Sentientism

Sentientism tacitly assumes the humanist value theory, and extends moral concern to all sentient beings. Humanists are usually more exclusive. They either limit moral concern to humans, or set humans above other sentient beings as more worthy of care and concern. Sentientists reject this double standard as contrived and arbitrary. Why is a dog or a monkey less worthy of altruism than a human being? If you view pain and pleasure as the ultimate source of value, it is quite natural to extend moral concern to all beings who experience pain and pleasure. So, the sentientist expands the moral circle to include all sentient beings.

The sentientist moral circle is very big. It would certainly include all mammals. It would probably also include birds, reptiles, amphibians and fish. The smarter mollusks, such as squid and octopus, would probably also qualify. Maybe even insects and crustaceans have some glimmer of sentience. One problem with sentientism is that we don’t know the exact boundaries of the moral circle.

Another problem is that altruism becomes more difficult as the circle expands. It is easy to be altruistic toward a single individual (although you might not want to). It is harder to be altruistic toward an entire society, a species or all sentient beings.

Is it altruistic to feed birds in your backyard? By doing so, you help some birds, but those birds will compete with other birds for nesting locations, mates, natural food, etc. Ultimately, the population is limited by competition for resources. If you add more resources, you will make life easier for some birds now, but the population will grow until life is just as hard as it was before. It is easy to be altruistic toward one bird, but almost impossible to be altruistic toward birds in general.

Life is zero-sum at the margins: populations expand until competition limits growth. Due to the nature of life, it is almost impossible to be altruistic toward sentient beings in general. Helping one will almost always harm another.

I have just been talking about energetic altruism, which is a transfer of work or resources. But the sentientists are concerned with hedonic utility, not energetic utility. Is hedonic utility also zero-sum at the margins?

I believe that hedonic utility is zero-sum at the individual level. Pain and pleasure balance out, so both hedonism and hedonic altruism are futile. (See Motivation.) However, most people believe that it is possible to increase or decrease hedonic utility for an individual. Even if that were true, it would still be almost impossible to increase the aggregate hedonic utility of all sentient beings, due to the zero-sum nature of life.

Some sentientists want to go deeper. David Pearce wants to redesign sentience itself, to increase net hedonic utility. He wants to change the mechanism that generates sentient experiences. This is philosophically interesting in multiple ways. It makes the hedonism assumption explicit. It identifies the mechanism that, according to hedonism, is the ultimate source of value. Then it proposes modifying that mechanism. Most proponents of hedonism focus on changing the material conditions of life, not on directly changing the brain, even though they believe that value resides in brain states. I consider a thought experiment along those lines in Hedonic Utilitarianism.

Ethical veganism is presumed by many to follow from sentientism. An ethical vegan believes that it is unethical to consume animal products. (Some vegans have other motives, such as health or aesthetic preferences.)

Ethical vegans are opposed to farming animals for meat or other products. Their opposition to farming is based mainly on the suffering of farm animals. They believe that the lives of farm animals have net negative value: that the animals experience more pain than pleasure, due to the circumstances of their lives. Most ethical vegans believe that farm animals are better off not being born. Yet, few would say the same about a wild animal, let alone a human being.

Is it biologically realistic that farm animals suffer more than wild animals? Farm animals live in enclosed spaces and are often denied the full range of behaviors that wild animals have. On the other hand, farm animals are fed on a regular basis, and protected from parasites and predators to a greater extent than wild animals. Most farm animals die young in a slaughterhouse. Most wild animals die young from predation, disease or hunger. It is far from obvious that farm animals have a worse life than wild animals, in terms of having more bad experiences.

I believe that pain and pleasure balance out. But even with ordinary assumptions about the attainability of happiness, it is hard to argue that wild animals are happier, on average, than farm animals.

Nature is brutal. Most living beings are losers, not winners. The majority die young without reproducing. That is just how life works. Life is the product of evolution, and evolution is based on excess reproduction. All life forms have the capacity to generate more offspring than would be necessary to replace the population. Excess reproduction causes competition. Life is a struggle. The balance of nature is maintained by the perpetual culling of organisms before they can reproduce. The winners pass on their genes, but they too die in the end.

For sentient beings, both winners and losers experience pain. Pain is a necessary byproduct of motivation, which drives action.

Most sentientists believe that some lives are more painful than pleasant, and thus not worth living. If so, what conditions are necessary to tip the balance from negative to positive? What lives are worth living?