity), each individual animal extinction is not obviously bad/ equally bad. For one, we don't know which animal species have happy lives. Also, if one animal goes extinct, in many cases this won't decrease the amount of animals in the ecosystem. In some cases it may increase it. 

Not sure if that fully answers your question, or just complicates things. Thanks for asking though!
 

Lin BL1
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Thank you for this answer. I am not sure I agree with this, for the reasons outlined below (in case useful information for you, I upvoted and disagree-voted this):

Paragraph 1: Somewhat minor point, I think you may be drawing a distinction without a difference, i.e. extinction being bad because of the effects of it (no future human happiness, flourishing etc) is putting a disvalue on extinction, because it inherently causes those effects.

In an animal context I would put this as: if an animal species has net positive lives, then extinction is inherently bad,... (read more)

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Toby Tremlett🔹
Thanks for this detailed response! I think there are a few points where a response from me may be useful.  1. "extinction being bad because of the effects of it (no future human happiness, flourishing etc) is putting a disvalue on extinction, because it inherently causes those effects"  I think this is just one of our cruxes- I think that extinction, like death, is not disvaluable in itself, but is generally linked to another disvalue. If we want to engage in trade-offs, make informed decisions etc... then we should look for the ultimate value/ dis-value, and not focus on something which almost always correlates.  2. "if an animal species has net positive lives, then extinction is inherently bad, and where there is uncertainty, an animal species should be assumed to have net positive lives" To me, it sounds as though you are treating extinction as contingently bad (in this case, bad because the animals of the species do or may have net positive lives). If you knew for sure that the animals had net negative lives, would you still think their extinction was bad?  FWIW I'd agree that, for chesterton's fencey reasons, it is better not to cause animal extinctions. But we were discussing whether we should treat animal extinctions with the weight of an X-risk (i.e. a human extinction). For that, we need a little more than an assumption that the animal's lives are net positive.  3. Amoebas I think this may be a straightforward misunderstanding. In McMahan's paper, in the last paragraph on page 9 in the pdf or 276 in the book, he is making a quick argument against caring about extinction intrinsically. I do not think that people who are concerned with biodiversity and extinction value either intrinsically, and therefore was not suggesting that they should attempt to return us to amoeba-world. (plus, to be pernickety, someone who cared about extinction intrinsically wouldn't want to return us anywhere, they would just want to stop evolution where it was-- assuming avoi
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Lin BL
Hey, thanks also for the detailed response. 1. I don't think that part is our disagreement. Maybe the way I would phrase the question is whether there should be an additional multiplier put on extinction in addition to the expected future loss of wellbeing. If I was to model it, the answer would be 'no' to avoid double counting (i.e. the effect of extinction is the effect of future loss of wellbeing). The disagreement is how this is not by default assumed to apply to animals as well. 2. "If you knew for sure that the animals had net negative lives, would you still think their extinction was bad?" Not sure how likely such a situation is to come up, as I'm not sure how I would know this for sure. Because that seems like not just being sure that every of that species that exists now has a net negative life, it's assuming that every of that species that might exist in the future also will have. But to answer the question philosophically and not practically, I would not say that the extinction of a species that will definitely have guaranteed suffering is bad. "But we were discussing whether we should treat animal extinctions with the weight of an X-risk (i.e. a human extinction). For that, we need a little more than an assumption that the animal's lives are net positive." Definitely agreed for prioritising between things that more than the just the assumption of net positive is required. But research would be required to know that, and as far as I can tell there has been very little done (and there are ~8.7 million animal species). 1. I see thanks - I can now find the section you were referring to. I don't think I agree the full argument as made follows, but I haven't made the full thing and I don't want this to be a thread discussing this one particular paper! 2. Agreed there are nuances re animals. However, outside philosophy I'm not sure how many people you'd have arguing against 'human extinction is bad even if humans are replaced by another species'! 3.
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harfe1
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Could you give some examples of animal x-risk? And what I could do about it? How much to prioritize an issue depends on these more concrete things, not just abstract considerations.

Also, are you having in mind extinction scenarios of a single species, or extinction scenarios of all mammals, or all non-human animal life?

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Stephen Robcraft1
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I am considering extinction scenarios for any and all species. I’m trying to understand why safeguarding against the extinction of humanity is prioritised, but this is not the case for any other species.

As for examples, the IUCN Red List is the most comprehensive database that I’m aware of - assessing and reporting the extinction risk to 1000s of species worldwide. I have seen some criticism of this list however (notably that the approach used to assess risk lacks transparency), so wonder if the EA community would have some value to add here?

https://www.iucnredlist.org/

What you (or the EA community more generally) could do about it will vary from species to species. Interventions might range from tackling deforestation, to reducing harm from human waste, to lobbying against hunting/fishing…. the list of possible interventions is huge! Again, I wonder if the EA community might have value to add in identifying effective interventions?

I’m not yet arguing for the EA community to do these things - just trying to understand what has been thought about/discussed by others, so I might better understand why this work is not prioritised.

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harfe1
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I have seen very little discussions about these things in EA circles and I dont know of a thorough investigation. Maybe some EAs have briefly thought about it but think that the cause is not as important/tractable/neglected as other causes, without doing a long writeup.

As for extinction of a single species, I imagine that moral factors are also at play here. Many people (including me), consider the extinction of homo sapiens to be much worse than the extinction of the "wandering albatross" (which I pulled from your linked list).

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Lin BL1
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I think there should be more discussions of animal x-risk and/or animal longtermism within EA. I definitely care more about human extinction than animal extinction and think human extinction risk should be a higher priority, but that does not mean that animal extinction risk should not be considered. For example, I think considering both human and animal xrisk might change how much climate change is prioritised as an existential risk, and what interventions are worth focusing on for it (there are definitely more people focussing on climate change compared to other xrisks outside of EA, but that does not mean that the best interventions have been focussed on similar to the global poverty space).

I don't have strong opinions on 'this should definitely be prioritised', but I think at least a few people should be researching this (to see if it is important/tractable/neglected/etc), and it should be discussed more than it currently is.

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