How would you decide how to prioritize spending between humans and animals in a way that didn’t raise this issue? This feels to me like a disguised argument against any concern for animals whatsoever, since the actual numbers in the comparison aren’t really what’s generating the intuitive repugnance so much as the comparison at all, as evidenced by ‘faced with a dying baby or a billion dying insects you’d save the baby’. Is your view that all animals rights charity is creepy because the money could have been spent on people instead? Or just that making explicit that doing animal rights charity means not helping people instead, and so implies a view about trade-offs is creepy? Lying about why you’re doing what you’re doing is also, by definition, untrustworthy.
I also think what your doing is a bit sleazy here: you’re blurring the line, I think, between ‘even if this is right, it ought to be obvious to you that you should lie about it for PR reasons, you weirdo’ and ‘this is obviously ridiculous, as seen by the fact that normal people disagree’, so that you can’t get pinned by the objections to either individually. (They’re consistent, so you can believe both, but they are distinct.)
How would you decide how to prioritize spending between humans and animals in a way that didn’t raise this issue? This feels to me like a disguised argument against any concern for animals whatsoever, since the actual numbers in the comparison aren’t really what’s generating the intuitive repugnance so much as the comparison at all, as evidenced by ‘faced with a dying baby or a billion dying insects you’d save the baby’. Is your view that all animals rights charity is creepy because the money could have been spent on people instead? Or just that making explicit that doing animal rights charity means not helping people instead, and so implies a view about trade-offs is creepy? Lying about why you’re doing what you’re doing is also, by definition, untrustworthy.
I also think what your doing is a bit sleazy here: you’re blurring the line, I think, between ‘even if this is right, it ought to be obvious to you that you should lie about it for PR reasons, you weirdo’ and ‘this is obviously ridiculous, as seen by the fact that normal people disagree’, so that you can’t get pinned by the objections to either individually. (They’re consistent, so you can believe both, but they are distinct.)