Hello everyone. Thank you so much for joining us. It's a pleasure to be here today with Jeff Sebo, who is associate professor of environmental studies, affiliated professor of bioethics, medical ethics, philosophy and law, director of the Center for Environmental and Animal Protection, director of the Center for Mind, Ethics and Policy, and co-director of the Wild Animal Welfare Program at NYU. His research focuses on animal minds, ethics and policy; AI minds, ethics and policy; and global health and climate ethics and policy. He's the author of "The Moral Circle" and "Saving Animals, Saving Ourselves," and co-author of "Chimpanzee Rights" and "Food, Animals, and the Environment." He's also an advisory board member at the Jeremy Coller Center for Animal Sentience, an advisory board member at the Insect Welfare Research Society, and an adviser at Elios AI, and a senior affiliate at the Institute for Law and AI. In 2024, Vox included him on its Future Perfect 50 list of thinkers, innovators, and changemakers who are working to make the future a better place. Professor Sebo, thanks for making time to talk with us.
Yeah, thanks so much for having me.
So, you've been dealing with issues that are of great importance to me and our community. And just to start with you, a big but basic question around suffering: where does your moral concern for suffering come from? For you?
My concern to some extent is intuitive and to some extent was informed by academic philosophy, because it is common now in ethics for people to regard sentience, the capacity to suffer, as if not necessary, then at least sufficient for welfare and moral considerability. Because when you have conscious experiences that can feel good or bad to you, when you can experience pleasure, pain, happiness, suffering, then you have a stake in what happens to you; it matters to you what happens to you. And at that point, once you have a stake, once it matters to you, I think that I have a responsibility to at the very least consider your interests when making decisions that affect you, and at the very least to avoid causing you pain and suffering and other distressing states unnecessarily.
Yeah, that makes a ton of sense. And yet it seems to be really difficult to care. I mean, whether it was David Hume or someone else, the point has been made so many times that we care more about the stubbing of our own toe than the death of a person on the other side of the world. This is a timeless problem of how we actually care. Do you think we care more or less right now than historically? Do you think this is just part of the human condition?
Good question. I do think that being partly altruistic and partly self-interested is a pretty universal trait of humans. Now obviously everybody is built a little bit different and some of us might have a slightly greater share of altruism, others of us might have a slightly greater share of self-interest. Generally speaking, by and large, I think we all have some combination of the two. But your question is whether our altruism might come out more in some eras than in other eras, and if it might be coming out a little bit less right now. And I think that can be true because structural conditions can affect how much we allow our altruism to come out and program our behavior. For example, we do tend to feel a little bit more able to be altruistic in times of abundance than in times of scarcity. We also are able to be a little bit more altruistic just generally when social, legal, political, economic, infrastructural, technological circumstances allow. So for example, when we feel that we need to use animals for food or medicine, it becomes a little bit harder to empathize with them, it becomes a little bit more tempting to see them as resources, objects, commodities. But when we do have alternatives available to us, alternative sources of food or medicine or other ways of meeting vital needs, then we once again have a little bit more space for viewing animals as subjects who deserve respect and compassion.
Very well said. So most Americans, certainly not all, but most Americans are going to be concerned about dogs, maybe cats, maybe horses. A much smaller sliver are going to be concerned about farm animals, chickens, cows, pigs. But then if we keep going out of concern, given the deeper uncertainty around insect sentience, how should moral agents weigh the risk of causing vast but low-probability suffering against more certain harms to clearly sentient beings?
This is such a great and complicated question, and I think the way you frame it is perfect, because traditionally there has been this presumption that we should extend moral consideration to someone only when we have proof or certainty that they have sentience and can suffer. But that is generally not how we navigate risks in other contexts. In other contexts we naturally appreciate that if I am certain that a harm will occur, then certainly I should work to prevent it. But even if I am not certain, but know that there is a realistic possibility that a harm will occur, then I should still take reasonable, proportionate steps to mitigate risk. And I think that we ought to take that same approach here. We should not wait for proof or certainty that animals can suffer before taking basic steps to reduce and repair harms that we might be causing them. Once we have enough evidence to indicate at least a realistic possibility that they can suffer, we should once again take reasonable, proportionate steps to mitigate risk. And when the probability is lower, maybe lesser steps are called for, but there should still be some baseline consideration. There should still be some baseline mitigation of harm. And so you now asked what to do when there is a low but non-negligible probability of harm for this really large number of individual insects. And I think we really ought to take seriously the possibility that in the aggregate our responsibilities to them are still quite significant. Even if there is only, say, a 1% chance that an individual ant can suffer, and even if they can only suffer a tiny amount if at all, okay, that might be a very low amount of expected suffering for the individual ant. But multiplied across the quadrillions of ants who exist at any given time, and taking into account the scale of our interactions with them and impacts on them, that really still adds up and deserves serious consideration, even if intuitively, psychologically, it might be difficult for us to appreciate it and naturally empathize with it.
So that's really powerful. And just to step back to a moral philosophy question for a moment: I suspect we're mostly using a utilitarian framework, but are you at all concerned with virtue ethics? Like, is the question at all, can we be cruel to robots, relevant to you? And, you know, if we were certain that ants don't suffer, should we not inflict pain simply for our own character, or are you not concerned with that question?
Oh, absolutely. I am concerned with those situations, with those considerations. I do not think that this is strictly a utilitarian analysis. Obviously, when we talk about welfare impacts and when we talk about estimating and quantifying welfare impacts, that does call to mind utilitarian philosophers like Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill. And I think that kind of utilitarian thinking does deserve a place in our moral frameworks, because whether our actions or practices or policies cause happiness versus suffering to other beings, that ought to be a factor in our decision-making, and greater amounts of happiness ought to be treated as better, greater amounts of suffering ought to be treated as worse. But as your question suggests, in order for our moral decision-making to be complete, we also ought to complement that utilitarian thinking with other rights-oriented thinking, virtue-oriented thinking, relational thinking. And you specifically asked about virtue, which is a great opportunity to note that yes, cultivating virtuous character traits, virtuous ways of naturally seeing and interacting with other animals, that can be a really good complement to those rare moments when we can use our rational, logical thinking in order to inform our decisions. And even if we were certain that these non-humans are not sentient, if our interactions with them still shape our character, that can still be a good reason to practice at being kind, since that kindness can then spill over into our interactions with other individuals who are sentient and deserving of that kindness.
Very nice. Very nice. So if we accept even a small chance that insects are sentient, does that push us toward radically different policies, such as rethinking pest control, agriculture, urban planning, or are these principles limited to how far precaution should go?
