EA-relatable quotes

“The very notion of human enhancement is usually defined in contrast to therapy or intervention against the disorders: while therapy aims to cure disorder and bring bodily and/or mental functionality up to (or towards) normal levels, enhancement aims to lift functionality beyond such levels. But “normal” is a fuzzy concept, and some of the above examples indicate the difficulty of drawing a clear line in the sand. Some writers argue that we can and must do so, whereas others are more skeptical about the distinction, such as Wolpe (2002), who characterizes it relativistically as “what medicine chooses to treat is defined as disease, while altering what it does not treat is enhancement.””

— Olle Häggström, Here Be Dragons: Science, Technology and the Future of Humanity, Chapter “Engineering better humans?”, p. 38
*“[A]ny man to whom you can do favor is your friend, and […] you can do a favor to almost anyone.”

— Mark Caine
“It is so inefficient that there are pro- and anti- gun control charities and pro- and anti-abortion charities. Charities on either side of the divide should be able to agree to ‘cancel’ off some of their funds and give it to a mutually agreed good cause (like developing world aid). This would do just as much for (or against) gun control as spending it on their zero-sum campaigning, as well as doing additional good for others.”

— Toby Ord
“If we don’t believe in strategic compromise with those we can’t identify with, we don’t believe in it at all.”

— Noam Chomsky
“[I]ndividuals must decide what to do against the background of what others will in fact do.”

— Jeff McMahan, Philosophical Critiques of Effective Altruism
“Consider for a moment what our planet is and what it might be. At present, for most, there is toil and hunger, constant danger, more hatred than love. There could be a happy world, where co-operation was more in evidence than competition, and monotonous work is done by machines, where what is lovely in nature is not destroyed to make room for hideous machines whose sole business is to kill, and where to promote joy is more respected than to produce mountains of corpses. Do not say this is impossible: it is not. It waits only for men to desire it more than the infliction of torture.”

— Bertrand Russell, 1967
“We don’t have ways to control aging, which is the major cause of death, and we don’t have ways to control mood, which is the major cause of suffering. After we solve those, the biggest problems are and will be those related to global [cooperation].”

— Nick Bostrom, Panel discussion “Global coordination” (Effective Altruism Global 2015: Oxford University)
“It’s quite plausible that someone will take over the future by disregarding the wishes of everyone else, rather than by combining and idealizing them. Or maybe concern for the powerless will just fall by the wayside, because it’s not really adaptive for powerful agents to care about weak ones, unless there are strong, stable social pressures to do so. This suggests that improving prospects for a reflective, tolerant future may be an important undertaking. Rather than focusing on whether or not the future happens, I think it’s more valuable for suffering reducers to focus on making the future better if it happens – by encouraging compromise, moral reflectiveness, philosophical wisdom, and altruism, all of which make everyone better off in expectation.”

— Brian Tomasik, Risks of Astronomical Future Suffering (Foundational Research Institute)
“Most of humanity’s problems are fundamentally coordination problems / selfishness problems. If humans were perfectly altruistic, we could easily eliminate poverty, overpopulation, war, arms races, and other social ills. There would remain “man vs. nature” problems, but these are increasingly disappearing as technology advances.”

— Brian Tomasik, Thoughts on Robots, AI, and Intelligence Explosion (Foundational Research Institute)
“No standard moral framework, be it utilitarian, libertarian, egalitarian, Rawlsian, Christian, or any other well-developed perspective, regards people from foreign lands as less entitled to exercise their rights – or as inherently possessing less moral worth – than people lucky to have been born in the right place at the right time. Nationalism, of course, discounts the rights, interests, and moral value of “the Other, but this disposition is inconsistent with our fundamental moral teachings and beliefs.”

— Alex Tabarrok, The Case for Getting Rid of Borders – Completely (The Atlantic, 2015)
“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.”

— Mark Twain
“The typical citizen drops down to a lower level of mental performance as soon as he enters the political field. He argues and analyzes in a way which he would readily recognize as infantile within the sphere of his real interests. He becomes a primitive again.”

— Joseph Schumpeter
“No longer enslaved or made dependent by force of law, the great majority are so by force of poverty; they are still chained to a place, to an occupation, and to conformity with the will of an employer, and debarred, by the accident of birth both from the enjoyments, and from the mental and moral advantages, which others inherit without exertion and independently of desert. That this is an evil equal to almost any of those against which mankind have hitherto struggled, the poor are not wrong in believing.”

— John Stuart Mill, Chapters On Socialism (1879)
“Can we seriously say, that a poor peasant or artisan has a free choice to leave his country, when he knows no foreign language or manners, and lives, from day to day, by the small wages which he acquires? We may as well assert that a man, by remaining in a vessel, freely consents to the dominion of the master; though he was carried on board while asleep, and must leap into the ocean and perish, the moment he leaves her.”

— David Hume, Of the Original Contract
“When Americans today recall the unabashed racism of earlier generations, we may easily feel ashamed of our forebears. Most of us would cringe at the suggestion that our race is better than other races. We feel that we cannot understand what it would be like to be so prejudiced. How could one not see the injustice in slavery, or racial segregation? But most Americans, like most human beings around the world, in fact have easy access to what it was like to be an unabashed racist. It was to feel about one’s race the way most of us now feel about our country. Today’s Americans do not cringe when we hear the statement that America is the greatest country on Earth, any more than white people a century ago would have cringed to hear that whites were the best race. We do not cringe to hear that American businesses should hire native-born Americans rather than immigrants, any more than Americans three generations ago would have cringed to hear that white-owned businesses should hire white people in preference to blacks. Naturally, nationalists may attempt to devise explanations for why nationality is different from race, and why nationalism is really justified. This is not the place to attempt to argue that point. I would like simply to put forward for consideration the thought that perhaps we have no right to feel ashamed of our ancestors, and that our descendants may feel about us the way we feel about our ancestors.”

