When must we kill them? Now. Later. Continuously. Infinitely.
A very specific trigger warning: Noah Smith, if you ever see this, please do proceed with caution.
Based on a true story.
A favorite pastime of mine is wandering about in nature’s splendor. The whole experience is delightful: The planning, the topo maps, the gear setup, the drive, the type II hedonism of light, voluntary suffering at an oxygen-deprived altitude. The locomoting while chatting with friends, or solitarily listening to a podcast. The sheer adventure of exploring the Earth. Fun for the whole internal family of experiencing and remembering selves. My ancestors studied hunting and gathering and then agricultural science so that I might have liberty to study an approximation of hunting and gathering. And it’s a great way to stay in shape.
So there I was at the edge of civilization when it all happened, on approach to the trailhead to climb a mountain. Driving my still-quite-new, designed-overseas-but-made-in-America, symmetrical all-wheel drive, turbocharged, off-roading family station wagon (practical and a blast to drive). Digesting my favorite fast food breakfast—a superstimulus of sweet and savory delight, and purchased at a heavy discount. Drinking my favorite artificially sweetened mountain beverage (zero, not diet). Listening to one of my favorite podcasts. Wearing my new, limited-edition desert boots of ethically sourced exotic leather, designed by hippy shoemakers across the ocean, and made in a different country across the other ocean to take advantage of market efficiencies.
Peak human experience really. Brought to me by globalism.
The weather was perfect. There was just a bit more pavement, passing some cabins by, and then a few dusty miles up the canyon. What a great day. All my problems were behind me for the moment.
Up ahead, I noticed some fresh roadkill in the other lane. Probably a jackrabbit; could be a racoon or maybe a skunk though, with the nearby streams. Or a cat. Sad.
Ah well, so it goes. Happens all the time. I don’t even have to adjust course to avoid it. Onward and upward.
The long ears of the prostrate jackrabbit twitched.
Fuck.
I thought. Loudly.
That was not the wind as I passed next to it.
For I had seen a twitch; I knew it, and I knew that (nature’s) god knew it, and I could not deny it, neither dared I do it; at least I knew that by so doing I would offend (nature’s) god, and come under condemnation.
“FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK!” I shouted to myself in particular.
“FUCK fuck Fuck!” I fired for effect as I pulled off the road. The concept of moral luck briefly traversed my thoughts. I had been called and chosen.
What kind of monster just drives away? You had an accident; you chose to flee the scene. Finish what you started. Do your moral duty. You break it, you need to make sure the animal bought it.
I instantaneously had realized there was no alternative. Hence my reaction. (You probably did too. Self-evident, really. It’s no trolley problem.) All I could do was evaluate means, not the end. Still, I employed various moral heuristics in rapid succession to calculate the expected value of my options, hoping I could conceive of a way around the clear implications for the sum total of utility in the universe. And my seemingly obligatory role in it by dint of happenstance.
I know the unit of caring is dollars, but what is the unit of suffering?[1] Do we measure that per second? Log-scale magnitude maybe adjusted by neuron count? Who is my moral patient? A moral person’s a moral person no matter how small. The Life You Can End. Killing What We Can. Time Is Up Decision Theory. What would the best version of myself do? What would someone with 10X my agency do? Actually, scratch that; seems unlikely to go well if I try something drastic like taking this little guy to an emergency vet on Sunday in rural America. Can you imagine a jackrabbit with those wheelchair hind legs? I can’t really justify Make-a-Wish, Roadkill Rescue Edition. It is better that one rabbit should perish than that a budget should dwindle and perish in veterinary bills.
After modeling my utility function, the rabbit’s utility function, and the utility function of an infinite, uncaring impartial universalist, I found no alternative.
Consequentialism can be a real hassle sometimes. But I don’t believe deontology or virtue ethics would provide me an out here either. All models are wrong; some are useful. Ethics is knowing the difference. And supererogation just wasn’t going to cut it any way I sliced it.
I got out of the car. Thinking step-by-step.
Alright, how am I going to do it? There are cabins right over there and plenty of recreationists within earshot. Well that’s unfortunate. The modular emergency shovel kit with the axe head attachment it is, then. Visceral. How am I going to handle it? I do have work gloves. What are the odds I’ll make a clean kill with a single blow; how traumatic was that going to be for everyone? Model the scenario using your inner simulator; how do you fail? Gruesome.
I approached the perfectly still jackrabbit to confirm the status of its existence. It was definitely alive. Still, small, silent, stoic; cipher in the road.
It moved. The poor creature. Paralyzed from the waist down, using its forelegs to drag itself across the road away from me. Clear and present danger that I was.
