vegan advocacy [...] has a lot of ambiguous effects on wild animal suffering (which don’t seem more “speculative”, given the fairly robust-seeming arguments Tomasik has written about)
I’d be curious to hear more about this. What are the robust-seeming arguments?
The “lower meat production” ⇒ “higher net primary productivity” ⇒ “higher wild animal suffering” connection seems robust to me. Or not that much less robust than the intended benefit, at least.
This might not be the place for a discussion of this, but I personally don’t feel that the “robustness” of Tomasikian chain of reasoning you note here is similar to the “robustness” of the idea that factory farms contain a crazy amount of suffering.
In the first instance, the specific chain of arrows above seems quite speculative, since we really have no idea how land use would change in a world with no factory farming. Are we that confident net primary productivity will increase? I’m aware there are good arguments for it, but I’d be surprised if someone couldn’t come up with good arguments against if they tried.
More importantly, I don’t think that’s a sufficient reasoning chain to demonstrate that wild animal effects dominate? You’d need to show that wild+farmed animal welfare on post-factory farmed land uses is lower than wild+farmed animal welfare on current land uses, and that seems very sensitive to specific claims about moral weights, weights between types of suffering, empirical information about wild animal quality of life, what it means for a life to be net-negative, etc.
Or am I misunderstanding what you mean by robustness? I’ve just finished reading your unawareness sequence and mostly feel clueless about everything, including what it could mean for a reasoning chain to be robust.
Sorry this wasn’t clear! I wasn’t thinking about the choice between fully eliminating factory farming vs. the status quo. I had in mind marginal decreased demand for animal products leading to marginal decreased land use (in expectation), which I do think we have a fairly simple and well-evidenced mechanism for.
I also didn’t mean to say the wild animal effects dominate, just that they’re large enough to be competitive with the farmed animal effects. I agree the tradeoffs between e.g. cow or chicken suffering vs. wild insect suffering seem ambiguous. (And yep, from a non-suffering-focused perspective, it would also plausibly be ambiguous whether increased wild insect populations are bad.)
(I think when I wrote the above comment, I was thinking of pretty coarse-grained buckets of “robustness” vs “speculativeness”.)
I’d be curious to hear more about this. What are the robust-seeming arguments?
The “lower meat production” ⇒ “higher net primary productivity” ⇒ “higher wild animal suffering” connection seems robust to me. Or not that much less robust than the intended benefit, at least.
This might not be the place for a discussion of this, but I personally don’t feel that the “robustness” of Tomasikian chain of reasoning you note here is similar to the “robustness” of the idea that factory farms contain a crazy amount of suffering.
In the first instance, the specific chain of arrows above seems quite speculative, since we really have no idea how land use would change in a world with no factory farming. Are we that confident net primary productivity will increase? I’m aware there are good arguments for it, but I’d be surprised if someone couldn’t come up with good arguments against if they tried.
More importantly, I don’t think that’s a sufficient reasoning chain to demonstrate that wild animal effects dominate? You’d need to show that wild+farmed animal welfare on post-factory farmed land uses is lower than wild+farmed animal welfare on current land uses, and that seems very sensitive to specific claims about moral weights, weights between types of suffering, empirical information about wild animal quality of life, what it means for a life to be net-negative, etc.
Or am I misunderstanding what you mean by robustness? I’ve just finished reading your unawareness sequence and mostly feel clueless about everything, including what it could mean for a reasoning chain to be robust.
Sorry this wasn’t clear! I wasn’t thinking about the choice between fully eliminating factory farming vs. the status quo. I had in mind marginal decreased demand for animal products leading to marginal decreased land use (in expectation), which I do think we have a fairly simple and well-evidenced mechanism for.
I also didn’t mean to say the wild animal effects dominate, just that they’re large enough to be competitive with the farmed animal effects. I agree the tradeoffs between e.g. cow or chicken suffering vs. wild insect suffering seem ambiguous. (And yep, from a non-suffering-focused perspective, it would also plausibly be ambiguous whether increased wild insect populations are bad.)
(I think when I wrote the above comment, I was thinking of pretty coarse-grained buckets of “robustness” vs “speculativeness”.)