— Michael Huemer, Is There a Right to Immigrate?
“Suppose Marvin is in danger of starvation and walks to the market to buy some food. In the absence of outside interference, the market is open, and there are people willing to trade him food. Now suppose I block Marvin from reaching the market. As a result, he starves to death. In this situation, I would surely be said to have killed Marvin, or at least done something morally comparable to killing him.

Countries are like the market where would-be immigrants could satisfy their needs. There are people willing to hire immigrants, to rent them living spaces, and in general to engage in all other kinds of interactions with them. Governments actively and coercively prevent many from meeting their needs that they would otherwise. This is much closer to inflicting a harm than it is to merely allow a harm to occur.”

— Michael Huemer, Starving Marvin (Open Borders: The Case)
“Morality in foreign policy isn’t about bombing bad guys. It’s about helping people. And usually, the best way to do that won’t involve bombings at all.”

— Dylan Matthews, The Best Way the US Could Help Syrians: Open the Borders (Vox, September 4, 2015)
“Almost every argument for immigration controls is flawed. Take, for example, the argument that we need to ‘protect out jobs’. Well, why is someone who charges too much for his labour entitled to keep that job and not be out competed? The usual answer is that it is all right to be out competed by a compatriot but not by a foreigner. But this is simply xenophobic (‘communitarian’ would be a more charitable word)[.]”

— Fernando Tesón, On Trade and Justice (2004)
“I regard open borders as the moral imperative of our time. [M]odern immigration laws may be ever so slightly more malleable than the colour line, but it remains that the typical citizen of a developing country has a near-zero chance of ever living and working in a country where they can realise their full potential. The economic implications alone are staggering: immigration policies consign millions to lives of poverty based on nothing more than an accident of birth.

There is no moral justification for what we do today. We purport that all human beings are created equal, and yet we arbitrarily agree that some human beings have more of a right to work and live in certain places than others. [T]he case against immigration restrictions is simply an extension of the case against slavery and the case against racial segregation.”

— John Lee, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” (Open Borders: The Case, October 11, 2012)
“I really do consider existing First World societies to be morally comparable to the Jim Crow South. Worse, actually. Under Jim Crow, blacks couldn’t legally do some jobs or live in some places in the country. Under modern immigration law, illegal immigrants can’t legally do any job or live anywhere in the country.

“Anti-immigration laws make me poorer, but I just think it’s unjust that everyone on Earth doesn’t enjoy at least the same rights that I do – and tragic that First World countries could do the right thing at a cost of less than nothing. Still, when I think about immigration, I’m grateful for the simple fact that I can make my voice heard. If one victim of immigration restrictions feels better knowing that someone somewhere stands up for his basic human right to accept a job offer from a willing employer, I’m glad.”

— Bryan Caplan, My Path to Open Borders (January 2, 2013)
“[C]onsider the practical implications of the following two moral principles: 1) we will not allow the creation of a single instance of the worst forms of suffering [for] any amount of happiness, and 2) we will allow one day of such suffering for ten years of the most sublime happiness. What kind of future would we accept with these respective principles? Imagine a future in which we colonize space and maximize the number of sentient beings that the accessible universe can sustain over the entire course of the future, which is probably more than 10^{30}. Given this number of beings, and assuming these beings each live a hundred years, principle 2) above would appear to permit a space colonization that all in all creates more than 10^{28} years of [extreme suffering], provided that the other states of experience are sublimely happy. This is how extreme the difference can be between principles like 1) and 2); between whether we consider suffering irredeemable or not. And notice that even if we altered the exchange rate by orders of magnitude — say, by requiring 10^{15} times more sublime happiness per unit of extreme suffering than we did in principle 2) above — we would still allow an enormous amount of extreme suffering to be created; in the concrete case of requiring 10^{15} times more happiness, we would allow more than 10,000 billion years of [the worst forms of suffering].”

— Magnus Vinding, Effective Altruism (2018)
“One might ask, “Why not just promote broader circles of compassion, without a focus on suffering?” The answer is that more compassion by itself could increase suffering. For example, most people who care about wild animals in a general sense conclude that wildlife habitats should be preserved, in part because these people aren’t focused enough on the suffering that wild animals endure. Likewise, generically caring about future digital sentience might encourage people to create as many happy digital minds as possible, even if this means also increasing the risk of digital suffering due to colonizing space. Placing special emphasis on reducing suffering is crucial for taking the right stance on many of these issues.”

— Brian Tomasik, Reasons to Promote Suffering-Focused Ethics (2015)
“Some writers indeed are so much impressed with the amount of suffering in the world, that they doubt, if we look to all sentient beings, whether there is more of misery or of happiness; whether the world as a whole is a good or bad one. According to my judgment happiness decidedly prevails, though this would be very difficult to prove. If the truth of this conclusion be granted, it harmonizes well with the effects which we might expect from natural selection. If all the individuals of any species were habitually to suffer to an extreme degree, they would neglect to propagate their kind; but we have no reason to believe that this has ever, or at least often occurred. Some other considerations, moreover, lead to the belief that all sentient beings have been formed so as to enjoy, as a general rule, happiness.”

— Charles Darwin, The Autobiography of Charles Darwin 1809-1882: with the Original Omissions Restored (1958), p. 88
“I’m always surprised when I see the laws of evolution being used as an argument for the status-quo. You can’t say “we mustn’t change anything because otherwise evolution will stop”. Evolution has come to a certain point at which it has brought about a species intelligent enough, and capable enough (opposable thumb, air-breathing, social…) to change the very principle of evolution. Evolution 1.0 was blind, purposeless. Evolution 1.5, originating some 600 million years ago, created (blindly, purposelessly) foreseeing and purposeful beings – but these still had no grip on evolution as a whole. Now they have started to have such a grip. This is the beginning of evolution 2.0.”

