*Content warning: discussion of extreme suffering. Inspired by this piece. *
If we took seriously the badness of torture-level suffering, this would radically upend almost everybody’s view of the world.
Take a moment to seriously imagine what it would be like to be tortured. Imagine being deposited into a vat of boiling water. Really think about what the experience would be like—both during and before it. There’d be no spot on your skin where it wouldn’t hurt; it would be like the pain of being burned but worse, and longer lasting, and all over your body. Or imagine having your fingers taken off with pliers.
It’s hard to really vividly imagine this, because it’s more generally difficult to grok what an experience is like when we’re not in the experience—especially one as extreme as this. But even in our ability to glimpse this kind of horror through a glass darkly, we can see how horrendous it is. Torturous suffering is very bad and there are extremely strong reasons to prevent it.
The badness of this kind of suffering depends on how it feels. If before being tortured, you were given a pill that made you dumb or unable to speak, that would not make the torture okay. It might even make it worse. Similarly, your species has nothing to do with why that torture would be bad. If a pill made you unable to speak and also changed your genes so that you weren’t biologically human, the torture would still be bad because of the unbearable pain it would cause you.
Of course, there are bad effects of being tortured other than the pain it causes. Many ways of being tortured would kill you or leave you permanently psychologically damaged. But it is clear that in addition to these later effects of being tortured, there is the additional intrinsic badness of intense suffering. All else held equal, the world is worse if there is more extreme suffering, even if the being suffering it isn’t smart.
This sounds like a very obvious truth. Why have I spent three hundred words telling you that it’s bad to be tortured?
The reason why I have hammered home this obvious-seeming point is that the world is filled with torturous suffering that very few people regard as being an especially serious problem. In fact, most people implicitly treat most torturous suffering in the world as being barely bad at all. So if we take torturous suffering to be bad, that will majorly change how we think about the world.
Begin with the most obvious example: factory farming. Every year, trillions of animals are killed. Around 80 billion land animals are killed every year. Prior to slaughter, factory farmed animals mostly undergo torturous suffering. About a million birds are boiled alive each year in the U.S. alone. Most egg laying hens are locked in cages where they can’t spread their wings. Many pigs are slowly roasted to death over the course of hours. Calves are disbudded, which involves being burned with an 800-degree iron for ten to twenty seconds.
Take a moment to imagine what it would be like to be burned with an 800-degree iron. This is about twice as hot as an industrial oven. The iron is applied for ten to twenty seconds. Imagine that you had to have a doctor do this to you without anesthetic. How would you feel in the run up to the experience? How would you feel during it? There are some sufferings so extreme that people were given bullets to bite so they didn’t bite through their tongues. We inflict these tortures on billions of animals.
Cows have brains that resemble human brains in the important pain-related respects. They can suffer. When you hurt them, they act like you’d expect if they were in intense pain. By the tens of billions, we torture land animals: cows, pigs, chickens, turkeys, ducks, and more. Almost any torture you can imagine—burning, starving, castrating, cutting, gassing—is inflicted on countless farm animals. The most disturbing book I ever read was about a girl being slowly tortured to death; coincidentally, all the tortures it described are all commonplace in the meat industry.
So if torturous suffering is a horrible thing because of the way that it feels, factory farming is a catastrophe of incomprehensible proportions. It’s about as bad as it would be if everyone when they slept experienced torturous suffering or if there was a disease which affected a huge chunk of the world and caused them to undergo non-stop very extreme suffering or if every infant was tortured for a year in a way that left no long-lasting developmental effects.
Animals are, in crucial respects, like infants. Animals are not smart and cannot understand what goes on. Neither can infants. Nonetheless, it is bad for them to undergo torture-level suffering. It is bad if they undergo experiences that would feel like being tortured after taking a “become unintelligent and unable to speak” pill. And it’s not just bad because of its negative effects later on—it is in large part bad because of how it feels. If there are other sentient beings that can feel pain similarly, then their pain is bad for the same reason. Torturous suffering is bad no matter who experiences it or how smart they are.
If we took torturous suffering seriously, we would also be very concerned about wild animals. There are many orders of magnitude more conscious wild animals than farmed animals and humans combined. These animals often starve to death, get eaten alive, and die of parasitism. Sometimes parasites eat their way from the inside out, causing suffering too horrible to imagine for days.
At the present moment, there are very likely more animals undergoing the kind of torturous suffering I described at the beginning of this post than there are people on Earth. Most people think this is not a big deal. The consensus view, therefore, implies that most torturous suffering in the world doesn’t matter.
I think we can only seriously maintain this view by deluding ourselves—by pretending these beings aren’t really experiencing anything or by never thinking about what it’s like for them on the inside. If you think about what it’s like to be a fish being devoured by piranhas, a fawn dying in a fire, or a wolf slowly starving, it is clearly horrible. They are not animatronic robots—there is someone inside.
It is clear that they are undergoing torturous suffering, and torturous suffering is bad because of how it feels. The fact that the lion, fish, and fawn aren’t smart and can’t understand language—like babies or some mentally disabled people—doesn’t make their pain any less bad. Your smartness doesn’t make a difference to the intrinsic badness of your pain. Neither does whether you live in nature.
There are other ways that the world might have even more intense suffering. If simple animals like crabs, lobsters, and insects are conscious, then they might be undergoing intense suffering. I’ve made the case for this being a realistic possibility here. I do not claim to know what it’s like to be a lobster, but if there’s any chance that being a lobster boiled alive feels like anything in the vicinity of being a human boiled alive—and certainly the lobsters act like they are in terrible pain when they’re boiled—then the welfare of simple invertebrates is of the utmost importance.
Likewise for AIs. It is hard to know whether AIs have any experiences, or what they will experience if they come to have experience. But if intense suffering matters, then it is of great importance that we not proliferate them in incomprehensible numbers and make them suffer horribly.
Note that I am not saying intense suffering is the only thing that matters. I think that both pleasure and relationships are of intrinsic value and can be weighed against intense suffering. But if we recognize that some unspeakable horror is occurring wherever on Earth some creature is undergoing an experience that feels to them like being tortured, then this dramatically upends our priorities.
The dominant priorities of society involve indifference to nearly all the torture-level suffering on Earth. That, I maintain, is a grave mistake. We shouldn’t be indifferent to torture.
