I had never considered the first point regarding a local maximum—interesting thing to explore but I’m unsure, except perhaps in a more ideal world, that we are at all capable of consistently getting more than local maxes at times (and yeah dogs seem to be one of the best (easiest) one-time actions someone can take for their happiness (https://jamesclear.com/how-to-automate-a-habit), author surveys his own audience and they produce this tidbit and it matches my intuition).
And this sort of strikes me of my impression of dog-free (or pet-free?) as a movement overall—I recall a friend discussing it with me as a potential ongoing moral catastrophe that people in the future would be horrified with—which I agree with (particularly with the pug example (I can imagine this being extrapolated to all dogs somewhat perhaps), as you said!) but I feel quite horrified by a lot of more horrifying things now than this specific cause area (others with way more scale). It feels like a step for later moral progress, somewhat along the lines of the discounting argument: “people are starving now, why pursue better lives for animals before them.” (I don’t really subscribe to this argument).
I think the idea of dogs replacing children is really interesting and I will definitely think about that a bit more in the future!
I had never considered the first point regarding a local maximum—interesting thing to explore but I’m unsure, except perhaps in a more ideal world, that we are at all capable of consistently getting more than local maxes at times (and yeah dogs seem to be one of the best (easiest) one-time actions someone can take for their happiness (https://jamesclear.com/how-to-automate-a-habit), author surveys his own audience and they produce this tidbit and it matches my intuition).
And this sort of strikes me of my impression of dog-free (or pet-free?) as a movement overall—I recall a friend discussing it with me as a potential ongoing moral catastrophe that people in the future would be horrified with—which I agree with (particularly with the pug example (I can imagine this being extrapolated to all dogs somewhat perhaps), as you said!) but I feel quite horrified by a lot of more horrifying things now than this specific cause area (others with way more scale). It feels like a step for later moral progress, somewhat along the lines of the discounting argument: “people are starving now, why pursue better lives for animals before them.” (I don’t really subscribe to this argument).
I think the idea of dogs replacing children is really interesting and I will definitely think about that a bit more in the future!
Thanks for sharing.