— David Olivier, comment on the Reducing-Wild Animal Suffering Facebook group
“The insidious lethality of a parasitic wasp, the cruelty of a cat playing with a mouse – these are, after all, just the tip of the iceberg. To ponder natural selection is to be staggered by the amount of suffering and death that can be the price for a single, slight advance in organic design. And it is to realize, moreover, that the purpose of this “advance” – longer, sharper canine teeth in male chimpanzees, say – is often to make other animals suffer or die more surely. Organic design thrives on pain, and pain thrives on organic design.”

— Robert Wright, The Moral Animal: Why We Are The Way We Are
“In a way, Darwin discovered God – a God that failed to match the preconceptions of theology, and so passed unheralded. If Darwin had discovered that life was created by an intelligent agent – a bodiless mind that loves us, and will smite us with lightning if we dare say otherwise – people would have said ‘My gosh! That’s God!’ But instead Darwin discovered a strange alien God – not comfortably ‘ineffable’, but really genuinely different from us. Evolution is not a God, but if it were, it wouldn’t be Jehovah. It would be H. P. Lovecraft’s Azathoth, the blind idiot God burbling chaotically at the center of everything, surrounded by the thin monotonous piping of flutes. Which you might have predicted, if you had really looked at Nature.”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky, An Alien God
“Look round this universe. What an immense profusion of beings, animated and organised, sensible and active! You admire this prodigious variety and fecundity. But inspect a little more narrowly these living existences, the only beings worth regarding. How hostile and destructive to each other! How insufficient all of them for their own happiness! How contemptible or odious to the spectator! The whole presents nothing but the idea of a blind Nature, impregnated by a great vivifying principle, and pouring forth from her lap, without discernment or parental care, her maimed and abortive children!”

— David Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion
“We now know that the whole of organic nature on our planet exists only by a relentless war of all against all. Thousands of animals and plants must daily perish in every part of the earth, in order that a few chosen individuals may continue to subsist and to enjoy life. But even the existence of these favoured few is a continual conflict with threatening dangers of every kind. Thousands of hopeful germs perish uselessly every minute. The raging war of interests in human society is only a feeble picture of the unceasing and terrible war of existence which reigns throughout the whole of the living world. The beautiful dream of God’s goodness and wisdom in nature, to which as children we listened so devoutly fifty years ago, no longer finds credit now – at least among educated people who think.”

— Ernst Haeckel, Monism as Connecting Religion and Science
“Thus, from the maggot up to the man, the universal law of the violent destruction of living things is unceasingly fulfilled. The entire Earth, perpetually steeped in blood, is nothing but an immense altar on which every living thing must be immolated without end, without restraint, without respite, until the consummation of the world, until the extinction of evil, until the death of death.”

— Joseph De Maistre
“All species reproduce in excess, way past the carrying capacity of their niche. In her lifetime a lioness might have 20 cubs; a pigeon, 150 chicks; a mouse, 1,000 kits; a trout, 20,000 fry, a tuna or cod, a million fry or more; an elm tree, several million seeds; and an oyster, perhaps a hundred million spat. If one assumes that the population of each of these species is, from generation to generation, roughly equal, then on the average only one offspring will survive to replace each parent. All the other thousands and millions will die, one way or another.”

— Fred Hapgood, Why Males Exist: An Inquiry into the Evolution of Sex (1979), pp. 44-45
“r is evil, but K is not so great either.”

— Sarah Perry, Every Cradle Is a Grave: Rethinking the Ethics of Birth and Suicide (2014)
“The jungle, existing exclusively in the present, is certainly subject to time, but remains forever ageless. Any concept of justice would be antithetical to all this. But is there justice in the desert, either? Or in the oceans? And in the depths? Life in the sea must be pure hell, an infinite hell of constant and ever-present danger, so unbearable that in the course of evolution some species – including Homo Sapiens – crawled, fled, onto some clods of firm land, the future continents.”

— Werner Herzog, April 12, 1981 diary entry, published in Conquest of the Useless: Reflections from the Making of Fitzcarraldo (2009)
“Man and the animals are merely a passage and channel for food, a tomb for other animals, a haven for the dead, giving life by the death of others, a coffer full of corruption.”

— Leonardo da Vinci, The Notebooks (1508-1518)
“The conscious self is a neurocomputational weapon, invented and optimized in a cognitive arms race.”

— Thomas Metzinger (Effective Altruism Global X: Basel University 2015)
“Perhaps the Cambrian explosion, where first evolved both nervous systems capable of pain and predation-based animal ecosystems, is the most terrible event in the history of the known Universe.”

— Massimo Sandal
“Existence, for all [sentient Darwinian] life, is a constant struggle to feed – a struggle to incorporate whatever other organisms they can fit into their mouths and press down their gullets without choking. Seen in these stark terms, life on this planet is a gory spectacle, a science-fiction nightmare in which digestive tracts fitted with teeth at one end are tearing away at whatever flesh they can reach, and at the other end are piling up the fuming waste excrement as they move along in search of more flesh.”

— Ernest Becker, Escape from Evil
“What a book a Devil’s chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering low & horridly cruel works of nature!”

— Charles Darwin, Letter to J. D. Hooker (July 13, 1856)
“Nature is Satan’s church.”

— Lars Von Trier, Antichrist
“From the point of view of the moralist the animal world is on about the same level as a gladiator’s show. [A]nd since the great game is going on in every corner of the world, thousands of times a minute; since, were our ears sharp enough, we need not descend to the gates of hell to hear [sighs and groans of pain like those heard by Dante].”

— Thomas Henry Huxley, The Struggle for Existence in Human Society: Collected Essays IX (1888)
“And so the extinction of the Pinta Island tortoise is ensured. 2 million years of evolution snuffed out. For in the end, nature is horrific and teaches us nothing.”

— Futurama (season 7, episode 13 “Naturama”)
“And so the endless circle of life comes to an end, meaningless and grim. Why did they live and why did they die? No reason.”

