Why an Efilist is Focusing on Human Extinction
The reason for me being an EFIList is the same as my main reason for being an antinatalist and that is since it is impossible for living beings not to harm others. Everyone’s existence is inevitably at the expense of someone else. No one can live without somehow harming others. Whether it is by competing with others for food, water, shelter, mating, the best sunbathing niches, the most shaded spots and etc., or by the more explicit and raw manifestation of living at the expense of others – devouring others.
It is impossible to morally justify anyone’s existence because everyone’s existence is at the expense of someone else. The creatures who don’t directly consume other creatures are harming others by denying them essential resources. Even if there are some truly symbiotic relationships between some species, each of these existences is still at the expense of other creatures who are not part of this relationship. Life is necessarily and inevitably harmful.
It is impossible for any creature in the world to put into practice even the first most basic ethical principle – do no harm. So how can it even theoretically be possible for life to be ethical if every life form must inevitably harm other life forms?
The fact that most life forms cannot be held accountable for their harm doing doesn’t undo the harm. It doesn’t compensate the harmed victim. It just makes the whole system even worse since everyone is harming everyone, and all except for humans can’t even help it. This is how fucked up life is.
No one should exist because no one can exist not at the expense of others. It is impossible to exist without harming others, therefore it is impossible to live ethically.
The more aware people, ones who don’t automatically and ignorantly idealize nature, tend to think about nature and evolution as cruel since it is a constant and never-ending battle between organisms over who is the fittest. But it is even worse than that since there aren’t even any winners in this battle, not even the fittest, who might “get” to live through adulthood but only to be devoured by another creature who battled its way to being the fittest of its own species, or to die of hunger, dehydration, disease, cold, landslide, storm, fire, parasites, poison, gunshot and etc. Not that winning a cruel constant in a never-ending battle between all the organisms of who is the fittest can serve as any compensation or consolation, but things are so horrible that even “winning” in nature only means postponing the loss.
Individuals in nature are constantly struggling, competing and fighting other individuals who are forced to do the same, in a tough violent and harmful environment, just to survive a pointless and needless existence which there is no rational and moral justification for. There is no good reason for this to continue. Life doesn’t exist because it should exist, has to exist, needs to exist, or that it is good that it exists. It only exists because it started and the system is naturally structured with inner inertia. Life is a self-replicating suffering system. It is infused with needless pain and suffering which its only purpose is self-perpetuation.
I am an EFIList because of the inevitability of suffering in all sentient life. And I think it is the most urgent goal possible because of its magnitude and its unnecessariness. The tragic irony of sentient life is that it necessarily involves suffering which is utterly unnecessary, as it serves no end other than its own continuation.
I am an EFIList because all suffering matters, regardless of location, situation, and species. Sentient creatures’ moral status is derived from their ability to experience. And our ethical obligation to prevent suffering is derived from the fact that suffering is intrinsically bad for anyone experiencing it. We are morally obligated to help anyone in need, regardless of their species, or of our share in causing the harm. The fact that harm is bad for the one who is harmed is sufficient.
I am an EFIList because life imposes suffering on trillions upon trillions of creatures just for being alive. When horrendous suffering is simply a natural and inevitable part of life, all the more so when it is so extremely abundant, life is simply, naturally and inevitably horrendous.
Why Despite that I am an EFIList I am Advocating for Focusing on Human Extinction
So obviously I don’t think that humans are the only problem on earth, nor do I idealize nature and support human extinction so nature can recover itself (like VHEMT do), and I also don’t think that humans are not to intervene in nature or anything of this sort. I acknowledge that the origin of the problem is evolution, DNA, life. Was it practical to bring the extinction of all sentient creatures I don’t think any ethical person should have even hesitated for a millisecond before doing that. Was it realistic to sterilize every creature on earth I would unhesitatingly fully support that. That could be the most wonderful thing that ever happened to life on earth. The question is not is it morally right, but is it technically possible. And unfortunately that seems extremely unlikely.
It might be technologically possible, but it is technically impossible. For it to be technically possible we need to convince the entire or at least most of the human race and that is completely impossible.
