I agree that trying to make moral progress has near-term benefits but, particularly in some areas like animal welfare, progress can feel dishearteningly slow. The accumulated benefit from 1000 years of tiny steps forward in terms of moral progress could be pretty huge, but perhaps it won’t ever feel massively significant within any one person’s lifetime. That makes it feel longtermist, though I accept that it feels quite vague to be considered an actionable longtermist intervention.
I hope that moral progress on animal rights/animal welfare will take much less than 1,000 years to achieve a transformative change, but I empathize with your disheartened feeling about how slow progress has been. Something taking centuries to happen is slow by human (or animal) standards but relatively fast within the timescales that longtermism often thinks about.
I agree that trying to make moral progress has near-term benefits but, particularly in some areas like animal welfare, progress can feel dishearteningly slow. The accumulated benefit from 1000 years of tiny steps forward in terms of moral progress could be pretty huge, but perhaps it won’t ever feel massively significant within any one person’s lifetime. That makes it feel longtermist, though I accept that it feels quite vague to be considered an actionable longtermist intervention.
I hope that moral progress on animal rights/animal welfare will take much less than 1,000 years to achieve a transformative change, but I empathize with your disheartened feeling about how slow progress has been. Something taking centuries to happen is slow by human (or animal) standards but relatively fast within the timescales that longtermism often thinks about.