— Futurama (season 7, episode 13 “Naturama”)
“I don’t think there’s anything wrong with abolishing zoos altogether, even if that means some species will go extinct. I don’t think non-existence is a problem for animals, if it were different, we’d be ethically obliged to bring as many sentient beings into the world as possible, and that strikes me as rather odd. Those animals that exist now should have a life as nice as possible, that’s what matters most.”

— Lukas Gloor
“Why are people trying to conserve species? A “species” can’t feel pain or pleasure. It’s the individual members of a species that matter. Humans shouldn’t put their aesthetic preferences above the vital interests of sentient beings. To an animal, it doesn’t matter whether it belongs to a species that is going extinct or not, the animal just wants to live with as little suffering as possible. If we give more consideration to some animal just because it belongs to an endangered species, that seems blatantly speciesist.”

— Lukas Gloor
“No, ecologists are particularly liars and vile: they want to preserve species on this earth for mankind’s sake, for man enjoyment and for man to eat them. I don’t. I think differently: species that goes extinct, is a species that stops suffering.”

— Fernando Vallejo
“But I own that I cannot see as plainly as others do, and as I should wish to do, evidence of design and beneficence on all sides of us. There seems to me too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidæ with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of Caterpillars, or that a cat should play with mice…”

— Charles Darwin, in a letter to Asa Grey (May 22, 1860)
“Insects are far more numerous than NPCs right now, and they’re also far more sophisticated. Many insects have at least 100,000 neurons and exhibit not only reactive and goal-directed behavior like NPCs but also reinforcement learning, selective attention, memory, sleep-like states, cognitive generalization, social behavior, and so on. There are an estimated 10^{19} insects on Earth, compared with around 10^{10} humans or around 10^{11} to 10^{12} birds. Even if you count just raw number of neurons, insects outweigh humans by a few orders of magnitude. While humans may matter a lot more for instrumental reasons related to the trajectory of the far future, in terms of pure morally relevant amount of sentience, insects may dominate on Earth at the moment.”

— Brian Tomasik, This guy thinks killing video game characters is immoral (Dylan Matthews, Vox, April 23, 2014)
“[I]f all sentient beings have equal moral status and insects are sentient, it would seem that we would be obliged to take insects quite seriously indeed. This is highly counterintuitive. Moreover, if all who have moral status have it equally, then we should right now be very invested in the question of whether insects are sentient. If they are, then we are routinely harming trillions of beings with full, equal moral status – a very serious matter. The commonsense reaction that we need not be so concerned with the question of whether insects are sentient suggests that, if they are, their moral status is less than ours, implying that not all who have moral status have it equally.”

— David DeGrazia, Moral Status As a Matter of Degree?
“[C]onsider what we would think if we were the tiny ones. Would we be okay with giants squishing us because they couldn’t bother to watch where they were stepping? [S]tuart Russell and Peter Norvig actually raise this point in Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach: “We can’t just give a program a static utility function, because circumstances, and our desired responses to circumstances, change over time. For example, if technology had allowed us to design a super-powerful AI agent in 1800 and endow it with the prevailing morals of the time, it would be fighting today to reestablish slavery and abolish women’s right to vote. On the other hand, if we build an AI agent today and tell it how to evolve its utility function, how can we assure that it won’t read that “Humans think it is moral to kill annoying insects, in part because insect brains are so primitive. But human brains are primitive compared to my powers, so it must be moral for me to kill humans.”””

— Brian Tomasik, Is Brain Size Morally Relevant? (Essays on Reducing Suffering)
“A person’s a person, no matter how small.”

— Dr. Seuss
“The bias against small beings seems closely related to another bias we have, namely the bias to believe what is most convenient. For it would no doubt be much more convenient if small beings such as insects are not sentient. If they are, and if they can feel pain, the world suddenly becomes very complex and messy, and not least full of suffering beyond what we have imagined thus far. Therefore, it seems reasonable to suspect that our reasoning is somewhat motivated to jump to the conclusion that insects are not sentient.”

— Magnus Vinding, Speciesism: Why It Is Wrong, And The Implications of Rejecting It (2015)
“Whichever way man may look upon the earth, he is oppressed with the suffering incident to life. It would almost seem as though the earth had been created with malignity and hatred. If we look at what we are pleased to call the lower animals, we behold a universal carnage. We speak of the seemingly peaceful woods, but we need only look beneath the surface to be horrified by the misery of that underworld. Hidden in the grass and watching for its prey is the crawling snake which swiftly darts upon the toad or mouse and gradually swallows it alive; the hapless animal is crushed by the jaws and covered with slime, to be slowly digested in furnishing a meal. The snake knows nothing about sin or pain inflicted upon another; he automatically grabs insects and mice and frogs to preserve his life. The spider carefully weaves his web to catch the unwary fly, winds him into the fatal net until paralyzed and helpless, then drinks his blood and leaves him an empty shell. The hawk swoops down and snatches a chicken and carries it to its nest to feed its young. The wolf pounces on the lamb and tears it to shreds. The cat watches at the hole of the mouse until the mouse cautiously comes out, then with seeming fiendish glee he plays with it until tired of the game, then crunches it to death in his jaws. The beasts of the jungle roam by day and night to find their prey; the lion is endowed with strength of limb and fang to destroy and devour almost any animal that it can surprise or overtake. There is no place in the woods or air or sea where all life is not a carnage of death in terror and agony. Each animal is a hunter, and in turn is hunted, by day and night. No landscape is so beautiful or day so balmy but the cry of suffering and sacrifice rends the air. When night settles down over the earth the slaughter is not abated. Some creatures see best at night, and the outcry of the dying and terrified is always on the wind. Almost all animals meet death by violence and through the most agonizing pain. With the whole animal creation there is nothing like a peaceful death. Nowhere in nature is there the slightest evidence of kindness, of consideration, or a feeling for the suffering and the weak, except in the narrow circle of brief family life.”

— Clarence Darrow
One scene of blood, one mighty tomb display!