Since it is very unlikely that it would ever be possible for a small group of activists to somehow exterminate each and every sentient species on earth due to their great extent, variety, stamina and distribution on the globe, many EFILists are counting on the human race to someday reach the ethical and logical conclusion that it is better to end all sentient lives on earth, and immediately after that exterminate itself.
But considering the history and present of the human race, this option is absolutely implausible.
I advocate for focusing on human extinction, even if it means that other species won’t go extinct, not because there is no guarantee that humans would someday be able to end the suffering of other sentient creatures, but because it is guaranteed that they won’t, since in order to do that they must first of all want to.
And so far humans haven’t even taken the first step towards ending suffering on earth which is to at least stop intensifying their share in causing it. Currently humans are still deeply immersed in increasing the suffering on earth by artificially creating billions of animals who would know nothing but suffering for their whole miserable lives, just so humans could enjoy the taste of their flesh. Humans are way too unethical to take upon themselves such a moral duty as ending all suffering on earth seriously.
I fail to comprehend the empirical basis for counting on humanity to someday choose to end all the suffering on earth for ethical reasons. Whenever and wherever humans have reached they have wreaked havoc. Humans have consistently hunted other animals, killed them when they came near the areas they have conquered from them, or in the much worse case captivated, domesticated and reared animals for food, exploited them for various uses such as carry them around, carry their belonging, fight in their wars, do their labor, guard their camps, help them hunt, keep them warm, decorate their bodies and homes, serve as the raw material of their tools, and all that while systematically destructing their habitats. So why, as opposed to every single moment in history, would humans all of sudden be such caring creatures whose main task in life would be to help other animals in nature? Where is all this compassion now? More than 95% of humans are not even vegans, meaning the vast majority of the human race is still choosing to personally and needlessly harm and abuse animals, when they can very easily choose not to, so to expect that they would devote their lives to help animals they haven’t personally harmed? How does it make any sense?
It is far more ethically basic to stop harming other animals than start helping other animals, and yet humanity isn’t even choosing veganism. That is despite that choosing veganism is so obvious and should have been a human phenomenon long ago, certainly after the realization that there is a very strong connection between animal based diet and numerous health and environmental problems. Not even all antinatalists or environmentalists are vegans. So thinking that the human race would someday choose to be so compassionate about animals in nature? To think that about the future of humans is forgetting their past and present. Most people don’t care about suffering at all, and most of the few who do care, idealize nature and want more of it. Most, if not all, of the environmental organizations are for nature conservation, not nature alteration. Most of the people involved with wildlife organizations, and most of the people who donate and support such groups, are in such a fundamental clash with the most basic essence of EFILism that they would probably find it totally incomprehensible. These people mourn the extinction of each species and aspire for as much wildlife as possible. And these are the people who “love” and care about wild animals, the rest simply don’t give a damn about anything but themselves.
For EFILism to be practically relevant, all people, or at least the vast majority of them, must be convinced that as opposed to their current perception, life in nature is actually horrible. Although some of the disregard of animals in nature is a result of ignorance regarding life in nature, that is not the main reason, so educating people will not suffice. Lack of information is not the main issue. Shattering the nature myth is very important but not the required breakthrough, for that to happen we need to shatter humans’ indifference, and that is mission impossible.
Ethically speaking only, I think that EFILism is a necessary logical extension of antinatalism, and I can’t even understand antinatalists who are not EFILists. I can’t see how EFILism isn’t the obvious derived conclusion from the cruel life on planet earth. It should be absolutely clear and self-evident. But apparently it isn’t. Not even among all antinatalists, so to expect that from the entire human race?
Many argue that EFILism is the last ethical frontier. But practically humans haven’t even made the first ethical step which is stop creating sentient creatures and torture them for their entire lives. So does it make any sense to jump to the last step before making the first one? How can we seriously expect a species which hasn’t even made the first crucial ethical step, to make the last one?
Ending only human caused suffering is a horrible option only compared with ending all suffering in nature as well. But that option doesn’t exist. The refusal to compromise on the much less good option will end with a much more horrible option which is that no suffering will ever end.
It is as if EFILists are so focused on the choice between the best option and a compromised one that they forget the unimaginably terrible option.
