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This is a great post.

Personally, I am most interested in this topic:

AS advocacy is a form of moral circle expansion (MCE), an increase in the number of beings given moral consideration, such as legal protection.^[7] Therefore, questions that affect the prioritization of MCE could also affect the prioritization of AS.

Personally, I believe that until we have moral acceptance and genuine legal protections for sentient non-human animals, there will be significant barriers for AS. I also believe that adding non-human animals to the moral circle can and should be a near-term achievement.

Thanks for writing this Jamie!

Concerning the “SHOULD WE FOCUS ON MORAL CIRCLE EXPANSION?” question, I think something like the following sub-question is also relevant: Will MCE lead to a “near miss” of the values we want to spread?

Magnus Vinding (2018) argues that someone who cares about a given sentient being, is absolutely not guaranteed to wish what we think is the best for this sentient being. While he argues from a suffering-focused perspective, the problem is still the same from any ethical framework.
For instance, future people who “care” about wild animals and AS, will likely care about things that have nothing to do with their subjective experiences (e.g., their “freedom” or their “right to life”), which might lead them to do things that are arguably bad (e.g., creating a lot of faithful simulations of the Amazon rainforest), although well intentioned.
Even in a scenario where most people genuinely care about the welfare of non-humans, their standards to consider such welfare positive might be incredibly low.