Personhood
TLDR: Utopia treats many non-humans as having moral weight, and affords them the same rights that a human has.
Prerequisites: None
There was a time when nearly everyone thought slavery was part of the natural order. In writing about Utopia, Plato seemed oblivious to the moral repugnancy of slavery. Plato perhaps had a notion of what “good slavery” looked like, to distinguish it from slavery in many real-world contexts, but the fact remains that the institution was so pervasive that even the brightest philosophers took it for granted.
I find moral progress to be a fascinating phenomenon. On one hand there’s an argument that “moral progress” is what value drift sometimes feels like from the inside. People in 1822 valued certain things about the world, and people in 2022 value different things; perhaps the “moral progress” that has happened in the last 200 years is an illusion of this drift. That is, instead of reflecting a “moral truth,” the change was the result of environmental pressures or simply random deviation.
If we brought someone forward in time, would they be aghast at the ways in which morals have shifted? I think they would, and I think much of this mortification would persist even after living in the future for a while. They would likely say that our “moral progress” is in actually moral decay.
It’s easy to dismiss the values of those in the past as parochial, but it’s worth keeping in mind that in the grand scope of history, we’re also in the deep past. To deny the possibility of value-drift is to believe that it’s impossible for the pendulum to swing the other way and for a society to become more regressive.
I think it’s quite likely that future beings will lose sight of at least some of the things that we think are important. If I were transported 200 years into the future, I might then be aghast at what is considered “progress.”
But I think that discounting all of moral progress as value drift is missing the huge possibility of detectable moral errors. In the course of steering one’s life towards what is valuable, decisions must be made, and sometimes those judgments include mistakes. Furthermore, those mistakes can reflect a consistent error in how we apply our moral principles. Correcting these kinds of errors, then, results in moral progress.
Better writers than I have spilled much ink on the subject, so I’ll simply recommend Holden Karnofsky’s excellent essay on future-proof ethics.
If we adopt the task of finding moral errors in our society, what might we find? Perhaps the largest (but not only) error, I think, is that our circle of moral concern is too small. In the same way that treating women, people of color, or slaves as undeserving of the same rights as free, white men is morally defunct, there are almost certainly entities that deserve more rights and/or moral standing than we currently give them, as a society.
Here are some candidates for entities that it might be an error not to grant more rights to, or otherwise treat as more morally important. Note that I am not making a claim that all of these should be granted more moral weight, but merely that it is worth thinking deeply about whether they deserve more. (I am also not claiming that all moral patients deserve equal weight, or any other utilitarian baggage.)
People in other countries?
People with atypical gender expression?
Including non-binary people?
People with atypical identities, such as otherkin?
People with atypical sexualities?
Including zoophilia, pedophilia, and other paraphilias?
People with otherwise atypical minds?
Including humans with multiple/split-personalities?
Including psychopaths?
People born with intellectual disabilities?
People born with intellectual gifts?
Elderly people?
Children?
Fetuses?
People in future generations?
People in past generations?
Prisoners? Criminals?
Digital People/Artificial Intelligences?
Fictional People? Archetypes?
God(s)?
People in other parts of the multiverse?
Societies/Families/Cultures?
Companies/Businesses? Governments?
Works of art? Historical artifacts? Tools? Other inanimate objects?
Information?
Nature?
Species-in-themselves?
Lakes? Forests? Mountains? Planets?
Evolution-as-a-whole?
Plants?
Microscopic organisms?
Non-human animals?
Even if you have a strong belief that most of the entities on that list do not deserve more moral weight, I bet the vast majority of people think there is at least one instance where our circle of moral concern is too small.
I’m going to spend the remainder of this essay arguing that there are at least some non-human animals that deserve more moral concern, and that once we step down the path of giving weight to animals, the natural stopping place precludes factory farming, and probably traditional livestock farming as well.
Nearby Non-Humans
There was no “first human,” in a meaningful sense. The question of who the first human was is like asking which color is the least-saturated red.
Words (like “human”) are used to distinguish unlike things, but the “first human” had parents that were extremely similar to her. It’s a bit crazy to refer to any child as a different species than their parents. And yet, over time, populations change. This is a general pattern in evolution: species are a somewhat fake concept.
About 50 thousand years ago (relatively recent!) there were probably four or more “species” of hominids: neanderthals, denisovans, floresians, and humans. Again, the division between “species” is a bit fake — all modern humans have some neanderthals and denisovans ancestors. But the point is that these ancient hominids were distinctly inhuman, and yet they were obviously people.
Neanderthals are the most well-understood, and while certain details are debated, it seems clear that they lived in organized societies, constructed tools, and very likely used language. I cannot think of any argument that would deny them moral weight other than something extremely gerrymandered in its speciesism or that would prove-too-much and deny moral weight to unintelligent humans. No, instead I claim that neanderthals, denisovans, and floresians all deserve to be treated comparably to humans, and that this moral status extends beyond the groups that happened to exist 50 thousand years ago.
Inner Worlds
Where should this extension of the circle of moral concern stop, if not at the (fake) species boundary? An obvious, but philosophically thorny, choice is “consciousness” — the property of self-reflecting such that there is an inner-listener that doesn’t simply engage with the external world, but also experiences itself.
Of course, it is terribly difficult (at our current level of scientific understanding) to demonstrate the consciousness or non-consciousness of someone or something. For instance, are you sure that other humans are conscious? How do you know? Are they conscious all of the time, or just some of the time? Are you conscious all of the time?