To seriously count on humanity to someday end all suffering on earth is to ignore the whole history of humanity, and present the issue as if all along history, whenever humans have encountered other animals in nature, they wanted to help them but didn’t know how, while it is exactly the opposite. All along history whenever humans have encountered other animals they wanted to use them for their own benefit, and usually with horrendous success.
When humans have seen other animals hunt each other, they didn’t think to themselves ‘oh, if only we had a way to help these poor animals being hunted’, but more like these poor animals are chasing other animals day after day to feed themselves, when instead, they can confine many of them, make them breed, and kill as many as they like whenever they wish. Humans saw what other animals are doing and made it much much much worse.
Most of the world’s suffering is not a result of humans not having enough time to end it, but a result of humans having too much time causing it. The biggest barrier to reducing suffering is the human race, not its extinction.
It is very unreasonable to argue that all the suffering caused by humans must continue because of the potential of humans to stop all the suffering in nature. That is especially so since humans are extremely far from solving even human related problems. Humans have been producing more food than needed to feed every human on earth for a long time now, and yet there are almost a billion people suffering from hunger and hunger related maladies. Almost every eighth person on earth suffers from hunger in one way or another.
Hunger wasn’t always a human phenomenon. Of course people were hungry in times of harsh weather, but it was never even remotely similar in kind and extent to the world hunger of the last two centuries. Modern hunger is manmade. It’s a result of politics and economics. And that simple problem that humanity has created with its own hands, to its own kind, wasn’t and is still far from being solved. Unlike the case of stopping the creation and torture of new sentient creatures, or helping animals in nature, the case of hunger is about solving one of the biggest problems humanity has ever faced, and one that is caused by humanity and to its own kind. And it still exists in the third decade of the 21st century. So justifying the torture of trillions of beings by the human race every single year, because maybe someday humanity might decide that it actually wants to help animals in nature, when humanity is so far from feeding all its members, and is even farer from stop fighting each other over territories on this planet?!
All along history humans have used their intelligence and rationality to use, abuse, exploit, manipulate, and control each other and other animals. All along history humans have consistently wreaked havoc everywhere they went. Wars, pollution, torture facilities, concertation camps, factory farms and many many more examples are the products of human intelligence. It is really cruel to condemn trillions upon trillions of sentient creatures to such a miserable life because maybe someday humans might change. And there is no reason to believe that as opposed to their history on this planet, humans would someday change.
I highly recommend reading the text about The Harm to Others, to get a broader sense of how harmful humans actually are. Relying on humanity to end all the suffering gives the false impression that humans are constantly busy with minimizing suffering, while the truth is that most are constantly busy with maximizing it. The risk that suffering on Earth wouldn’t end is because humanity doesn’t care about it, not because it might run out of people.
The main reason humanity would never decide to end the suffering of nonhumans in nature is the indifference of the vast majority of humans to the suffering of nonhumans in nature. However, humans’ indifference is not the only obstacle that EFILism must somehow overcome.
The expectation that humanity would someday reach the conclusion that it is better to end all sentient lives on earth because it is the most ethical and logical thing to infer from the horrendous life on earth, is very naïve considering how illogical humans are.
Humans are so highly affected by various cognitive biases that it is not even that it is their indifference to the suffering of others that prevents them from reaching what should have been a very self-evident conclusion.
One of these biases is the Status-Quo Bias. Generally speaking, people prefer stability, the familiar, sticking to their routines. Therefore they tend to make decisions which guarantee that things remain more or less the same, even if they can be better, or are currently wrong. Though it makes sense not to fix something that is not broken, the problem is that many things are not even seen as broken because people don’t want to bother fixing them.
That is especially the case when it comes to nature which most people tend to see as the model for what’s right. Obviously their everyday lives, especially their consumption habits, factually contradict their pretended values regarding nature and natural, but still when it comes to “criticizing nature”, most, are most likely to object the idea that something natural could be wrong, not to mention the idea that nature as whole is terrible. That can be seen as a special case of the Status-Quo Bias, but it is more familiar as the appeal to nature fallacy.
