Fin Moorhouse asked something along these lines on Twitter. Pasting his question and my response below:
Fin: “Great article. I’m curious: are there estimates for how many extra fish deaths are caused by fishing wild-caught fish, especially high on the food chain (like tuna and salmon)? Seems complicated if fishing diminishes fish stocks and ∴ reduces predation in the long run?”
Me: “I didn’t come across any. I think this is an interesting line of reasoning, and it makes me a bit more uncertain about the ethics of wild-fishing, but ultimately, it doesn’t move me much.
Why?
1. If killing predators in the wild is good, why stop at fish? Why not systematically hunt tigers and lions to extinction? Some people bite this bullet, but I feel like we don’t know nearly enough to know what the welfare effects of such a large ecosystem change would be.
2. Given how clueless we are, I think that having clear signals that we care about the wellbeing of others is more robust than coming up with a byzantine diet where eating wild-caught predator fish is good, but eating other kids of fish is bad.
As our knowledge of the world gets better, I think diets like vegetarianism and veganism are more likely to lead to good welfare outcomes, both because they’re easier memes to spread & because someone eating wild-caught fish because they are predators may have motivated reasoning to keep eating them even when our understanding of the welfare effects change.
Fin Moorhouse asked something along these lines on Twitter. Pasting his question and my response below:
Fin: “Great article. I’m curious: are there estimates for how many extra fish deaths are caused by fishing wild-caught fish, especially high on the food chain (like tuna and salmon)? Seems complicated if fishing diminishes fish stocks and ∴ reduces predation in the long run?”
Me: “I didn’t come across any. I think this is an interesting line of reasoning, and it makes me a bit more uncertain about the ethics of wild-fishing, but ultimately, it doesn’t move me much.
Why?
1. If killing predators in the wild is good, why stop at fish? Why not systematically hunt tigers and lions to extinction? Some people bite this bullet, but I feel like we don’t know nearly enough to know what the welfare effects of such a large ecosystem change would be.
2. Given how clueless we are, I think that having clear signals that we care about the wellbeing of others is more robust than coming up with a byzantine diet where eating wild-caught predator fish is good, but eating other kids of fish is bad.
As our knowledge of the world gets better, I think diets like vegetarianism and veganism are more likely to lead to good welfare outcomes, both because they’re easier memes to spread & because someone eating wild-caught fish because they are predators may have motivated reasoning to keep eating them even when our understanding of the welfare effects change.