Here's a way to modify the Nietzchean perfectionist theory so as to avoid discounting nonhuman animal suffering: let's say that it's not just human excellence that matters, but excellence simpliciter, where excellence is defined roughly as fulfilling the constitutive capacities of a being of one's kind. For a human being those are rational, creative, and moral capacities. For (at least wild) dogs those are social and hunting capacities (which has the tragic upshot that excellence for a dog necessarily comes at a cost to other animals). For trees (if we want to include nonsentient lifeforms) those are growth capacities. So a world where cows, chickens, and the rest are suffering miserable lives is worse than otherwise because the animals in question are barred from fulfilling their constitutive capacities; such a world misses out on the distinctive excellence of certain of our fellow creatures.
This view has an attractive upshot for opponents of intervention in the wild: the suffering of wild animals may be a tolerable cost of them achieving their kind-specific excellence (which we would frustrate with intervention). One open question would be how to quantify excellences of different kinds (if that's at all possible). How many thriving whale pods are worth one Hamlet (or perhaps vice versa)?
I've always been skeptical of the genuine normativity of such "constitutive" norms, since there's no guarantee that existing beings' constitutions will be oriented towards genuine goodness. Effective mosquitos--or viruses!--are not a kind of "excellence" worth having in the world. So I think we always need to ask the prior question of whether one's "constitutive capacities" are oriented towards something good, or not. (But it may be that this constrained version of the view could help count at least *many* animal interests appropriately, even if *some* must be rejected as simply bad.)
You have reinvented Aristotle, but don't worry, you are in good company. Ruth Millikan wrote that once something is selected and copied for, whatever it was selected and copied for becomes a proper function, a final cause, a telos.
This circles back to classic Stoicism, where the essence of the good is to fulfill one's nature to the ultimate capacity. For humans, this was seen as rationality and virtue (or arete, "excellence"), and included acting for the good of all; for animals, it would have been as you described.
Here's the abstract, in case it piques others' interest:
> Is suffering really bad? The late Derek Parfit argued that we all have reasons to want to avoid future agony and that suffering is in itself bad both for the one who suffers and impersonally. Nietzsche denied that suffering was intrinsically bad and that its value could even be impersonal. This paper has two aims. It argues against what I call ‘Realism about the Value of Suffering’ by drawing from a broadly Nietzschean debunking of our evaluative attitudes, showing that a recently influential response to the debunking challenge (the appeal to phenomenal introspection) fails. It also argues that a Nietzschean approach is well suited to support the challenge and is bolstered by the empirical literature. As strangers to ourselves, we cannot know whether suffering is really intrinsically bad for us.
Ha, roughly. Though I think it was a bit artificial of Mill to try to squeeze his perfectionist intuitions into hedonistic cloth; I expect that if he was writing today, he wouldn't be a hedonist at all.
Maslow's hierarchy of needs still provides the most complete taxonomy of what we need to be wholly happy (https://en.wikipedia.org//wiki/Maslow's_hierarchy_of_needs). EA concerns itself most with physiological needs and some safety needs, perhaps correctly viewing them as low hanging preconditions for human flourishing. EÆs address cognitive and aesthetic needs. Belonging and love, esteem, self actualization and transcendence are omitted in by both moral accounting systems. Perhaps they are too hard to measure and not secular enough? Or they're considered first world problems? Nevertheless, we intuitively understand these needs are real, especially the many among us who confront ennui despite first world material abundance and the accessibility of great culture in the internet age.
Nitpick: pyramids in Egypt were built by free laborers, not slaves.
I also think Nietzsche's elitism is a core part of his philosophy, and Huddleston’s misinterprets him to conform more to egalitarian intuitions. But I'm not that familiar with Nietzsche and don't have a point to make here.
> to be a slave building the pyramids, a medieval serf laboring on Chartres cathedral, or a peon sweeping Beethoven’s floor
This assumes some ability to know in the present what would be assessed as having merit in a maybe distant future? Suppose your aesthetics aligned more with Paganini's and you choose to sweep his floor instead, and then oops -- classical music aficionados rate Beethoven higher and your life is now worth less?