A similar bias, with a similar effect for that matter, is the Existence Bias which is people’s tendency to treat the mere existence of something as evidence of its goodness, and to evaluate an existing state more favorably than its alternatives. Obviously ‘nature’ falls into this category more than anything else, and so it would be extremely hard to convince people to go against their intuitions and structured biases, no matter how false they are.
And as if the effects of these biases are not strong enough as it is, other common biases further strengthen them. One of them is the Confirmation Bias which is people’s tendency to favor ideas and information that confirms their positions and actions, and disfavor and disregard ideas and information that contradict or threaten their positions and actions.
Another psychological obstacle to EFILism is that it is such an ambitious, complicated and implausible goal, and people tend to value the logic of an argument according to the plausibility of its conclusion. This is called the Belief Bias and it is one of the strongest examples of how illogical people are, as the logic of an argument, by definition, must be objective and independent of how plausible or desirable the conclusion which is rationally inferred from it, is. Otherwise what is the point of logic in argumentation?
Another serious impediment to EFILism is the omission bias – people’s tendency to ascribe more moral weight to harmful actions than to equally harmful inactions (refraining from preventing harm), even if they result in the same harmful consequence. The omission bias is especially relevant in the case of suffering in nature since people are even less motivated to prevent suffering which they have not directly caused, than they are when they have, and that is the case even if the suffering they can prevent is of much greater scale. People are not even highly concerned about the suffering they are committing, so expecting them to be highly concerned about the suffering they are currently refraining from preventing, is way too optimistic and delusional.
Since suffering in nature is so natural, so inherent, so common and ordinary, it is harder for people to treat it as a catastrophe. People are more inclined to treat unordinary and unusual suffering as a catastrophe, even if it is of a tiny scale compared with the ordinary and usual suffering happening every single moment, everywhere on earth. Partly, it is exactly because it occurs everywhere all the time. And so, instead of the fact, that extreme suffering is so abundant in our world, becoming one of the strongest arguments for EFILism, it is one of the strongest arguments for why people would never become EFILists because they are so indifferent and used to so much suffering happening all the time all over the world.
In addition, people are more inclined to be affected by small scale catastrophes, even ones of a single victim, especially if that victim is identified (if a name, a picture and a short biography of that person was published) over mass scale catastrophes such as the everyday reality of this world. In fact, usually the greater the scope of suffering, the greater the chances that people would treat it extremely unproportionately, to the point of being more indifferent the more victims there are – a psychological phenomenon which is often referred to as the “scope neglect”. Many psychological studies show that when catastrophes are represented by numbers or statistics they fail to affect. Some show that harmed individuals draw much more attention, focus, and even intensity, which most of it is lost once a harmed group is being targeted instead of one identifiable victim.
The rational response should have been that each victim needs to be treated equally and so each added victim should add a proportionate attention, but in reality, not only that each victim doesn’t add a proportional attention, it appears that even a second victim already starts a ‘compassion fatigue’ among people, and the more victims added the more they all become merely “statistics”.
This has a horrible implication on suffering individuals in nature, which their catastrophe is of an infinite scale, and it is natural, ordinary and usual. Not only that humans are anyway naturally indifferent to nonhumans’ suffering, their catastrophe is the kind that humans are naturally inclined to further ignore.
Humans are psychologically structured in such a way that instead of the inapprehensible scale of the horridness of life in nature motivating them to help, it numbs them. They find it much easier to be emotionally driven by the horror of a single victim than in the case of many, and they tend to be more driven the more that single victim is similar to them. Therefore it is hard to see many of them find themselves emotionally driven enough to do everything in their power to end a mass scale horror, caused to an infinite number of victims, who are not only unidentifiable, but their vast majority are very dissimilar to them.
So, unfortunately, for EFILism to be immensely endorsed by humans, they must become extremely unhuman.
The scale of suffering in nature is clear to me. It is just that I am also not ignorant regarding the horrors the human race is responsible, was responsible and would be responsible for if it won’t go extinct. I am aware of its history on this planet, of its psychology, and of the option of it further intensifying its exploitative character. Humans are the world’s biggest problem, not its greatest saviors.
To me the fact that probably only humans can act differently makes them worse not better. Because they are the only species who can at least try to be less harmful, but they are by no comparison the most harmful creature to ever walk on the face of the earth.