From Hunger’s arm the shafts of Death are hurl’d,

And one great Slaughter-house the warring world!”

— Erasmus Darwin (Charles Darwin’s grandfather), The Temple of Nature (1803)
“The wolf, escorted by his milk-drawn dam,

Unknown to mercy, tears the guiltless lamb;

The towering eagle, darting from above,

Unfeeling rends the inoffensive dove;

The lamb and dove on living nature feed,

Crop the young herb, or crush the embryon seed.

Nor spares the loud owl in her dusky flight,

Smit with sweet notes, the minstrel of the night;

Nor spares, enamour’d of his radiant form,

The hungry nightingale the glowing worm;

Who with bright lamp alarms the midnight hour,

Climbs the green stem, and slays the sleeping flower.

Fell Oestrus buries in her rapid course

Her countless brood in stag, or bull, or horse;

Whose hungry larva eats its living way,

Hatch’d by the warmth, and issues into day.

The wing’d Ichneumon for her embryon young

Gores with sharp horn the caterpillar throng.

The cruel larva mines its silky course,

And tears the vitals of its fostering nurse.

While fierce Libellula with jaws of steel

Ingulfs an insect-province at a meal;

Contending bee-swarms rise on rustling wings,

And slay their thousands with envenom’d stings.

Yes! smiling Flora drives her armed car

Through the thick ranks of vegetable war;

Herb, shrub, and tree, with strong emotions rise

For light and air, and battle in the skies;

Whose roots diverging with opposing toil

Contend below for moisture and for soil;

Round the tall Elm the flattering Ivies bend,

And strangle, as they clasp, their struggling friend;

Envenom’d dews from Mancinella flow,

And scald with caustic touch the tribes below;

Dense shadowy leaves on stems aspiring borne

With blight and mildew thin the realms of corn;

And insect hordes with restless tooth devour

The unfolded bud, and pierce the ravell’d flower.

In ocean’s pearly haunts, the waves beneath

Sits the grim monarch of insatiate Death;

The shark rapacious with descending blow

Darts on the scaly brood, that swims below;

The crawling crocodiles, beneath that move,

Arrest with rising jaw the tribes above;

With monstrous gape sepulchral whales devour

Shoals at a gulp, a million in an hour.

—Air, earth, and ocean, to astonish’d day
“Homer, here in St. Cloud’s I have been given the opportunity of playing God – or leaving practically everything up to chance. Men and women of conscience should seize those moments when it’s possible to play God. There won’t be many.”

— Dr. Larch, Cider House Rules
“As long as one poor cockroach feels the pangs of unrequited love, this world is not a moral world.”

— William James
“We’re Nature’s conscience. One day, we’ll finally make it listen and realise what a monster it’s been all along.”

— Catherine G. Evans
“A quick test of the assertion that enjoyment outweighs pain in this world, or that they are at any rate balanced, would be to compare the feelings of an animal engaged in eating another with those of the animal being eaten.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer, On the Sufferings of the World
“Had Mother Nature been a real parent, she would have been in jail for child abuse and murder.”

— Nick Bostrom, In Defense of Posthuman Dignity (2005)
“The ways in which creatures in nature die are typically violent: predation, starvation, disease, parasitism, cold. The dying animal in the wild does not understand the vast ocean of misery into which it and billions of other animals are born only to drown. If the wild animal understood the conditions into which it is born, what would it think? It might reasonably prefer to be raised on a farm, where the chances of survival for a year or more would be good, and to escape from the wild, where they are negligible. Either way, the animal will be eaten: few die of old age. The path from birth to slaughter, however, is often longer and less painful in the barnyard than in the woods. Comparisons, sad as they are, must be made to recognize where a great opportunity lies to prevent or mitigate suffering. The misery of animals in nature – which humans can do much to relieve – makes every other form of suffering pale in comparison. Mother Nature is so cruel to her children she makes Frank Perdue look like a saint.”

— Marc Sagoff, Animal Liberation and Environmental Ethics: Bad Marriage, Quick Divorce (1984), p. 303
“[Wild animals] have to struggle to survive on a daily basis, from finding food and water to another individual to mate with. They don’t have the right to comfort, stability, or good health. [B]y the standards our governments have set, the life of a wild animal is cruelty.”

— Christie Wilcox
“[W]hile many animals appear to endure such conditions rather calmly, this doesn’t necessarily mean they aren’t suffering. Sick and injured members of a prey species are the easiest to catch, so predators deliberately target these individuals. As a consequence, those prey that appear sick or injured will be the ones killed most often. Thus, evolutionary pressure pushes prey species to avoid drawing attention to their suffering.”

— Brian Tomasik, The Importance of Wild-Animal Suffering
“The blind forces of evolution do not optimize for happiness. The pain endured by a fish afflicted with parasites or a rat swallowed alive by a snake is no more tolerable than the “natural” suffering of humans due to malaria, cancer, or starvation. Both deserve our attention.”

— Brian Tomasik
“The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation. During the minute it takes me to compose this sentence, thousands of animals are being eaten alive; others are running for their lives, whimpering with fear; others are being slowly devoured from within by rasping parasites; thousands of all kinds are dying of starvation, thirst and disease. [T]he universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.”

— Richard Dawkins, River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life, Chapter: God’s utility function (1995)
“Intense suffering is a regular feature of life in the wild that demands, perhaps not quick-fix intervention, but at least long-term research into the welfare of wild animals and technologies that might one day allow humans to improve it.”

— Brian Tomasik, The Importance of Wild-Animal Suffering
“Our job now is to prepare the ground for forthcoming generations to take action where we may be currently unable to act.”

— Oscar Horta, Disvalue in Nature and Intervention (2010)
“In sober truth, nearly all the things which men are hanged or imprisoned for doing to one another, are nature’s every day performances. [T]he phrases which ascribe perfection to the course of nature can only be considered as the exaggerations of poetic or devotional feeling, not intended to stand the test of a sober examination. No one, either religious or irreligious, believes that the hurtful agencies of nature, considered as a whole, promote good purposes, in any other way than by inciting human rational creatures to rise up and struggle against them.”

