I’d be interested to know: do you think your view would be different if you saw the past few hundred years as a period when one group of animals gained a great deal of power, which they used (1) to make their own lives much better and (2) to subject a much larger number of other animals to a great deal of suffering, mainly in order to be able to eat them?
I’m not making an argument that this is the right way of seeing things, though it doesn’t seem crazy to me. I’m also not arguing that, if this view is accurate, it’s sensible just to project it into the future (ie improvements in human lives will be accompanied by ever-greater suffering of other animals). I’m just drawing attention to the way that, in what you write, you focus on the ways that human lives have improved recently, and that we might expect this to continue, given the ways human societies work, with things being passed on to future generations (knowledge, habits, organisations, material goods); without paying any attention to how this process has also involved inflicting a great deal of suffering on other animals.
It might be that including other animals in the picture makes one feel more ambivalent about the process of development in human societies which we have benefited so richly from, and more wary about what supporting and accelerating this process will bring (the ‘human lives getting better’ strand which you seem to value highly for benefits long into the future). Or it might be that the suffering of animals is seen as a separate, contingent fact about a narrow period which doesn’t have any lessons for what we should expect in the future. Do you have a sense one way or the other? (Perhaps you can’t answer if you don’t share the premise that lots of animals have suffered as humans have become more powerful, and that this matters.)
I don’t think that this necessarily affects the argument that targeting changes in how humans act now is likely to be more important than targeting changes in how animals live now, since the human changes are more likely to be passed on long into the future in some form, and good changes might well have good effects long into the future. But when you write ‘I do think that optimising for long-term animal welfare is not the best place to stop in picking an instrumental goal, because it’s quite hard to see how things affect it.’, you seem to be saying that it’s hard to know what would affect the well-being of non-human animals in the long term, in contrast to things that would affect the well-being of humans in the long term. Having a sense of the mixture of gain and suffering across all animals from recent human development might
(1) draw attention to the importance of asking about the long-run well-being of all animals, human and not
(2) make one wonder about whether the future well-being of human and non-human animals are completely independent (thus, better to focus on humans since one can be more confident in the long-run effects) or if there might be an enduring negative relationship
(3) make it less difficult to see what might affect long-term animal welfare (eg more empathy for non-human animals among humans in the short term)
Great questions. I’m afraid I won’t do justice to them properly here, but I’ll give a quick answer with my opinions without too much justification.
I think that empowering humans tends to:
(i) increase their influence over the world;
(ii) improve their values.
Over the past few hundred years, the effect of (i) has significantly outweighed the effect of (ii) on animal welfare (in a way which may or may not be positive after you account for the effects on wild animals). My best guess is that going forwards this will be true for a while longer, but eventually (ii) will come to dominate (humans like to think of themselves as having nice values, and when we’re wealthy enough that it’s cheap to act on this I expect them to do so). I would like to have a better understanding of this dynamic, though.
Owen,
Thanks for the two pieces.
I’d be interested to know: do you think your view would be different if you saw the past few hundred years as a period when one group of animals gained a great deal of power, which they used (1) to make their own lives much better and (2) to subject a much larger number of other animals to a great deal of suffering, mainly in order to be able to eat them?
I’m not making an argument that this is the right way of seeing things, though it doesn’t seem crazy to me. I’m also not arguing that, if this view is accurate, it’s sensible just to project it into the future (ie improvements in human lives will be accompanied by ever-greater suffering of other animals). I’m just drawing attention to the way that, in what you write, you focus on the ways that human lives have improved recently, and that we might expect this to continue, given the ways human societies work, with things being passed on to future generations (knowledge, habits, organisations, material goods); without paying any attention to how this process has also involved inflicting a great deal of suffering on other animals.
It might be that including other animals in the picture makes one feel more ambivalent about the process of development in human societies which we have benefited so richly from, and more wary about what supporting and accelerating this process will bring (the ‘human lives getting better’ strand which you seem to value highly for benefits long into the future). Or it might be that the suffering of animals is seen as a separate, contingent fact about a narrow period which doesn’t have any lessons for what we should expect in the future. Do you have a sense one way or the other? (Perhaps you can’t answer if you don’t share the premise that lots of animals have suffered as humans have become more powerful, and that this matters.)
I don’t think that this necessarily affects the argument that targeting changes in how humans act now is likely to be more important than targeting changes in how animals live now, since the human changes are more likely to be passed on long into the future in some form, and good changes might well have good effects long into the future. But when you write ‘I do think that optimising for long-term animal welfare is not the best place to stop in picking an instrumental goal, because it’s quite hard to see how things affect it.’, you seem to be saying that it’s hard to know what would affect the well-being of non-human animals in the long term, in contrast to things that would affect the well-being of humans in the long term. Having a sense of the mixture of gain and suffering across all animals from recent human development might
(1) draw attention to the importance of asking about the long-run well-being of all animals, human and not
(2) make one wonder about whether the future well-being of human and non-human animals are completely independent (thus, better to focus on humans since one can be more confident in the long-run effects) or if there might be an enduring negative relationship
(3) make it less difficult to see what might affect long-term animal welfare (eg more empathy for non-human animals among humans in the short term)
Great questions. I’m afraid I won’t do justice to them properly here, but I’ll give a quick answer with my opinions without too much justification.
I think that empowering humans tends to: (i) increase their influence over the world; (ii) improve their values.
Over the past few hundred years, the effect of (i) has significantly outweighed the effect of (ii) on animal welfare (in a way which may or may not be positive after you account for the effects on wild animals). My best guess is that going forwards this will be true for a while longer, but eventually (ii) will come to dominate (humans like to think of themselves as having nice values, and when we’re wealthy enough that it’s cheap to act on this I expect them to do so). I would like to have a better understanding of this dynamic, though.