However, as strong as this indictment is, I do not advocate for human extinction because of that. It is not a revenge or hate campaign. Obviously I am not a big fan, yet I am not driven by loathing humanity. My only motive is that the suffering caused by humanity is the biggest and most solvable problem.
I am an EFIList who focuses on human extinction for practical reasons. The reason I advocate for human extinction is because they are by far the biggest harm, and since it is by far more realistic than the extinction of all other life forms. I long for an empty rock too. This is my dream as well. I can’t imagine anything better than that. I am advocating for human extinction not because it is the best option, but because it is the only realistic option.
For me Antinatalism is much more than a philosophy, it is practical ethics. And practical ethics is about doing the right thing not pressing the right buttons. I don’t get the argument that the red button is a thought experiment which mainly functions as a way of detecting how deep someone’s ethics is. I am not into radicalism tests, I am into solutions. For me the red button is first and foremost a practical solution, and if it is not a practical option then what exactly is its point? Given that there can never be a button that can safely end all sentient life on earth, I fail to see the point of advocating for this “option”. What is the point of stating ethical stands that no one can stand behind? I don’t think that life’s trillions of victims are impressed by our hypothetical decisions to press hypothetical buttons. We need practical solutions, and forced sterilization of the human race, as complicated, troublesome, super challenging as it is, is still definitely way more practical than a button that can safely end all sentient life on earth. Obviously it is a much less ambitious option which would solve much less problems but it is still much more realistic.
Of course we must press the button that would end all life on earth, anyone who refuses to do that is extremely cruel. It is so obvious, that it shouldn’t even be an ethical question. The question is what are we doing with the world that we are actually living in, not what we would have done had we lived in a world with imaginary buttons. And in our actual world there are no buttons of this sort. All we have is suffering. All we have is pain, frustration, imposition, indifference, violence and etc. There are no clean solutions in this world, not to mention ones that would be offered to us out of the blue. It is our job to find solutions and do everything in our power so they would be as painless and as quick as possible. If we’ll keep playing with thought experiments of imaginary solutions it is hardly likely that we would ever reach a real one.
Obviously if it was possible to end it all in a split painless second that would be a dream come true. I can’t think of anything better than a world with no suffering. But that is unfortunately not a realistic option. So we must focus on realistic options such as targeting one species which is by far the worst species ever and try to find ways to sterilize it.
Without any operative plan, and with some even opposing an active search for real “red buttons”, EFILism is merely a radicalism contest.
We don’t need more and more radicalization of hypothetical ideas but more and more practicalization of plausible ones. At some point we must stop describing the problem we must solve and start working on ways to actually solve it.
Even the few who rationally comprehend the dreadful reality of life on earth, find it hard to proportionally “feel” that reality. Otherwise they wouldn’t make do with saying that they would push the ‘red button’ but would do everything they can so there would actually be one.
EFILists seem to like the ‘bus driver’ metaphor according to which the human race is the only creature who can drive the bus. In my view, we have an option to drive the bus to a destination that although is far from where we want to go, it is immensely better than our current horrible world. This bus can take us to a world full of suffering, a cruel pointless world in which trillions of creatures suffer from cold, heat, hunger, thirst, diseases, parasites, pain, predation and etc. But the other option is to keep waiting for an imaginary bus that would never come, while all that happens to trillions of creatures, including additional trillions of animals suffering from cold, heat, hunger, thirst, diseases, constant stress, pain, suffocation, extreme density, extreme filth, ulcers, broken bones, torn body parts, parasites, deliberate skin scorching, dehorning, castration, electrification, plucking, screwed brains, throat slitting and anything else that the torturous mind of the human race can think of.
Considering that everything is better than our current world, I prefer a bus driving to a still horrible yet much much better place, over forever waiting for a bus to heaven while living in hell. Waiting for an option which would never come is condemning trillions upon trillions of sentient creatures to suffer by humanity. And all this suffering can be prevented by bringing its extinction.
It might be true, hypothetically speaking, that humans are the only species who at least has some potential to end all the suffering in nature, but those who all along history were by far the biggest problem with no competition or proportions to any other species ever on earth, won’t wake up someday as everyone’s saviors.