I took the view to be more about what (objectively) *has* merit rather than what *will be assessed* by future experts as having had merit. But either way, it's certainly true that pursuing goals successfully requires some degree of ability to assess what will or will not be an effective means to achieving the goal in question.
Talk of a life's "worth" can be ambiguous, though, between more or less objective forms of assessment. Suppose a scientist dedicates their life to curing cancer, and explores some very reasonable avenues in hopes of a breakthrough, but -- through sheer bad luck -- the avenues they explore all turn out to be dead ends. They failed at their central goal. But they did a good job of pursuing it, in the sense that their decisions had high *expected* value. I could see a Nietzschean appealing to a similar idea to validate supporting *reasonable prospects* for advancing excellence, even if it doesn't work out in the end.
Without venturing an opinion on which of EA or Nietzchean perfectionism is (all things considered) morally preferable, I think it is worth pointing out that EA seems peculiarly plausible at the moment in part because superb and plainly excellent achievements in the arts are so few and far between nowadays. (I consider this to be a pretty obvious fact, but I link to some evidence for it here: https://furtheroralternatively.blogspot.com/2022/03/where-have-all-geniuses-gone-or-whats.html .) If you can't write a great symphony - and, let's be honest, no one can nowadays - you might at least add a few utils to the global util pot.
I don't know if he offered a coherent rationale for caring about animals, but Nietzsche may have been personally sensitive to animal suffering. He is apparently supposed to have suffered a nervous breakdown after hugging a horse someone was brutally beating.
Here's a way to modify the Nietzchean perfectionist theory so as to avoid discounting nonhuman animal suffering: let's say that it's not just human excellence that matters, but excellence simpliciter, where excellence is defined roughly as fulfilling the constitutive capacities of a being of one's kind. For a human being those are rational, creative, and moral capacities. For (at least wild) dogs those are social and hunting capacities (which has the tragic upshot that excellence for a dog necessarily comes at a cost to other animals). For trees (if we want to include nonsentient lifeforms) those are growth capacities. So a world where cows, chickens, and the rest are suffering miserable lives is worse than otherwise because the animals in question are barred from fulfilling their constitutive capacities; such a world misses out on the distinctive excellence of certain of our fellow creatures.
This view has an attractive upshot for opponents of intervention in the wild: the suffering of wild animals may be a tolerable cost of them achieving their kind-specific excellence (which we would frustrate with intervention). One open question would be how to quantify excellences of different kinds (if that's at all possible). How many thriving whale pods are worth one Hamlet (or perhaps vice versa)?
I developed a similar view in a paper I had published in a student journal during my undergrad (starts on pg. 53): https://drive.google.com/file/d/1OokVdHBYoirShlgXGgbIrk6rHG3sRPy9/view
I've always been skeptical of the genuine normativity of such "constitutive" norms, since there's no guarantee that existing beings' constitutions will be oriented towards genuine goodness. Effective mosquitos--or viruses!--are not a kind of "excellence" worth having in the world. So I think we always need to ask the prior question of whether one's "constitutive capacities" are oriented towards something good, or not. (But it may be that this constrained version of the view could help count at least *many* animal interests appropriately, even if *some* must be rejected as simply bad.)
You have reinvented Aristotle, but don't worry, you are in good company. Ruth Millikan wrote that once something is selected and copied for, whatever it was selected and copied for becomes a proper function, a final cause, a telos.
This circles back to classic Stoicism, where the essence of the good is to fulfill one's nature to the ultimate capacity. For humans, this was seen as rationality and virtue (or arete, "excellence"), and included acting for the good of all; for animals, it would have been as you described.
Very cool post. I'm a big fan of Andrew's work.
Shameless plug, I have a paper on related issues: https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/DSYKSKEGTTG9PECFHCT8/full?target=10.1080/0020174X.2021.2018357
Writing it has slightly changed my mind about what matters, including in EA related terms.
Cool, thanks for sharing!
