Notes
The following text explores, in a speculative manner, the evolutionary question: Did high-intensity affective states, specifically Pain, emerge early in evolutionary history, or did they develop gradually over time?
Note: We are not neuroscientists; our work draws on our evolutionary biology background and our efforts to develop welfare metrics that accurately reflect reality and effectively reduce suffering. We hope these ideas may interest researchers in neuroscience, comparative cognition, and animal welfare science.
This discussion is part of a broader manuscript in progress, focusing on interspecific comparisons of affective capacities—a critical question for advancing animal welfare science and estimating the Welfare Footprint of animal-sourced products.
Key points
Ultimate question: Do primitive sentient organisms experience extreme pain intensities, or fine-grained pain intensity discrimination, or both?
Scientific framing: Pain functions as a biological signalling system that guides behavior by encoding motivational importance. The evolution of Pain signalling —its intensity range and resolution (i.e., the granularity with which differences in Pain intensity can be perceived)— can be viewed as an optimization problem, where neural architectures must balance computational efficiency, survival-driven signal prioritization, and adaptive flexibility.
Mathematical clarification: Resolution is a fundamental requirement for encoding and processing information. Pain varies not only in overall intensity but also in granularity—how finely intensity levels can be distinguished.
Hypothetical Evolutionary Pathways: by analysing affective intensity (low, high) and resolution (low, high) as independent dimensions, we describe four illustrative evolutionary scenarios that provide a structured framework to examine whether primitive sentient organisms can experience Pain of high intensity, nuanced affective intensities, both, or neither.
Introdu
Answering this or similar questions will be challenging for any worldview that takes into account second-order and long-run consequences of actions, not just negative utilitarianism.
Saving a child has many such effects that will be very difficult to account for: not just effects on loved ones but also effects on the ecosystem, climate change, demand for meat, the economy more generally, etc. So assessing the grief experienced by loved ones is probably only a small piece of the answer to your overall question. At the same time, it might be particularly salient or important because the bond is personal and irreplaceable. If this life is not saved, we can do little to offset that harm.
For what it’s worth, a negative utilitarian theory might also include the frustration of preferences in the evaluation of an action. To the extent that the child wants to continue living, this would provide reasons to save them, even by negative utilitarian lights. Whether this is a decisive reason is another matter of course.
If you do find negative utilitarianism or other suffering-focused views compelling, I think it makes more sense to ask the question: according to this view, what could be the very best thing I could be doing with my time and money? Most people who have asked this question have come up with interventions that seem much more impactful than saving lives directly -- regardless of whether the latter would overall be a good thing. Here is one person's attempt to answer this very difficult question: https://reducing-suffering.org/