— John Stuart Mill, “On Nature”
“[T]o anyone who has accepts a modern scientific view of our origins, the problem is insoluble, for evolutionary theory breaks the link between what is natural and what is good. Nature, understood in evolutionary terms, carries no moral value.”

— Peter Singer, A Reply tou Martha Nussbaum (2002)
“The moralistic fallacy is that what is good is found in nature. It lies behind the bad science in nature-documentary voiceovers: lions are mercy-killers of the weak and sick, mice feel no pain when cats eat them, dung beetles recycle dung to benefit the ecosystem and so on.”

— Steven Pinker
“We must continually remind ourselves that there is a difference between what is natural and what is good. Nothing is more “natural” than being mauled and eaten by a bear.”

— Sam Harris
“It’s no mystery why organisms sometimes harm one another. Evolution has no conscience, and if one creature hurts another to benefit itself, such as by eating, parasitizing, intimidating, or cuckolding it, its descendants will come to predominate, complete with those nasty habits. All this is familiar from the vernacular sense of “Darwinian” as a synonym for “ruthless” and from Tennyson’s depiction of nature as red in tooth and claw.”

— Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (2002), Chapter 14: The Many Roots of Our Suffering, p. 242
“Not long ago I was sleeping in a cabin in the woods and was awoken in the middle of the night by the sounds of a struggle between two animals. Cries of terror and extreme agony rent the night, intermingled with the sounds of jaws snapping bones and flesh being torn from limbs. One animal was being savagely attacked, killed and then devoured by another. [I]t seems to me that the horror I experienced on that dark night in the woods was a veridical insight. What I experienced was a brief and terrifying glimpse into the ultimately evil dimension of a godless world.”

— Quentin Smith, An Atheological Argument from Evil Natural Laws (1991)
“Many people have a romanticized view of wild animals; they think wild animals are like Spartan warriors who do not feel pain, or, at least, do not feel it to the extent that humans and domesticated animals do. But this is simply untrue. [T]hey endure it not because it’s easy for them but because they have no choice. [A]ll the reasons to believe domesticated animals are conscious also apply to many wild animals.”

— Animal Ethics, Wild Animal Suffering
“Nature is neither kind nor unkind. She is neither against suffering nor for it. Nature is not interested in suffering one way or the other unless it affects the survival of DNA. It is easy to imagine a gene that, say, tranquilizes gazelles when they are about to suffer a killing bite. Would such a gene be favored by natural selection?

Not unless the act of tranquilizing a gazelle improved that gene’s chances of being propagated into future generations. It is hard to see why this should be so, and we may therefore guess that gazelles suffer horrible pain and fear when they are pursued to the death – as many of them eventually are. The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation. During the minute that it takes me to compose this sentence, thousands of animals are being eaten alive, many others are running for their lives, whimpering with fear, others are being slowly devoured from within by rasping parasites, thousands of all kinds are dying of starvation, thirst and disease.”

— Richard Dawkins, River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life, Chapter: God’s utility function (1995)
“The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation. During the minute that it takes me to compose this sentence, thousands of animals are being eaten alive, many others are running for their lives, whimpering with fear, others are slowly being devoured from within by rasping parasites, thousands of all kinds are dying of starvation, thirst, and disease. It must be so. If there ever is a time of plenty, this very fact will automatically lead to an increase in the population until the natural state of starvation and misery is restored. In a universe of electrons and selfish genes, blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won’t find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.”

— Richard Dawkins, River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life, Chapter: God’s utility function (1995)
“The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation. During the minute it takes me to compose this sentence, thousands of animals are being eaten alive; others are running for their lives, whimpering with fear; others are being slowly devoured from within by rasping parasites; thousands of all kinds are dying of starvation, thirst and disease.”

— Richard Dawkins, River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life, Chapter: God’s utility function (1995)
“If we already lived in a cruelty-free world, the notion of re-introducing suffering, exploitation and creatures eating each other would seem not so much frightful as unimaginable – no more seriously conceivable than reverting to surgery without anaesthesia today.”

— David Pearce, Reprogramming Predators
“The ethic of species conservation is indeed a bizarre one. It is a view that holds the conservation of populations of certain kinds of beings to be more important than the well-being of the individuals in these populations. It essentially amounts to the reduction of non-human individuals to being mere means to the end of keeping some kind of status quo in nature. There are two obvious problems with this view, the first being that there is no such thing as a status quo in nature in the first place. The “natural state” of nature that we are asked to conserve was never a “conservational” one in the first place, and least of all at the level of species, since 99.9 percent of all species that have ever lived on Earth are now extinct. Different species of life have arisen and disappeared constantly. This has been the natural state of things for the entire history of life, which implies that, ironically, our effort to conserve nature — which usually means nature as it is right now, or perhaps a few decades or centuries ago — is in some sense a most unnatural one.

The second and even bigger problem with the ethic of species conservation is that it is starkly unethical and speciesist, which should be obvious if we again shift our focus to humans. For in the case of humans, we would never be tempted to spend resources to try to conserve certain kinds of people — e.g. a certain race of humans — as doing so clearly would amount to a failure to see other humans as ends in themselves, and a failure to understand the core aim of ethics. For what matters is sentient individuals and their well-being, not the preservation of certain kinds of individuals. This is all plain common ethical sense when it comes to humans, of course, yet when it comes to non-human beings, we have turned a profoundly speciesist ethic into unquestioned, and almost universally praised, (im)moral dogma, an ethic that overlooks individuals, and which takes the worst kind of instrumental view of non-human animals.