I regretted immediately and immensely—a full-body sensation—that I had inadvertently caused this suffering innocent creature of (nature’s) god further pain. Ah, the sharp pang of guilt and pity. I can still feel a little every time I reread the paragraph above. Further introspection ensued.
It’s in no way my fault that I have no means to comfort it. No way to explain that it is a victim of the cumulation of some billions of years of blind watchmaking, thousands of years of human technological development, and just over a century of the automobile industry. That neither nature nor nurture prepared it for dealing with several thousand pounds of motorcar traveling at 20+ MPH. There is no affordance provided by nature to transmit, let alone justify, to this conscious creature that its utility is negative, with no realistic way to rectify that, and so we must select our least bad option—the merciful, rapid onset of everlasting darkness. “Who is ‘we’ here?” it could not ask.
No evident bleeding. It had been there long enough to have left some pellets, but probably not all that long. (Scavengers and all that.) At least I wasn’t going to have to move it myself off the road now. I felt sorrow at the absurd tragedy of it all. It wasn’t dust in my eye, since as previously described I was still on a paved road.
Why even feel sorrow here? It won’t help anyone. No call for it. It’s not like I haven’t in my youth hunted his coethnics for sport and pest control. For the greater good. For crying out loud. Hell, at the little zoo yesterday my primary takeaway was “I should really try out coyote hunting.”[2] Had the bunny been a bit more than mostly dead, I wouldn’t have had a second thought; not another quale expended on the problem of roadkill and moral justice of the universe. Neither priest nor saint, I routinely consume unethically sourced animal products with no regard for consumee welfare. Emotion for a wild animal, but not a farm animal? Some animals really are more equal than others. Monster that I am, the boots on my feet are almost certainly more ethically sourced than my breakfast. I don’t think anyone factory farms camels, anyway. Frankly, I have no right to feel such emotion here, on top of it being pointless. Could I have felt differently? But I did have breakfast this morning.
Reframe: I get to. Embrace the suck. Just do it. Be present in the moment. Everything is finite. You can just do things. Do a good turn daily. YOLO. No regrets. Be all that you can’t be. This too shall pass. Semper Gumby. Spark joy. Count your many blessings, name them one by one. Be the change you want to see in the world. God helps those who help themselves (YMMV). There must be a pony in here somewhere. Lemons; lemonade. Choose the right. Well it matters to this one. Do unto others. Here am I; send me. Only you can prevent forest utility fires. Called to serve him heavenly king of utility maximization. You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take. Do what is right; let the consequences follow. Execution is everything.
Hunt the good stuff: Wild animals, of course, typically die a grim natural death, so this is maybe even significantly better than par for the course. Except for the emotional downsides of my involvement, anyway. Optimistically, given that it has mostly held so still, it can’t feel the full extent of its injuries due to paralysis and/or shock. Just some confused panic I’m exacerbating. God I hope that’s true. Let that be true. A tender mercy. Please.
“Fuck, fuck, fuck,” I continued to narrate for no one but myself as I walked back to the car, rifled through my cargo organizer, assembled my modular hatchet, and walked back to the side of the road. I looked down at the poor bunny, hatchet in hand, planning my next move. Summoning the final bit of free will to do what had to be done. I contemplated the Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics.
Sorry, Brer Rabbit. Yours, upon examination, is not a life worth living. Nor worth saving. A brief map recon of the moral landscape shows you are in a deep depression. Your revealed preference is the will to live, but I think you should trust my superior reasoning as a lifeform with higher-order cognition that it’s in your best interest to stop doing that. I am so very sorry, however pointless an apology it may be, that you are a mere crippled bunny on a road and not a child drowning in a shallow pond. Or a pool, which is far more common. Facts don’t care about your feelings. Or mine, annoyingly. You’re just going to have to take it on faith that if you could somehow walk a mile in my fancy boots you would concur with my planned course of action. Knowing me, knowing you, it’s the best I can do. I would hope any eventual AGI finding itself in similar circumstances would give me the same courtesy.[3]
A black SUV approached.
Great, an audience.
A man in sunglasses with flowing locks pulled up, window down. I didn’t even take note of the make/model, as I would otherwise automatically do if I hadn’t been so task oriented on the axe in my hand.
Injured?Yeah, hind legs are paralyzed. I’d shoot it but for the houses.I think I’d prefer to shoot it if it was me.I momentarily reconsidered tradeoffs and re-estimated the utils balance of my options. Sure would be easier to use a bullet. It’s cleaner. What’s the point of rural America, after all, if a solitary gunshot is a big deal? I appreciated the second opinion. The solidarity. The permission. I updated my priors.
Yeah. You’ve convinced me. I’m going to get some ear pro.He drove off. I walked off to get my Chinese-made, wired, Bluetooth headphones with like 40 hours of battery life. Excellent product. And they are good enough ear plugs.
