EA - Does the Trajectory of Pain Matter? by William McAuliffe

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Does the Trajectory of Pain Matter?, published by William McAuliffe on October 18, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Summary Humans might prefer bad events giving way to good outcomes over good events giving way to bad outcomes, holding net welfare constant. If this preference reflects a valid moral intuition that applies to both humans and non-human animals, then painful events at the end of life deserve additional moral weight because there is no scope for a better future. It would follow that improving the humaneness of the transport and slaughter of farmed animals is more urgent than the duration and severity of pain they cause would imply. There are at least two plausible explanations for why humans would value the temporal order of valenced experiences even if it had no intrinsic moral value: People might implicitly assume that improvements in welfare result in greater total welfare because pain relief is itself rewarding (and, as such, might produce more pleasure than is initially apparent). Human compassion likely evolved to be sensitive to sudden need, not absolute need Unless future research indicates that farmed animals themselves intrinsically value the trajectory of welfare, it is not clear that the welfare issues posed by transport and slaughter deserve additional attention in virtue of their occurence at the end of life. Epistemic Status This report was the product of about three weeks of research, and as such may overlook relevant research or philosophical considerations that we did not find or have time to consider. Before finalizing the report, we spent about a week's worth of work revising it in light of new comments, but did not add any new sections. Introduction This report is a postscript to "The Relative Importance of the Severity and Duration of Pain", which was intended to contextualize cause prioritization decisions when sources of suffering they seek to ameliorate differ in duration and severity. The present report addresses an issue that has elicited some discussion in the philosophical literature, but to our knowledge has only recently surfaced in animal ethics: Does the temporal ordering of positive and negative valence states matter beyond its influence on the total amount of pleasure and pain experienced? Browning and Veit (2020, 2022) say "yes." Their main premise is that end-of-life welfare is particularly important: "even when two lives contain an equal total sum of positive and negative experiences, it is still worse to have suffering at the end of life" (2022, p. 9). Therefore, the transport and slaughter of farmed animals deserve special consideration over and above the duration and severity of suffering they cause. The following provides an exposition and evaluation of Browning and Veit's argument that the temporal ordering of suffering is morally relevant. To make the implications of their view clear, we contrast it with a simple hedonistic approach in which all that matters morally is the severity and duration of pain and pleasure. That said, none of our arguments against the moral relevance of the trajectory of valenced experience depend on accepting hedonism. Shape of a Life On a simple hedonistic approach to welfare, the temporal ordering of events per se has no intrinsic importance (de Lazari-Radek & Singer, 2014, Chapter 5, section 3). Timing only matters to the extent it affects future welfare. Browning and Veit (2020, p. 7) give an example of previously higher living standards making current low living standards seem even worse: enclosure space is an important determinant of welfare for captive animals. It is likely to be worse for an animal to have the positive experience of a larger enclosure space before the negative experience of a smaller one, because the perceived decrease in quality will add to the negative f...