This is a question I have asked myself for a long time, and that I don’t like asking myself, but that I find incredibly important. I’m less motivated to work on x-risks if in practice it means “supporting to continuation of factory farming for a long, long time”.
I also think that including this possibility into other cause areas might be very important. This advice especially seems very crucial : modeling the animal welfare impacts of human health and global development interventions.
I’ll note that while there are indeed massive uncertainties, I really have trouble seeing how the combined happiness of humanity might outweight the terrible suffering of farmed animals, since they are far more numerous and have far worse living conditions(although wild animal suffering might change everything). Especially since there are > 4x as many farmed chickens as humans, and > 10x more farmed fish and shrimp, with terrible living conditions.
Instinctively, of course, I think of humans as having more worth, and I like the idea of saving lives. But in practice, I don’t find good arguments to justify that humans have a much higher moral weight than other animals.
Thanks for the post !
This is a question I have asked myself for a long time, and that I don’t like asking myself, but that I find incredibly important. I’m less motivated to work on x-risks if in practice it means “supporting to continuation of factory farming for a long, long time”.
I also think that including this possibility into other cause areas might be very important. This advice especially seems very crucial : modeling the animal welfare impacts of human health and global development interventions.
I’ll note that while there are indeed massive uncertainties, I really have trouble seeing how the combined happiness of humanity might outweight the terrible suffering of farmed animals, since they are far more numerous and have far worse living conditions(although wild animal suffering might change everything). Especially since there are > 4x as many farmed chickens as humans, and > 10x more farmed fish and shrimp, with terrible living conditions.
Instinctively, of course, I think of humans as having more worth, and I like the idea of saving lives. But in practice, I don’t find good arguments to justify that humans have a much higher moral weight than other animals.