Thus, the rejection of speciesism clearly requires that we abandon the ethic of species conservation and realize that it is no more defensible to strive to conserve species of non-human kind than it is to conserve human races — that conservation of kinds of individuals, whether human or non-human, simply is not the aim of any sane ethical stance. And it is indeed bizarre that we seem to show deep concern for the existence of some beings, for instance orangutans and panda bears, just because they belong to a threatened species, while we at the same time directly support the exploitation and suffering of other beings, such as chickens and fish, just because they belong to another species. Our speciesism could hardly be clearer. A speciesism that the ethic of species conservation not only fails to question, but which it actively reinforces and perpetuates.”

— Magnus Vinding, Speciesism: Why It Is Wrong and the Implications of Rejecting It (2015)
Magnus Vinding: “I think [nature conservation is] really just bizarre. It’s as though nature is being treated as some collector’s object. They seem especially concerned about rare species and about how “we can’t lose them”. So is it for your [own] sake or is it for their sake? It’s very bizarre to me…”

Brian Tomasik: “Yeah, it seems an extension of human’s general tendency to want to preserve rare things. There are also antique collectors and people who care about the first edition or the Mona Lisa, religious artifacts or was this object touched by a saint in the past. So there are a lot of ways in which humans have these special attachments to inanimate or at least non-conscious objects. So what you described in particular is probably an extension of that.”

— transcribed from Magnus Vinding and Brian Tomasik on insects and wild-animal suffering
“Many believers in animal rights and the relevance of animal welfare do not critically examine their basic assumptions. [T]ypically these individuals hold two conflicting views. The first view is that animal welfare counts, and that people should treat animals as decently as possible. The second view is a presumption of human non-interference with nature, as much as possible. [T]he two views are less compatible than is commonly supposed. If we care about the welfare and rights of individual animals, we may be led to interfere with nature whenever the costs of doing so are sufficiently low.”

— Tyler Cowen, Policing Nature (2003)
“Interestingly, it is not even clear that animal liberationists are motivated by ultimate concern about welfare. Consider animals in the wild, as Ng also mentions. Theirs may not be happy lives. Certainly Darwin was sufficiently persuaded by his conception of evolution that no good God could have created the scheme of things he, Darwin, discerned in nature. Perhaps animals much prefer living in domestic conditions. But this seems beside the point to hard-core animal liberationists.”

— Joel Marks, End-state welfarism (Animal Sentience, 2016)
“Humans are prone to status quo bias. So let’s do a thought-experiment. Imagine we stumble across an advanced civilisation that has abolished predation, disease, famine, and all the horrors of primitive Darwinian life. The descendants of archaic lifeforms flourish unmolested in their wildlife parks – free living but not “wild”. Should we urge scrapping their regime of compassionate stewardship of the living world – and a return to asphyxiation, disembowelling and being eaten alive? Or is a happy biosphere best conserved intact?”

— David Pearce, Quora reply to “Should humans wipe out all carnivorous animals so the succeeding generations of herbivores can live in peace?” (2015)
“Let us understand, once for all, that the ethical progress of society depends, not on imitating the cosmic process, still less in running away from it, but in combating it.”

— Thomas Henry Huxley, Evolution and Ethics: And Other Essays
“George Williams, the revered evolutionary biologist, describes the natural world as “grossly immoral.” Having no foresight or compassion, natural selection “can honestly be described as a process for maximizing short-sighted selfishness.” On top of all the miseries inflicted by predators and parasites, the members of a species show no pity to their own kind. Infanticide, siblicide, and rape can be observed in many kinds of animals; infidelity is common even in so-called pair-bonded species; cannibalism can be expected in all species that are not strict vegetarians; death from fighting is more common in most animal species than it is in the most violent American cities. Commenting on how biologists used to describe the killing of starving deer by mountain lions as an act of mercy, Williams wrote: “The simple facts are that both predation and starvation are painful prospects for deer, and that the lion’s lot is no more enviable. Perhaps biology would have been able to mature more rapidly in a culture not dominated by Judeo-Christian theology and the Romantic tradition. It might have been well served by the First Holy Truth from [Buddha’s] Sermon at Benares: “Birth is painful, old age is painful, sickness is painful, death is painful…”” As soon as we recognize that there is nothing morally commendable about the products of evolution, we can describe human psychology honestly, without the fear that identifying a “natural” trait is the same as condoning it. As Katharine Hepburn says to Humphrey Bogart in The African Queen, “Nature, Mr. Allnut, is what we are put in this world to rise above.””

— Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate (2002): Chapter 9: The Fear of Imperfectibility, p. 163.
“It seems to me that many theories of the universe may be dismissed at once, not as too good, but as too cosy, to be true. One feels sure that they could have arisen only among people living a peculiarly sheltered life at a peculiarly favourable period of the world’s history. No theory need be seriously considered unless it recognises that the world has always been for most [humans] and all animals other than domestic pets a scene of desperate struggle in which great evils are suffered and inflicted.”

— C. D. Broad
“All animals are somebody – someone with a life of their own. Behind those eyes is a story, the story of their life in their world as they experience it.”

— Tom Regan
“It is often assumed that wild animals live in a kind of natural paradise and that it is only the appearance and intervention of human agencies that bring about suffering. This essentially Rousseauian view is at odds with the wealth of information derived from field studies of animal populations. Scarcity of food and water, predation, disease and intraspecific aggression are some of the factors which have been identified as normal parts of a wild environment which cause suffering in wild animals on a regular basis.”

— UCLA Office for the Protection of Research Subjects, UCLA Animal Care and Use Training Manual.
“Many humans look at nature from an aesthetic perspective and think in terms of biodiversity and the health of ecosystems, but forget that the animals that inhabit these ecosystems are individuals and have their own needs. Disease, starvation, predation, ostracism, and sexual frustration are endemic in so-called healthy ecosystems. The great taboo in the animal rights movement is that most suffering is due to natural causes. Any proposal for remedying this situation is bound to sound utopian, but my dream is that one day the sun will rise on Earth and all sentient creatures will greet the new day with joy.”

