Wild Animal Ethics

The Moral and Political Problem of Wild Animal Suffering

Kyle Johannsen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781000197747
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy

Though many ethicists have the intuition that we should leave nature alone, Kyle Johannsen argues that we have a duty to research safe ways of providing large-scale assistance to wild animals. Using concepts from moral and political philosophy to analyze the issue of wild animal suffering (WAS), Johannsen explores how a collective, institutional obligation to assist wild animals should be understood. He claims that with enough research, genetic editing may one day give us the power to safely intervene without perpetually interfering with wild animals' liberties.

Questions addressed include:

• In what way is nature valuable and is intervention compatible with that value?
• Is intervention a requirement of justice?
• What are the implications of WAS for animal rights advocacy? What types of intervention are promising?

Expertly moving the debate about human relations with wild animals beyond its traditional confines, Wild Animal Ethics is essential reading for students and scholars of political philosophy and political theory studying animal ethics, environmental ethics, and environmental philosophy.

1

Introduction

1.1 The Subject of This Book

In recent years, animal rights theorists have increasingly come to appreciate the extent to which wild animals fail to live flourishing lives. Though we’ve always known that the wild is a nasty place where predators lethally attack prey, only recently have most animal rights theorists come to realize that the majority of wild animals fail to flourish. In fact, what we know about wild animal reproduction suggests that the majority of sentient beings born into the world may not even live lives worth living. After all, only some wild animals (K-strategists) protect their genes by restricting reproduction to a small number of cared-for offspring. Many animals protect their genes by producing large numbers of uncared-for offspring. This evolutionary reproductive strategy, normally referred to as the r-strategy,¹ is used by many lizards, amphibians, fish, and small mammals. Instead of restricting reproduction and providing intensive care, r-strategists produce a large quantity of offspring, the majority of whom die from disease, starvation, injury, exposure, or predation shortly after birth. In some cases, the death that an r-strategist infant experiences is quick, albeit painful, for example, being quickly eaten by a predator. In other cases, it can be slow and grueling (dying from starvation or exposure takes a while). And even when their death happens quickly, it typically occurs before they’ve had the opportunity to become comfortable with or competent to navigate their environment. In other words, your typical r-strategist infant crawls around uncomfortably for a short while, after which it dies either a quick and painful death, or a slow and painful death. Only a very small number of r-strategist offspring live long enough to reach a point in their lives where they’re competent to manage the dangers of their environment and able to reproduce.²

For example, consider the results of a population study concerning Podarcis muralis: the common wall lizard.³ The population in the study (which was located in a cemetery in France) started at a total of 570 members (570 eggs). Of those 570, 194 lived to one year of age, 48 reached their second year of life, 25 made it to year three, and only 12 reached year four. Some of the eggs did not hatch at all, so a portion of the ‘mortality’ represented by the drop from 570 to 194 did not involve the death of sentient beings. Still, even if we (implausibly) assume that the initial drop in population size is entirely attributable to unhatched eggs; most of these wall lizards experienced an abysmal fate. Only 48 of 194 lizards reached the age of sexual maturity (year 2): that’s roughly 25% of the population.⁴ Considering that a healthy, well-nourished wall lizard can live for up to 10 years, premature death was apparently the norm for this population.⁵

The wall lizards in the above study are not idiosyncratic. Many amphibians and lizards have similar life histories. High early-life mortality rates are normal for crocodilians, turtles, and amphibians that develop indirectly (have a larval stage in their life history). In fact, species in these groups typically experience an early-life death rate of greater than 90%.⁶

In combination, the fact that many wild animal species are r-strategist, that r-strategists (by definition) have far higher reproduction rates than K-strategists, and that most r-strategist young live short painful lives, is concerning. In light of these facts, I believe the below argument is sound.

Premise 1: A life that’s filled with suffering and ends shortly after birth is not a flourishing one, and it may not be worth living.

Premise 2: Most r-strategists live lives that are filled with suffering and end shortly after birth.

Premise 3: Most sentient individuals born into the world are r-strategists.

Conclusion: Most sentient individuals born into the world do not live flourishing lives, and their lives may not be worth living.⁷

It’s not unreasonable for one to initially react to the above argument with a sense of depressed resignation. The word’s a terrible place for most sentient beings, it seems, but is there anything we can safely do about it? Isn’t it too ecologically risky to try and help wild animals? In this book, I use concepts from moral and political philosophy to analyze the problem of wild animal suffering (WAS). Though many animal ethicists have the intuition that the best course of action is to leave wild animals alone,⁸ I argue that a cautious, collective commitment to intervention is morally required. With enough research, it will one day be feasible for us to safely conduct large-scale, humanitarian interventions in nature. Considering how enormous the amount of WAS appears to be, I argue that we have a collective obligation to fund that research.

