Yeah, more research on questions like whether beef reduces net suffering would be extremely useful, both for my personal donation decisions and more importantly for potentially shifting the priorities of the animal movement overall. My worries about funging here ultimately derive from my thinking that the movement is missing some crucial considerations (or else just has different values from me), and the best way to fix that would be for more people to highlight those considerations.
I’m unsure how more research on the welfare of populous wild animals would shift people’s views. I guess relative to mainstream animal-rights ideology that says more wildlife is good, there’s only really room to move in a more pessimistic direction. But for people already thinking about wild-animal welfare, it’s less clear. To me it’s obvious that I would be horrified to be born as a random wild animal, but I’m often surprised by how little some classical utilitarians care about suffering relative to happiness.
This is one reason I’m more inclined these days to promote suffering-focused philosophy rather than generic antispeciesism. However, there aren’t that many ways to donate to suffering-focused philosophy at the moment, and depending on who is funded, that approach has its own possible downside risks. For example, I’ve considered whether the antinatalism movement could benefit from funding (because it’s people-rich and money-poor), but a lot of antinatalists are abrasive and may give suffering-focused ethics a bad name. Picking the right antinatalists (and other advocates of suffering-focused ethics) to fund would be a lot of work (but might be worth it). Also, this philosophy work doesn’t scratch my itch to have some amount of concrete suffering-reduction impact in the near term.
Yeah, more research on questions like whether beef reduces net suffering would be extremely useful, both for my personal donation decisions and more importantly for potentially shifting the priorities of the animal movement overall. My worries about funging here ultimately derive from my thinking that the movement is missing some crucial considerations (or else just has different values from me), and the best way to fix that would be for more people to highlight those considerations.
I’m unsure how more research on the welfare of populous wild animals would shift people’s views. I guess relative to mainstream animal-rights ideology that says more wildlife is good, there’s only really room to move in a more pessimistic direction. But for people already thinking about wild-animal welfare, it’s less clear. To me it’s obvious that I would be horrified to be born as a random wild animal, but I’m often surprised by how little some classical utilitarians care about suffering relative to happiness.
This is one reason I’m more inclined these days to promote suffering-focused philosophy rather than generic antispeciesism. However, there aren’t that many ways to donate to suffering-focused philosophy at the moment, and depending on who is funded, that approach has its own possible downside risks. For example, I’ve considered whether the antinatalism movement could benefit from funding (because it’s people-rich and money-poor), but a lot of antinatalists are abrasive and may give suffering-focused ethics a bad name. Picking the right antinatalists (and other advocates of suffering-focused ethics) to fund would be a lot of work (but might be worth it). Also, this philosophy work doesn’t scratch my itch to have some amount of concrete suffering-reduction impact in the near term.