— Nick Bostrom, Golden (2004)
“Getting rid of predation isn’t a matter of moralising. A python who kills a small human child isn’t morally blameworthy. Nor is a lion who hunts and kills a terrified zebra. In both cases, the victim suffers horribly. But the predator lacks the empathetic and mind-reading skills needed to understand the implications of what s/he is doing. Some humans still display a similar deficit. From the perspective of the victim, the moral status or (lack of) guilty intent of a human or nonhuman predator is irrelevant. Either way, to stand by and watch the snake asphyxiate a child would be almost as morally abhorrent as to kill the child yourself. So why turn this principle on its head with beings of comparable sentience to human infants and toddlers? With power comes complicity.”

— David Pearce, The Radical Plan To Phase Out Earth’s Predatory Species (io9, Jul 30, 2014)
“The practical reality is that existing cost-benefit analyses of animal welfare policies are speciesist: they only explicitly consider the benefits and costs of the policy to people.”

— Jayson Lusk, Bailey Norwood, Animal Welfare Economics (2011), p. 468
“A strong duty to relieve suffering that does not discriminate between species would require radical changes in the ways that we relate to other animals. It would, for example, require an end to the practice of factory farming, in which billions of animals are annually subjected to extreme suffering in order to supply humans with meat and other products at the lowest possible cost. It would also raise difficult questions about the practice of experimenting on animals to obtain medical benefits for humans. These cases, much discussed in the literature on animal ethics, involve suffering that is inflicted by human beings. But a species-blind duty to relieve suffering would also make it a prima facie requirement to save animals from suffering brought upon them by natural conditions and other animals. That seems right to me.”

— Jamie Mayerfeld, Suffering and Moral Responsibility (2002), p. 117
“Humans already massively “interfere” with nature in countless ways ranging from uncontrolled habitat-destruction to captive breeding programs for big cats to “rewilding”.”

— David Pearce, The Radical Plan To Phase Out Earth’s Predatory Species (io9, Jul 30, 2014)
“When our interests or the interests of those we care for will be hurt, we do not recognize a moral obligation to “let nature take its course,” but when we do not want to be bothered with an obligation, “that’s just the way the world works” provides a handy excuse.”

— Stephen Sapontzis, Predation (1984), p. 29
“Suffering is suffering, and deprivation of happiness is deprivation of happiness, regardless of the being who is suffering or the source of the suffering. This is the main antispeciesist claim, and it can be applied not only when we consider the interests of humans versus those of nonhumans, but also when we consider the interests of different nonhuman animals.

Opposition to speciesism doesn’t only mean rejecting human disregard for other animals. Speciesism is the discrimination against those who don’t belong to a certain species. So we can be speciesist if we discriminate against some nonhuman animals to favor others, such as accepting worse treatment of pigs than dogs. Antispeciesism thus implies that we must reject the favoring of some nonhuman animals over others for unjustified reasons. This includes rejecting the favoring of domesticated animals over those living in the wild.”

— Animal Ethics, Wild Animal Suffering
“[W]e, [antispeciesist consequentialists], see you as violating rights if you don’t even want to try to do something about all the suffering that animals have to endure in nature. If animals have a right to live without the interference of human predators, then why don’t they have a right to live without the interference of non-human predators too? Non-human hunters often let their victims suffer more than human hunters. So why are you only concerned with human predators? That’s speciesism. If we try to end predation (and starvation and disease, which is even more important) in nature, that will result in a smaller total number of rights violations and will therefore be the lesser evil.”

— Adriano Mannino
“[I]f humans were obligate carnivores, we should get rid of their carnivorous genes too. It would be immoral not to do so because by staying carnivorous (or by having a carnivorous instead of a herbivorous child) one would cause the suffering and death of hundreds of non-human animals so that one single human animal can live. That cannot be right.”

— Adriano Mannino
“[I]t would be speciesist to accord greater weight to the interests of an individual just because it’s the last one of a certain species group. It doesn’t matter how many groups there are in the world. Groups are not conscious beings, they don’t have interests. Individuals do. [W]hat’s relevant is that all individuals that do exist now and that will exist in the future be able to live good lives. We cannot change what happened in the past. We can and should learn from it.”

— Adriano Mannino
“[T]he term ‘nonhuman’ grates on me, since it lumps millions of species together by an absence, as if they were missing something. Poor things, they are nonhuman! When students embrace this jargon in their writing, I cannot resist sarcastic corrections in the margin saying that for completeness’s sake, they should add that the animals they are talking about are also nonpenguin, nonhyena, and a whole lot more.”

— Frans de Waal, “Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?
“Carnivorous predators keep populations of herbivores in check. Plasmodium-carrying species of the Anopheles mosquito keep human populations in check. In each case, a valuable ecological role is achieved at the price of immense suffering and the loss of hundreds of millions of lives.”

— David Pearce, The Radical Plan To Phase Out Earth’s Predatory Species (io9, Jul 30, 2014)
“Predators dictate that their prey should live in fear and die in agony. Do you think predators are “superior” to prey. If not, they don’t have that right you’re talking about either, and it will be the lesser rights violation to intervene. [W]hichever decision we will make, it will have the impact of telling the animals how they should live. We’ll either positively affirm that prey animals should have to suffer from predation until the end of the world, even though we could change that, or we’ll choose the other option. Both will be a judgement with significant consequences on the lives of non-human animals.”

— Lukas Gloor
“What right have humans to impose our values on members of another race or species? The charge is seductive but misplaced. There is no anthropomorphism here, no imposition of human values on alien minds. Human and nonhuman animals are alike in an ethically critical respect. The pleasure-pain axis is universal to sentient life. No sentient being wants to be harmed – to be asphyxiated, dismembered, or eaten alive. The wishes of a terrified toddler or a fleeing zebra to flourish unmolested are not open to doubt even in the absence of the verbal capacity to say so.”

— David Pearce, The Radical Plan To Phase Out Earth’s Predatory Species (io9, Jul 30, 2014)