You may be surprised to learn that an increasingly large number of people think there are things we both can and morally ought to do about WAS.⁹ Some interventions, specifically large-scale ones, will require research before they can be conducted safely and effectively, but we have strong moral reasons to fund that research. In light of the emergence of CRISPR (a new form of gene editing),¹⁰ one especially promising line of research, in my view, is gene editing. Using a technique called ‘gene drive,’ we could disperse beneficial, genetically engineered traits through wild animal populations.¹¹

1.2 Effective Altruism and Wild Animal Suffering

Some of those who endorse humanitarian intervention in nature, myself included, are professional moral philosophers with an interest in animal ethics. It’s noteworthy, however, that a large number of those who endorse intervention are members of the effective altruism movement.¹² We should pause for a moment and reflect on why effective altruists are attracted to intervention in nature, as doing so will shed light on why WAS is such a pressing problem.

Effective altruism is the idea that beneficence ought to be exercised rationally.¹³ It maintains that when selecting a cause to support, as well as when choosing from among the organizations devoted to that cause, one should be careful to ensure that the choice one makes is efficient. Put another way, effective altruists maintain that we should try to ensure that each additional unit of resources we devote to beneficence (whether it be money or labor) produces the most good it feasibly can. All too often well-intentioned people select a cause because it’s close to their hearts, and many people fail to do the research needed to determine whether a given organization is effectively achieving its goals (or whether it’s sufficiently transparent for its effectiveness to be measured, for that matter). Effective altruists maintain that the standards of effectiveness we apply to self-interested behavior should also be applied to beneficent behavior, for example, just as we would disapprovingly say that someone behaves imprudently if they buy overpriced goods when less expensive, higher quality alternatives are available, so too should we disapprovingly say that someone who limits their support to low-priority cause areas, or who donates to ineffective organizations, isn’t truly being beneficent. True beneficence requires a commitment to actually doing good, not just to feeling good about one’s self.

As I mentioned above, a central issue for effective altruists is cause selection. If we want our beneficent actions to produce the most good possible, which cause or causes should we pursue? To answer this question, effective altruists rely on a few main criteria, two of which are scale and neglectedness. Scale refers, more or less, to the size of the problem a particular cause is addressing. Considerations relevant to scale include the number of individuals affected by a problem, as well as the amount of suffering those individuals experience because of it.¹⁴ Neglectedness refers to the extent to which a cause is failing to be pursued or has failed to attract interested advocates. If a worthy cause is currently being neglected relative to other worthy causes, this suggests that it’s especially worth one’s efforts. This is because the marginal utility of working on a cause typically decreases the more people work on it, that is, each additional unit of resources devoted to a cause will have a somewhat smaller impact than the previous unit.¹⁵ William MacAskill uses medical doctors to illustrate this idea. He notes that, at first glance, it might seem that one can do a tremendous amount of good by becoming a medical doctor. Doctors perform a variety of important interventions, including some that save lives and thus, the average value of what a doctor does is very high. Unless one works in a community suffering from a significant shortage of doctors, though, the marginal value of one more doctor will be considerably less than the average value of a doctor. This is because, in the absence of a significant shortage, there are already enough doctors to handle the more important work that an additional doctor would end up receiving. Thus, in the event that an additional doctor is not available, someone else will perform the necessary high priority procedures. To be fair, the absence of an additional doctor has some impact. It might, for example, mean that patients with relatively minor health problems will have to tolerate longer waiting times, as there will be fewer doctors available to tend to such problems. But the fact that there are enough medical resources available to ensure that high priority health problems are addressed entails that the marginal value of a doctor lies mostly in an increased capacity for addressing low-priority problems.¹⁶

Considerations of scale and neglectedness have been especially key in attracting effective altruists to the WAS problem.¹⁷ As I mentioned above, the fact that most individual wild animals born into the word are r-strate...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsements
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• 2 What’s So Good About Nature?
• 3 A Collective Obligation to Intervene
• 4 Assessing the Risks of Intervention
• 5 Editing Nature
• 6 Intervention and Animal Rights Advocacy
• Index