Every day the human race provides us with more and more reasons for its extinction. And every day it provides us with less and less reasons to believe that it would ever help animals in nature, or that human extinction would ever happen voluntarily.
So the choice is between acting so humanity would go extinct and so all the suffering caused by humans would surely be stopped, but also that unfortunately the suffering in nature would surely continue, or not acting so that the human race go extinct and both would surely continue. The option that humanity would someday for some reason totally turn its ways in the ethical sense is absolutely implausible.
The Greatest Causers of the Greatest Suffering
Although my main reasons to advocate for human extinction and not wait for humanity to cause the extinction of the rest of the sentient species on earth and then terminate itself, are because humans would never make that ethical decision and because implementing that ethical decision is practically impossible, and not because humans are causing most of the suffering on earth, I do argue that despite the immense scope of suffering in nature, and despite that quantitatively speaking, there is no doubt that there are more victims in nature than under humanity’s exploitative destructive rule, humans indeed are causing most of the suffering on earth. I am aware that this claim is debatable so I’ll shortly explain why I think so.
The fact that there are more animals in nature doesn’t necessarily indicate that it is a bigger problem. Not all the animals in nature are extremely suffering in every single moment of their lives. But that is most definitely the case of animals exploited by humans. Animals in the wild are forced to endure tough environmental conditions and they would eventually be hunted or die from a disease or hunger, but at least they are not caged for their entire lives, at least they can move, at least they live in an environment which is natural for them and not a totally alienated, filthy and contaminated one, at least they live in their natural society, at least they have some control over what, and often when, they eat and drink and are not totally controlled by humans’ decisions, at least they can sleep whenever they want wherever they want and not when and where humans decide they would sleep, at least they can spread their limbs, stretch their necks, socialize, breath clean air, clean themselves, fly, roam, run, jump and play. Humans have carelessly taken all that away from the animals they systematically exploit.
And it is not just the external living conditions which are so horrific that they are causing all the animals who are systematically exploited by humans to extremely suffer in every single moment of their lives. The selective breeding that humans have been and still are forcing species of industrially exploited animals to go through is so extreme that many of these animals are suffering just by being alive. Industrial chickens (broilers), hens, pigs, milking cows, salmons and many other farmed fish species, turkeys, sheep, and rabbits have all been designed by genetic selection and other factors so that their profitable body parts (or functions in the case of milking cows, and laying hens) would be as productive as possible, always at the expense of the rest of their body systems. They have become creatures that can’t survive in nature (even if no one would attack them).
Don’t get this wrong this is not at all a glorification of nature. I agree that life in nature is horrible, only that life under human domination is even more hellish. The point is not that nature is good, as it is definitely extremely far even from being bad – it is absolutely terrible, the point is that as horrible as nature is, humanity is even worse.
Counting the number of animals can maximally determine where there could be more suffering, not where there is more suffering. In order to assess where there is more suffering we need to count negative experiences and their quality, to count pains, to count fear, to count beatings, to count stress, to count density, to count heat, to count cold, to count diseases, to count infections, to count filled with ammonia lungs, to count infected wounds, to count broken bones, to count electrocutions, to count throat slicing, to somehow count imprisonment for life. When counting negative experiences and how negative these experiences are for the one experiencing them, there is no doubt where there is more suffering. It is where hundreds of billions of animals are suffering every single moment of their lives. Literally every single moment of their lives.
There are many creatures in nature who every single moment of their lives is suffering, but these are mostly creatures who live for a few moments only, as they are devoured as soon as or very soon after they hatch. These are also creatures who experience nothing but suffering but we can’t ignore the fact that this is mainly because they have only lived for a few moments and that the only suffering they have experienced is that of them being swallowed, which is usually very brief.
We have to consider the fact that although trillions of animals are being eaten alive in nature all the time – far more than the number of animals humans are eating – for many of these, especially small creatures which can be devoured whole, that brief moment is the only horror (and it most definitely is a horror) they would experience throughout their entire lives. Many creatures in nature don’t suffer every single moment of their lives, and that can’t be compared with life under human exploitation, which is a life of nothing but torture, in each and every single moment.
