The shrimp welfare project

I love articles like this that challenge the status quo of morality. I find my self asking the question, "Would I rather save a billion shrimp or one human?" and I honestly think I'm siding on the human. I'm not saying that answer is "correct". It's always good to think about these things and the point the author makes about shrimp being a test of our morality because they're so different is a good one.

How about one million kittens or one human?

Where did the kittens come from?

If they were spawned into existence for this thought experiment, then the human, probably.

But if even one of those kittens were mine, entire cities could be leveled before I let anyone hurt my kitten.

The best way to save even more shrimps would be to campaign for and subsidize whaling. They are shrimp-mass-murdering machines. What's a few whales versus billions of shrimps?

You didn't read the article nor follow the argument, just jumped in. It's about suffering shrimps, not saving shrimps.

Do shrimp not suffer from being consumed by whales?

In comparison to having their eyeballs crushed but left alive, or slowly frozen to death?

Collectively we kill and eat around a billion rabbits a year, around 8 million in the US. They aren't kittens, but they do have a similar level of fluffy cuteness.

It's not quite "one million to one"; the meat from 1 million rabbits meets the caloric needs of around 2750 people for 1 year.

This brings up an interesting point, our view of morality is heavily skewed. If you made me choose between something bad happening to my partner or 10 random people, I would save my partner every time and I expect every normal person in the world to choose the same.

Well humans aren’t perfectly rational.

I wouldn’t think it moral to save my kitten over a random non-evil person, but I’d still do it.

In that case I actually ask "Who's the human?", and in about 80% of the time I'd pick the human.

It’s the trolley problem https://neal.fun/absurd-trolley-problems/

Still the human.

How about one million humans or one kitten?

Where is the cut-off point for you>?

Also, where did the human come from? Are they already on their deathbed, prolonged in this thought experiment for only a few fleeting moments? Were they themselves a murderer?

The trade off here is eliminating mutilation, going from Pain + Death to just Death, or in the case of the whales, going from Death to normal, beautiful shrimp Life. I don't really have any interest in doing shrimp quality of life math this morning but there's clearly something there.

It is a rational choice tho.

It wouldn't just hurt your partner, it would hurt you.

We know that following a "objective morality" the 10 people would be a better choice but it would hurt (indirectly) you.

None of that matters if my kitten is in danger!

You’re right. Maybe rational was the wrong word.

Humans aren’t perfectly objective.

I'm almost certain this organization is focused on farmed shrimp. https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/z79ycP5jCDks4LPxA/...

Thanks for the kind words! I agree lots of people would value a human more than any number of shrimp. Now, in the article, I'm talking about which is worse--extreme suffering for one human or extreme suffering for millions of shrimp. So then the question is: can the common sense verdict be defended? What about shrimp is it that makes it so that their pain is of negligible importance compared to humans? Sure they aren't smart, but being dumb doesn't seem to make your pain less bad (hurting babies and mentally disabled people is still very very bad).

You see this type of argument used against animal welfare all the time. At the end of the day, I dismiss them all as "we can't be perfect so we might as well do nothing".

As the article suggests, imagine you must live the lifetime of 1 million factory farmed shrimps. Would you then rather people quibble over whether we should hunt whales to extinction and ultimately do nothing (including never actually hunting whales to extinction to save you because they don't actually care about you), or would you rather they attempt to reduce your suffering in those millions of deaths as much as possible?

For babies and mentally disabled people, we absolutely know beyond any doubt that they are capable of feeling pain, intense, blood curdling pain.

I don't think we can say the same of shrimp.

That's why humane killing of cattle (with piston guns to the head) is widely practiced, but nothing of the sort for crabs, oysters, etc. We know for sure cattle feel pain so we do something about it.

One cat versus many humans. My spending on my cat makes the answer clear.

I did. It was a whole lot of nothing.

In any case, I just wanted to point out that if you cared about the welfare of damn arthropods, you're going nowhere really fast.

Consider this: the quickest, surest, most efficient way and ONLY way to reduce all suffering on earth to nothing forever and ever is a good ole nuclear holocaust.

I said nothing about caring about arthropods. Side note, I do though, they are immensely important to our well being, without them we're not around, with them, we have trillions of dollars of mess to deal with. Again note that I said nothing about their feelings.

I feel you're still missing the point. I get you might be coming from a binary perspective, as evidenced by going to a nuclear argument, i.e. why bother talking about anything else, but I highly doubt that's the goal of the author. They are trying to make you imagine, and think, about how things fit together. YRMV.

Sure but if we're not sure then the possible infliction of huge amounts of horrendous suffering on trillions of them is quite serious. If there's even a 5% chance that shrimp feel pain as intensely as humans, the SWP is an excellent bet.

The whole idea of morality is totally arbitrary and only exists because we say it does. If you were an Aztec then sacrificing people to Huitzilopochtli was actually moral, and if you were alive two thousand years ago nobody would have batted an eye at owning slaves.

In reality, nobody would actually choose to save the life of 34 crustaceans over the life of a human, even if killing the prawn results in 102% of the suffering of killing the human.

It's the same with all the EA stuff like prioritising X trillion potential humans that may exist in the future over actual people who exist now - you can get as granular as you want and mess around with probability to say anything. Maybe it's good to grow brains in vats and feed them heroin - that'll increase total happiness! Maybe we should judge someone who has killed enough flies the same as a murderer! Maybe our goals for the future should be based on the quadrillion future sentient creatures that will evolve from today's coconut crabs!

> entire cities could be leveled before I let anyone hurt my kitten

Allowing that kitten to live will cause untold suffering for other small mammals.

You have the power to stop that suffering!