What concerns me is that I suspect people rarely get deeply interested in the moral weight of animals unless they come in with an unusually high initial intuitive view.
I also suspect this, and have concerns about it, but in a very different way than you I speculate. More particularly, I am concerned by the “people rarely get deeply interested in the moral weight of animals ” part. This is problematic because for many actions humans do, there are consequences to animals (in many cases, huge consequences), and to act ethically, even for some non-conseuquentialists, it is essential to at least have some views about moral weights of animals.
But the issue isn’t only most people not being interested in investigating “moral weights” of animals, but that for people who don’t even bother to investigate, they don’t use the acknowledgement of uncertainty (and tools for dealing with uncertainty) to guide their actions—they assign, with complete confidence, 1 to each human and 0 to almost everyone else.
The above analysis, if I am only roughly correct, is crucial to our thinking about which direction to move people’s view is a correct one. If most people are already assigning animals with virtual 0s, where else can we go? Presumably moral weights can’t go negative, animals’ moral weights only have one place to go, unless most people were right—that all animals have moral weights of virtually 0.
“I would expect working as a junior person in a community of people who value animals highly would exert a large influence in that direction regardless of what the underlying truth.”
For the reasons above, I am extremely skeptical this is worthy of worry. I think unless it happens to be true that all animals have moral weights of virtually 0, it seems to me that “a community of people who value animals highly exerting a large influence in that direction regardless of what the underlying truth” is something that we should exactly hope for, rationally and ethically speaking. (emphasis on “regardless of what the underlying truth” is mine)
P.S. A potential pushback is that a very significant number of people clearly care about some animals, such as their companion animals. But I think we have to also look at actions with larger stakes. Most people, and even more so for a collection of people (such as famailies, companies, governments, charities, and movements), judging from their actions (eating animals, driving, animal experiments, large scale constructions) and reluctance to adjust their view regarding these actions, clearly assign a virtual 0 to the moral weights of most animals—they just chose a few species, maybe just a few individual animals, to rise to within one order of magnitude of difference in moral weight with humans. Also, even for common companion animals such as cats and dogs, many people are shown to assign much less moral weight to them when they are put into situations where they have to choose these animals against (sometimes trivial) human interests.
Thank you for the post!
I also suspect this, and have concerns about it, but in a very different way than you I speculate. More particularly, I am concerned by the “people rarely get deeply interested in the moral weight of animals ” part. This is problematic because for many actions humans do, there are consequences to animals (in many cases, huge consequences), and to act ethically, even for some non-conseuquentialists, it is essential to at least have some views about moral weights of animals.
But the issue isn’t only most people not being interested in investigating “moral weights” of animals, but that for people who don’t even bother to investigate, they don’t use the acknowledgement of uncertainty (and tools for dealing with uncertainty) to guide their actions—they assign, with complete confidence, 1 to each human and 0 to almost everyone else.
The above analysis, if I am only roughly correct, is crucial to our thinking about which direction to move people’s view is a correct one. If most people are already assigning animals with virtual 0s, where else can we go? Presumably moral weights can’t go negative, animals’ moral weights only have one place to go, unless most people were right—that all animals have moral weights of virtually 0.
For the reasons above, I am extremely skeptical this is worthy of worry. I think unless it happens to be true that all animals have moral weights of virtually 0, it seems to me that “a community of people who value animals highly exerting a large influence in that direction regardless of what the underlying truth” is something that we should exactly hope for, rationally and ethically speaking. (emphasis on “regardless of what the underlying truth” is mine)
P.S. A potential pushback is that a very significant number of people clearly care about some animals, such as their companion animals. But I think we have to also look at actions with larger stakes. Most people, and even more so for a collection of people (such as famailies, companies, governments, charities, and movements), judging from their actions (eating animals, driving, animal experiments, large scale constructions) and reluctance to adjust their view regarding these actions, clearly assign a virtual 0 to the moral weights of most animals—they just chose a few species, maybe just a few individual animals, to rise to within one order of magnitude of difference in moral weight with humans. Also, even for common companion animals such as cats and dogs, many people are shown to assign much less moral weight to them when they are put into situations where they have to choose these animals against (sometimes trivial) human interests.