There are many animals whom their lives are very tough and brutal, but it is highly doubtful that it even comes close to the life of a sow in a farrowing crate, a hen in a battery cage, a monkey in a laboratory, or a calf in the veal industry. There is no doubt that dying of hunger is extremely horrendous, but foxes for example can live without food for several days until they agonizingly die, while foxes in the fur industry are losing their minds to the point of eating their own organs out of madness.
The idealization of life in nature consisting of animals leisurely lying on a grassland (a very rare and unrepresentative image of nature), is obviously false and ignorant. Life in nature is horrendous. But for most creatures it is usually not a life in which everything hurts all the time. It is usually not a life of not even one moment without pain, stress, crowding, boredom and filth. Most animals in factory farms don’t even know how it feels not to be in pain.
Like the human-caused suffering, the suffering in nature is constant, it never stops. But as opposed to suffering in nature, human-caused suffering is constant in a sense that the same animal is suffering constantly. That is while the suffering in nature is constant in a sense that every single moment an animal is suffering, but not the same animal. And that is a significant difference. Life in nature, as opposed to life in factory farms, is not constant suffering for each individual. In my view this definitely makes human-caused suffering worse than nature, but even for those who don’t agree, I think that it should at least make it wrong to present nature as worse since there is always suffering in it, while ignoring the kind and extent of suffering each individual endures. Don’t get this wrong, that is a very important viewpoint and a very strong claim by itself, but not one that can serve as an indication that nature is worse than human-caused suffering, not while in the later, each individual constantly suffers, an extreme suffering, with no moment of relief, and from the beginning until the end of his/her life.
And humans are also causing immeasurable suffering to many animals in nature, for example by emitting an enormous amount of pollution – suffering which is hard to measure or see, especially in cases that it is not, or that it is hard to indicate, that pollution is the direct cause of death, and of how many animals.
Ecologists can barely assess animals’ actual numbers to infer humanity’s effect over specific populations in some habitats, and they most definitely can’t assess humanity’s global effect on all of them, not to mention all the effects on each of them. So how is it possible to measure an individual animal’s suffering due to heat load? How is it possible to measure an individual animal’s suffering due to fear of predators which was intensified due to human habitat destruction? How is it possible to measure an individual animal’s suffering due to air pollution? How is it possible to measure an individual animal’s suffering due to light pollution? How is it possible to measure an individual animal’s suffering due to noise pollution? How is it possible to measure an individual animal’s suffering due to radiation? How is it possible to measure an individual animal’s suffering due to microplastics ingestion?
When taking into account the number of harmful experiences and how harmful each and every experience humans are causing to each animal in each exploitation industry is, as well as the various harms humans are inflicting on numerous animals living in nature, I think it is clear that human-caused suffering is greater.
As emphasized earlier, my main reasons to focus on human extinction, even if it means that other species won’t go extinct, are not because humanity is responsible for most of the suffering, but because humans would never make the ethical decision of global extinction of every sentient creature on earth including themselves, and because implementing that ethical decision is practically impossible. However, although the fact that humans are responsible for most of the suffering in the world is not a necessary factor in my argument, it surly has a significant part, especially when it integrates with the main motives. And in that respect I want to add that even if we only compare the likely positive effect that the few humans who would decide, on a personal level, to try and help at least some animals in nature, with the negative effect of humanity as a whole on wild animals, it is most probably the case that even for wild animals alone, meaning regardless of the vast majority of the suffering humans are causing to animals, it is still better to focus on human extinction.
I would like to add a few more notes on the comparison between suffering in nature and human-caused suffering which I am not fully sure of but are certainly worth considering. One of them is that according to some researchers it could be that human activity actually increases the number of animals in nature and not the other way around as some people think. That is mainly because humans are producing more food than is naturally grown in a given area, as well as a lot of waste which many animals find edible.
This claim is very counterintuitive, especially considering humans’ tremendous effect on animal extinction due to habitat destruction. But this claim is about human activity adding more animals, not more species. Human activity surly decreases biodiversity, but not necessarily the number of animals all in all, and that is the relevant factor when counting the number of sentient animals on the planet.
