The question of whether “sub-goal” x is the “simplest” or best “proxy” for our more ultimate goals doesn’t seem particularly useful and can be highly misleading, as in the example you chose. You conclude that promoting animal welfare is very probably not the best cause (because promoting empathy probably dominates it as a proxy), whereas we can’t say the same for promoting human welfare. But it could still be the case that promoting animal welfare is a better proxy than human welfare for far future flourishing, even though there’s a yet better intermediary in the case of animal welfare. The problem is that multiple descriptions of causes can be described, and we can generate multiple conflicting but practically uninformative statements about proxies and causes.
The takeaway isn’t supposed to be that people should switch from working to promote animal welfare to working to promote human welfare, but that they should switch from working to promote animal welfare to working to promote empathy.
The question of whether “sub-goal” x is the “simplest” or best “proxy” for our more ultimate goals doesn’t seem particularly useful and can be highly misleading, as in the example you chose. You conclude that promoting animal welfare is very probably not the best cause (because promoting empathy probably dominates it as a proxy), whereas we can’t say the same for promoting human welfare. But it could still be the case that promoting animal welfare is a better proxy than human welfare for far future flourishing, even though there’s a yet better intermediary in the case of animal welfare. The problem is that multiple descriptions of causes can be described, and we can generate multiple conflicting but practically uninformative statements about proxies and causes.
Of course it could be. I even said as much.
The takeaway isn’t supposed to be that people should switch from working to promote animal welfare to working to promote human welfare, but that they should switch from working to promote animal welfare to working to promote empathy.