Improvise, adapt, overcome.
“Fuck!” I exclaimed again as I approached the decrepit critter and unholstered my sidearm. Never before had it been used for its intended purpose—launching a 9mm +P, 124-grain, jacketed hollow point bullet at just over the speed of sound toward a living being.
Judge; jury; executioner. By the power vested in me by the state of nature and almighty (nature’s) god, I declare you a hedonistic outlaw. This ends today. I think therefore I am going to kill you. I am (a natural) god’s army of one. A lion does not concern himself with the opinion of scapegoats. Angel of mercy killing. Wabbit season. Now I am become Death, the destroyer of inner worlds. Hop little bunny, hop hop hop. The one mighty and strong. Blood loss aversion. Why did the jackrabbit cross the road? It could not have done otherwise. For the life of the flesh is in the blood: and I have given it to you upon the altar to make an atonement for your souls: for it is the blood that maketh an atonement for the soul. By all means necessary. What makes the green grass grow? Who, whom? Am I my brother’s zookeeper?
I aimed, closed my eyes, and squeezed the trigger.
You are no longer the author of your thoughts. Even the illusion of the illusion of the self is gone. There’s no “there” there. What would it take to change your mind to mush? The circle of life. Dust in the wind. Moral hazard lights at the end of the tunnel. From carbon to carbon. Next year in Watership Down. All’s well that ends well. In the long run we’re all dead. May your memory be a blessing. Till we meet again.
The canyon echoed. I opened my eyes. The suffering had ended. Entropy had increased. Rumination had begun.
Mission accomplished, at the cost of about 60 cents, a few minutes, and some overthinking. I transitioned to my spare magazine, holstered my weapons, and walked back to the car. My outfit was unblemished. A whiff of gunpowder was in the air.
I started up the mountain. Given the rumination, I opted for music instead of my usual podcast. The ancient ballad I happened to listen to helpfully reminded me:
There’s a time to live, a time to die,
But isn’t it strange,
As soon as you’re born, you’re dying.
On the summit, I ate crackers and drank protein as I cogitated and surveyed 360 degrees of a beautiful land of desolation. Another guy summited. He had the sniffles. The absolute son of a bitch. I put my other earbud in.
A fair bit above the tree line though I was, a ladybug landed on my hand as I typed notes for this essay. Despite the breeze, it stayed until I put the little lady on the rocks as I prepared to depart.
I demountained. On the drive out of the canyon, I saw up ahead a jackrabbit cross the road.[4]
It got to the other side.
Then I drove about 30 minutes to civilization and ate the best commonly available hamburger at a steep discount. I hope it was a happy cow. All in all, I had been pretty lucky. This had been a clear-cut moral situation. It’s not like I happened across a beehive, let alone a shrimp farm.[5]
Apparently, the unit of suffering is the dolor. Of all things. My knowledge of negative utilitarianism is clearly lacking.
This event happened last year. Since then I have, in theory, become a coyote hunter. The worst one in the world, probably. More “heavily armed birdwatching” in practice.
A poor paralyzed rabbit of grief
hath today crossed me on my way,
who sued so humbly for relief
that I could never answer nay.
I had not power to ask his name;
yet there was something in his ears
that won my concern. I knew why.
I spied him where a motorcar burst.
Clear from the road, his strength was gone.
The heedless universe mocked his pain;
he heard me, saw me, wriggling on.
I walked and raised the handgun up.
The flesh was weak; my blood ran chill,
but my free spirit cried, “I will.”
Once from the gun his life drained out.
Clipped, wounded, beaten nigh to death,
I found him by the highway side.
I flatlined his pulse, extinguished his breath,
released his spirit and supplied relief.
Gun, bullet, impact—he was deceased;
and sorrow bound up my broken heart.
Then in a moment to my view,
the ASI started from disguise;
the tokens in his neural net I knew;
the scapegoat stood before mine eyes.
He spake, and my poor name he named:
“Of me thou hast not been ashamed;
these deeds shall thy memorial be;
fear not, thou didst them unto me.”
(With apologies to James Montgomery, among others.)
Full disclosure, it was more likely a ground squirrel of some sort. Please forgive me this poetic license.
If the going rate to save a human life is ~$5k, what’s the going rate for indulgences to make up for all of the animals I consume? About $300 a year for a carnivore offset, apparently. That’s pretty affordable actually. Just ~$24k over an 80-year life span to guiltlessly consume from Pascal’s Endless Shrimp Buffet.
This is such a horrible situation to find yourself in, I'm so sorry.
While it seemed obvious to you that there was no alternative, I'm sure many many people wouldn't have stopped, nor tried to do what they thought best. Thank you for doing that.
I appreciate your sympathy, though I am pretty sure I don't deserve it!