Upvoting this interesting post, but strongly disagree that it’s positive-EV to hold off on eliminating factory farming. There’s a chance that holding off could result in larger long-term gains for sentient-being-welfare by forcing us to more explicitly codify moral reasons for getting rid of factory farming. But I think this is almost certainly outweighed by the much lower chance of actually getting it abolished for moral reasons alone.
Also, re: how future generations are likely to view factory farming elimination—I think the strong tendency is for most humans to ascribe a moral dimension to historical events that actually had more complex economic/political/geographic causes.
Thanks for the comment! It’s a strong argument. And my last point in the post seems to be making the same point and suggest that my post might actually be useless. What do you think, though, if we also think about the possibilities of other types of factory farming (not for food)? Particularly, if it is possible for them to be orders or magnitude larger in scale than current FFFF?
Yes, there’s a tendency. But there were case we pretty much ascribe it to pure economics. I think the consensus is that the horse advocates didn’t even play a tiny bit in replacing horses being transport, and that it was the invention and mass production of automobiles.
Upvoting this interesting post, but strongly disagree that it’s positive-EV to hold off on eliminating factory farming. There’s a chance that holding off could result in larger long-term gains for sentient-being-welfare by forcing us to more explicitly codify moral reasons for getting rid of factory farming. But I think this is almost certainly outweighed by the much lower chance of actually getting it abolished for moral reasons alone.
Also, re: how future generations are likely to view factory farming elimination—I think the strong tendency is for most humans to ascribe a moral dimension to historical events that actually had more complex economic/political/geographic causes.
Thanks for the comment! It’s a strong argument. And my last point in the post seems to be making the same point and suggest that my post might actually be useless. What do you think, though, if we also think about the possibilities of other types of factory farming (not for food)? Particularly, if it is possible for them to be orders or magnitude larger in scale than current FFFF?
Yes, there’s a tendency. But there were case we pretty much ascribe it to pure economics. I think the consensus is that the horse advocates didn’t even play a tiny bit in replacing horses being transport, and that it was the invention and mass production of automobiles.