Do you think this is wrong or not? I think there’s a tendancy here to dodge the hard close to home potentially repugnant scenarios while having tunnel vision on the effects on animals.
I think increasing human mortality in high income countries is good nearterm (next few years) given the high consumption per capita of animal-based foods there. However, I do not know whether it is good or bad overall due to uncertain longer term effects (next few decades).
In practice, whether encouraging doctors to go on strike is good or bad does not matter. I want people to pursue not only good actions (relative to the conventionally neutral action of burning money), but also cost-effective actions, and I do not think going on strike would be the most cost-effective action for a doctor to help animals. A doctor in a high income country saves around “one or two” lives over their career, and I estimate one can neutralise the annual harms to animals of a random person in 2022 donating 2.98 $ to cage-free campaigns (and much less, just 0.0214 $, to the Shrimp Welfare Project). So, even assuming the harms per capita are kept constant (I guess they will tend to decrease in high income countries with further welfare reforms), for a life expectancy of 80 years, donating 358 $ (= (1 + 2)/2*80*2.98) to cage-free campaigns is enough to neutralise the negative impacts on farmed animals of the career of a doctor in a high income country. A doctor in such a country caring about animals can easily donate way more than that to cage-free campaigns. So they should focus on increasing their donations to the best animal welfare organisations to help animals as much as possible. I think going on a strike would slow down their career progression in expectation, or make them loose their job at worst, and therefore decrease their future income and donations. I would say doctors caring about animals should mostly optimise to save as many human lives as possible because that will tend to result in a faster career progression, and therefore greater earnings and donations.
To square this circle I think there needs to be more emphasis on what the meat eating problem would actually mean if taken seriously in Western countries as well.
If the meat eating problem was broadly taken seriously, negative factory-farming would quickly vanish (people who take it serious follow plant-based diets even now despite this being very uncommon in the general population), and therefore there would be no worries about saving human lives.
“I think increasing human mortality in high income countries is good nearterm (next few years) given the high consumption per capita of animal-based foods there. However, I do not know whether it is good or bad overall due to uncertain longer term effects (next few decades).”
Thanks Vasco I appreciate the honesty here, but find this extremely chilling.
I think increasing human mortality in high income countries is good nearterm (next few years) given the high consumption per capita of animal-based foods there. However, I do not know whether it is good or bad overall due to uncertain longer term effects (next few decades).
In practice, whether encouraging doctors to go on strike is good or bad does not matter. I want people to pursue not only good actions (relative to the conventionally neutral action of burning money), but also cost-effective actions, and I do not think going on strike would be the most cost-effective action for a doctor to help animals. A doctor in a high income country saves around “one or two” lives over their career, and I estimate one can neutralise the annual harms to animals of a random person in 2022 donating 2.98 $ to cage-free campaigns (and much less, just 0.0214 $, to the Shrimp Welfare Project). So, even assuming the harms per capita are kept constant (I guess they will tend to decrease in high income countries with further welfare reforms), for a life expectancy of 80 years, donating 358 $ (= (1 + 2)/2*80*2.98) to cage-free campaigns is enough to neutralise the negative impacts on farmed animals of the career of a doctor in a high income country. A doctor in such a country caring about animals can easily donate way more than that to cage-free campaigns. So they should focus on increasing their donations to the best animal welfare organisations to help animals as much as possible. I think going on a strike would slow down their career progression in expectation, or make them loose their job at worst, and therefore decrease their future income and donations. I would say doctors caring about animals should mostly optimise to save as many human lives as possible because that will tend to result in a faster career progression, and therefore greater earnings and donations.
If the meat eating problem was broadly taken seriously, negative factory-farming would quickly vanish (people who take it serious follow plant-based diets even now despite this being very uncommon in the general population), and therefore there would be no worries about saving human lives.
“I think increasing human mortality in high income countries is good nearterm (next few years) given the high consumption per capita of animal-based foods there. However, I do not know whether it is good or bad overall due to uncertain longer term effects (next few decades).”
Thanks Vasco I appreciate the honesty here, but find this extremely chilling.