Safeguarding All Sentient Life Through Strategic Moral Expansion
As humanity accelerates toward a highly technological and potentially interstellar era, I argue that we must actively expand our moral circle to encompass all sentient beings. By overcoming our historical bias of agonizing moral under-inclusion, we can establish a robust ethical foundation that prevents astronomical-scale catastrophes. Advancing this moral expansion today serves as our ultimate strategic defense against existential “suffering risks” in the centuries to come.
Key facts
- Current moral frameworks heavily neglect the immense suffering of billions of domestic animals and trillions of wild animals.
- Historical pioneers such as Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill laid the foundation for moral expansion by simultaneously advocating for human rights and animal welfare.
- The abolition of the slave trade serves as a prime historical example that moral progress is frequently driven by dedicated social movements, not merely by economic shifts.
- The “Interspecies Model of Prejudice” reveals that hierarchical and dismissive views of animals strongly correlate with hostility toward human outgroups, such as in cases of racism and sexism.
- Psychologists utilize the “Moral Expansiveness Scale” (MES) to precisely track and measure how individuals extend ethical concern across different societal and biological categories.
- Under conditions of moral uncertainty, the historical track record of human “under-inclusion” makes excluding a sentient group far more dangerous than over-including a non-sentient one.
- From a strategic risk perspective, even a 1% probability of an astronomically dystopian future mathematically outweighs a 99% probability of a utopian outcome.
- Future technological advancements introduce massive “s-risks” (suffering risks), including the theoretical creation of “dolorium”—specialized hardware engineered to maximize artificial suffering.
- Implementing systemic institutional changes today, such as granting legal personhood to animals, creates essential precedents for the future ethical treatment of artificial sentience.
Our take
To avoid steering humanity into a bleak, sci-fi dystopian nightmare, I highly recommend we start practicing a bit of basic decency toward the creatures currently sharing our planet. If we cannot even figure out how to treat a factory-farmed chicken with a shred of dignity, our odds of ethically managing hyper-intelligent artificial beings seem impressively slim. So, perhaps advocate for the global poor and support animal rights today—unless, of course, you are eagerly looking forward to our future robot overlords treating us with the exact same compassion we currently show to invertebrates.
Sources
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