To truly come-to-grips with a consciousness-anchored moral foundation, I think it’s important to search around for the least-conscious beings that provoke obvious moral consideration, then look around for things that are at least plausibly that conscious. For me, it seems like (at least) both newborn babies and severely mentally-impaired people are worth treating as moral patients. This is distinct from thinking that such humans are worth respecting because of their social connections or some other downstream consideration. Some might say that killing infants is bad only insofar as it results in fewer people later on, or upsets the parents, family, or broader society. I am not willing to bite that bullet, and I suspect that an enlightened society wouldn’t either. Instead, I take on the position that newborn babies are worth protecting in-and-of-themselves.
Infants are not very conscious, by most standard measures. They lack language and fail the mirror-test. Meanwhile, most great-apes (chimpanzees, orangutans, bonobos, and some gorillas), many cetaceans, some elephants, magpies, and perhaps even manta rays have passed the mirror test, indicating non-trivial levels of self-awareness. Oh, also, pigs probably pass the mirror test.
This isn’t to say that only mirror-test-passing animals have value. Infants, as I will reiterate, don’t start consistently passing the mirror test until they’re around 18 months old. But it does mean that if we want to consistently apply a consciousness-grounded moral standard, then we should treat dolphins, orangutans, magpies, and pigs with at least as much moral gravity as we give to babies.
You might use a different moral standard than reflective self-awareness. For instance, you may think that ability to code some stimuli as aversive/painful and others as attractive/pleasant is where moral patienthood naturally rests. But I claim that most groundings of moral worthiness that treat infants and people with severe disabilities as important will, when applied consistently, treat many non-human animals as worthy as well.
This Really Matters
If I had to list the worst atrocities in human history, I might start with:
The Great Leap Forward (~40 million starved over ~3 years)
The Holocaust (~17 million killed over ~6 years)
Stalin’s Dictatorship (~10 million killed/starved over ~25 years)
The Mongolian Conquests (~40 million killed over ~200 years)
The Siege of St. Petersburg (~3.5 million killed/starved over ~2 years)
The Armenian Genocide (~1.2 million killed over ~2 years)
The Nanjing Massacre (~200k killed, 20k+ raped over ~6 weeks)
WWII Bombing of Japan (~400k civilians killed in less than 1 year)
Removal of Native Americans (60k+ killed or displaced over ~30 years)
Atlantic slave trade (~13 million enslaved over ~400 years)
Kim’s Dictatorship (~26 million oppressed, ongoing since 1948)
The Uyghur Genocide (1+ million imprisoned, ongoing since 2014)
(The numbers here are only meant to give a general sense of scale, not to imply a definitive ordering of which things were more horrible. There are a host of considerations in each event that make them extremely hard to rank.)
But if pigs are worthy of moral concern, then buckle up, because things get much worse. There are about 800 million pigs in the world. Sources I found disagree on details, but my best guess is that about half of the world’s pigs are raised on factory farms. The average lifespan of a factory farmed pig is about 6 months, meaning the world kills a little under a billion pigs a year. The vast majority of these pigs live terrible lives, casually mutilated, forced into pens and cages that are too small (often without room to turn around), subject to disease, and then ultimately slaughtered, sometimes in immensely cruel ways such as being boiled alive. I will spare you the images; they are too horrific for me to want to share here.
There is a tendency in humans… no, bias is a better word. There is a bias in humans to encounter a great horror and to reflexively reject it. There is also a bias to discount arguments of scale, and to retreat into a sense of “all numbers that are big seem the same.” I, personally, fooled myself for years by averting my gaze and not doing the math. I beg you to actually consider the possibility that a pig has at least 0.1% of the moral significance of a human being, and that the evils of factory farming scale approximately with the number of animals affected.
If we grant those assumptions, then the factory farming of pork by itself, is comparable to the evils of the holocaust every two decades. If you are closer to the average person and think that the life of a pig is above 2% of the importance of a human, then it’s worse than the entire holocaust every year. Regardless, factory farming is an abomination. It is only through extreme moral bigotry that we tolerate it.
Utopian Personhood
In my conception of Utopia, someone is considered a “person” based on an inclusive and consistent set of moral principles. As a result, many people in utopia are non-human, including at the very least great apes, elephants, and cetaceans. All people, human or otherwise, are treated equally under the law and given the same rights and freedoms as anyone else.
People who can’t communicate well or stand up for themselves have competent guardians selected for them. In the case of humans, guardians are often (but not always) a person’s parents. Being a guardian is a serious and honorable profession, and many of the best guardians have multiple wards who they represent. Random audits ensure guardians are caring for their wards well. Guardians are selected by prediction markets on who is most likely to be rated highly (by their ward), and who is least likely to be judged unfit by an auditor.
All people with guardians are granted the right to (secretly) petition for a new guardian, as well as the right to take a simple test of self-determination. The test of self-determination can be passed by a typical 13-year-old human, but children are encouraged to wait until their late teens before shedding the legal protections that come with having a guardian.
One quarter of the basic income that a ward would receive goes to an investment fund that is granted to them upon achieving self-determination, while the other three-fourths goes to the guardian (with the guardian giving their ward an arbitrary allowance). In the case where a ward dies before reaching self-determination, their fund is donated to a charity of the guardian’s choice that they believe their ward would approve of. As a result, wilderness preservation and animal shelters/hospitals are well-funded in Utopia by the non-human people that inhabit the forests and oceans.