Here's the abstract, in case it piques others' interest:
> Is suffering really bad? The late Derek Parfit argued that we all have reasons to want to avoid future agony and that suffering is in itself bad both for the one who suffers and impersonally. Nietzsche denied that suffering was intrinsically bad and that its value could even be impersonal. This paper has two aims. It argues against what I call ‘Realism about the Value of Suffering’ by drawing from a broadly Nietzschean debunking of our evaluative attitudes, showing that a recently influential response to the debunking challenge (the appeal to phenomenal introspection) fails. It also argues that a Nietzschean approach is well suited to support the challenge and is bolstered by the empirical literature. As strangers to ourselves, we cannot know whether suffering is really intrinsically bad for us.
Wait, so Bentham+Nietzche=Mill? It seems you've just kind of argued your way back into Mill's higher pleasures stuff.
Ha, roughly. Though I think it was a bit artificial of Mill to try to squeeze his perfectionist intuitions into hedonistic cloth; I expect that if he was writing today, he wouldn't be a hedonist at all.
Fair enough.
Maslow's hierarchy of needs still provides the most complete taxonomy of what we need to be wholly happy (https://en.wikipedia.org//wiki/Maslow's_hierarchy_of_needs). EA concerns itself most with physiological needs and some safety needs, perhaps correctly viewing them as low hanging preconditions for human flourishing. EÆs address cognitive and aesthetic needs. Belonging and love, esteem, self actualization and transcendence are omitted in by both moral accounting systems. Perhaps they are too hard to measure and not secular enough? Or they're considered first world problems? Nevertheless, we intuitively understand these needs are real, especially the many among us who confront ennui despite first world material abundance and the accessibility of great culture in the internet age.
Nitpick: pyramids in Egypt were built by free laborers, not slaves.
I also think Nietzsche's elitism is a core part of his philosophy, and Huddleston’s misinterprets him to conform more to egalitarian intuitions. But I'm not that familiar with Nietzsche and don't have a point to make here.
> to be a slave building the pyramids, a medieval serf laboring on Chartres cathedral, or a peon sweeping Beethoven’s floor
This assumes some ability to know in the present what would be assessed as having merit in a maybe distant future? Suppose your aesthetics aligned more with Paganini's and you choose to sweep his floor instead, and then oops -- classical music aficionados rate Beethoven higher and your life is now worth less?
I took the view to be more about what (objectively) *has* merit rather than what *will be assessed* by future experts as having had merit. But either way, it's certainly true that pursuing goals successfully requires some degree of ability to assess what will or will not be an effective means to achieving the goal in question.
Talk of a life's "worth" can be ambiguous, though, between more or less objective forms of assessment. Suppose a scientist dedicates their life to curing cancer, and explores some very reasonable avenues in hopes of a breakthrough, but -- through sheer bad luck -- the avenues they explore all turn out to be dead ends. They failed at their central goal. But they did a good job of pursuing it, in the sense that their decisions had high *expected* value. I could see a Nietzschean appealing to a similar idea to validate supporting *reasonable prospects* for advancing excellence, even if it doesn't work out in the end.
Without venturing an opinion on which of EA or Nietzchean perfectionism is (all things considered) morally preferable, I think it is worth pointing out that EA seems peculiarly plausible at the moment in part because superb and plainly excellent achievements in the arts are so few and far between nowadays. (I consider this to be a pretty obvious fact, but I link to some evidence for it here: https://furtheroralternatively.blogspot.com/2022/03/where-have-all-geniuses-gone-or-whats.html .) If you can't write a great symphony - and, let's be honest, no one can nowadays - you might at least add a few utils to the global util pot.
I have tried to advance that point about the appeal of EA (among a few others) here: https://furtheroralternatively.blogspot.com/2022/07/on-effective-altruism.html .
I don't know if he offered a coherent rationale for caring about animals, but Nietzsche may have been personally sensitive to animal suffering. He is apparently supposed to have suffered a nervous breakdown after hugging a horse someone was brutally beating.