Ask A Genius 1334: Pet Ethics, Abstract Universes, and the Golden Rule
Author(s): Rick Rosner and Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2025/05/05
Rick Rosner: One more topic. Our brown dog—she’s 14 years old—has geriatric vestibular disorder. One or more of her Eustachian tubes gets blocked, which causes dizziness, head tilt, and circular walking. It is concerning and inconvenient to manage.
She gets nauseated from the vertigo and has difficulty eating because she cannot properly position her head to reach her food. The entire situation is frustrating. That said, some people might consider euthanasia at this point, but we are not doing that. She is not suffering. Apart from the head tilt—which usually resolves in about 10 days to two weeks—she is in decent shape.
So she should be fine for a while once this clears up. It got me thinking about the ethical rules for keeping pets alive. The basic principle is the Golden Rule: if a pet is still enjoying life, it’s wrong to put them down just because they’re inconvenient.
Of course, cost can become a legitimate factor. If it costs $20,000 to keep a cat alive for three more months, that may override a strict application of the Golden Rule for many people.
In general, though, we treat our pets the way we would want to be treated. And, in practice, we often keep them alive a little longer than we probably should—not because they’re still enjoying life, but because we enjoy having them around.
But the Golden Rule gets complicated when it comes to meat animals. There’s a contradiction between valuing our pets’ well-being and how we treat animals raised for food. Still, the Golden Rule is the foundation of moral analysis. Without it, it becomes difficult to build any coherent ethical structure.
Most people enjoy being alive and want to continue living. That intuitive preference forms the basis for many moral judgments—about what is valuable and what is not. That leads back to something we’ve discussed for a long time: IC. Part of IC involves imagining the set of all possible moments that could exist—across all possible universes.
As individuals, what we value is the continuation of moments within our own personal universe. If you consider each mind as its own universe, we want those minds to keep generating moments. We want those universes to persist.
You could try to derive value from the existence of the universe itself, but if there’s already a set of all possible universes—existing in an abstract, mathematical sense—then our arguments for creating more moments become less compelling. That set exists regardless of our subjective preferences.
It becomes hard to justify any one universe or moment as inherently valuable. You are left making value judgments about abstractions—like numbers—which is philosophically strange. You do not hear people debating whether numbers are good or bad. Numbers just exist—abstractly.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Of course, there were people centuries ago who argued that numbers were evil, even the work of the devil. Those kinds of beliefs basically helped end entire civilizations.
Rosner: Right. But we moved beyond that.
Jacobsen: Yeah. I think Neil deGrasse Tyson pointed this out—probably close to twenty years ago—at the Beyond Belief conference. He argued that this turning point marked the decline of the Islamic Golden Age under the caliphate.
Rosner: I can see that argument. Some sects of Islam prohibit depicting living beings, as that is considered the domain of God. So the rejection of numbers might follow a similar logic: numbers give humans too much control over the world—control that should belong to God. That makes sense. It’s about limiting what humans can claim authority over.
Rosner: Right. But here’s something else: what if the rules of existence were so strict that nothing could exist—absolutely nothing? You could try to argue that such a state would be bad, based on the Golden Rule—we enjoy existing, so nonexistence would be undesirable. But that argument falls apart because if nothing could exist, there would be no framework within which to make the judgment. No tools, no perspectives—just the absence of everything, including value judgments. It is disturbing to imagine a kind of absolute nothingness so complete that it cannot even be evaluated. Comments?
Jacobsen: I will leave the commentary to the beings in that universe. But that is the point—there are no beings, no universe. That was rhetorical. It ties into a broader point that’s been made many times. When people ask, “Where is all the life?” the answer might be: in other universes, where life did not emerge. And since there are no observers in those universes, there’s no one to ask the question.
So we happen to be in a universe where we can ask. In that sense, it is a kind of mathematical or probabilistic solipsism—a “spiritual solipsism,” if you follow Ann Druyan, Carl Sagan’s widow.
Rosner: Or even certain Buddhist ideas. It is also related to the weak anthropic principle.
Jacobsen: And the point is to frame these ideas in accessible terms—without needing to invoke concepts that might sound like neologisms to the average American ear, even if they are not.
Rosner: Understood.
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