Not only humanity’s food production plays a significant factor in the number of sentient animals on earth, but also the fragmentation and alteration of natural habitats by human activity, which mostly affect the bigger more vulnerable animals. And since smaller animals replace the bigger ones, as they normally compete for food and other resources, that usually means more animals for the same area, since the same area can support more small animals than bigger ones, and so the result is that there are more animals in general.
I am not saying that it is necessarily what happened or will happen on a global scale (some researchers suggest that humanity’s net effect is either slightly decreasing or slightly increasing the global available energy, and therefore the number of animals, but that in any case it has a smaller net impact than might be intuitively estimated), but that it did happen at least in some places and to some extent. And while I guess it is very hard to determine the net effect, the point is that human-caused suffering and suffering in nature are not necessarily in contradiction but sometimes go hand in hand.
Another relevant note to make for that matter is regarding headlines such as ‘humanity has wiped out 60 percent of animals since 1970’, based on the WWF’s Living Planet report, which are often misleading. That is mainly for two reasons. The first one is that these numbers reflect the average decrease in the numbers of all the species which were measured, but since obviously it is much easier to make assessments of larger animals than of very small ones, these measures reflect the decrease of the rather bigger animals and not all of the animals. And an even more crucial point of this problem is that (as was just explained) due to the fact that large animals are usually affected the most by human activity, their numbers are decreasing. And since large animals are competing with small animals for resources such as habitat and food, it is very probable that, as a consequence, the number of small animals has actually increased, and so all in all, the total number of animals has actually increased.
The second problem involves the calculation method. Such reports calculate the total percentage of change in the entire population of all animals by summing all the percentages of changes of each measured species, instead of summing all the changes in the numbers of individuals of all the measured species.
Here is a simple example made by Ed Yong that effectively demonstrates the problem:
“imagine you have three populations: 5,000 lions, 500 tigers, and 50 bears. Four decades later, you have just 4,500 lions, 100 tigers, and five bears (oh my). Those three populations have declined by 10 percent, 80 percent, and 90 percent, respectively—which means an average decline of 60 percent. But the total number of actual animals has gone down from 5,550 to 4,605, which is a decline of just 17 percent.”
Another thing to consider, which I guess some might view as a cheap reduction ad absurdum, but I think is worth at least some consideration, is that if one disagrees with the estimation that humanity’s effect on the number of animals in nature is relatively minor, and still thinks that humanity did decrease the number of animals in the wild, and that suffering in nature is greater than human-caused suffering, and that humanity is changing and is on the brink of becoming vegan, then since the more humans the less animals in nature, one must actually consider pro-natalism. This is more than arguing against human extinction due to the false belief that humans one day would somehow and for some reason decide as opposed to everything they did all along history to act in favor of other animals, this is arguing against antinatalism because according to this logic if humans would keep breeding, other species would breed less, so actually a planet full of vegan humans and with few nonhumans is what these people should advocate for. As mentioned earlier in this text, I find it strange that antinatalists are not EFILiests, but according to this logic it is even stranger that EFILiests would be antinatalists. They are supposed to be in favor of human reproduction to decrease the number of animals in nature.
But having said all that regarding the comparison between suffering in nature and human-caused suffering, taking this comparison seriously is as if I am implying that there are truly two options, human extinction and every sentient creature extinction.
Based on each and every single day along human history, it is more than certain to say that humanity would never ever make the ethical decision of global extinction. EFILism is not an option. Our choices are not between a world with no sentient creatures and a world with no humans, but between a world with no humans and our current one. I am all in favor of total extinction, but that is not going to happen. So we must choose human extinction or otherwise we’ll end up keeping and even intensifying the hell we live in today.
There are at least two additional arguments for human extinction as soon as possible that are worth addressing, but since currently they are rather speculative, I have decided not to include them as an integral part of the main text but as a supplementary appendix.
So to conclude, I am advocating for human extinction as soon as possible, not because other life forms are good, but because humanity is the worst life form ever, and who makes the life of every other life form even worse than it already is. It is the biggest problem which is also the most likely to be solved.
And obviously, the aspiration is that after successfully sterilizing the human race, we could turn, if possible, to also sterilize every other sentient species on earth in the time left before extinction. But in no way should that aspiration be at the expense of the most important and most urgent mission ever – human extinction.
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