I’m sympathetic to strong longtermism which implies that that we can pretty much ignore short-run effects and instead only focus on far future effects when doing good. If strong longtermism is true, it isn’t clear how wide the class of decision situations it applies to is, but I think it’s plausible that dietary change is one of those decision situations that may be in scope. This is because there’s a very plausible link between dietary change and moral circle expansion, which has been argued to be very important from a far future perspective.
So I tend to fall in the camp of thinking that ve*ism remains pretty robust even in the face of uncertainties over impact on wild animal populations. I’m not entirely certain about this though and would welcome thoughts.
That makes sense, and I think many longtermist animal advocates roughly agree. One concern I have is about what kinds of moral ideas vegism is reinforcing. For example, vegism is normally strongly associated with environmentalism, so maybe it reinforces the idea of “leaving wild animals alone” or even trying to increase populations of wild animals via habitat restoration and rewilding.
That said, as Jacy Reese has argued, maybe most animal-like suffering in the far future will be created by humans rather than natural, in which case how people view wild-animal suffering could be less relevant than how they view human-inflicted suffering like that in factory farms. OTOH, I think there’s still a question of whether creatures that inhabit virtual worlds or ancestor simulations of the far future would be seen as “wild” or as directly harmed by humans.
I’m sympathetic to strong longtermism which implies that that we can pretty much ignore short-run effects and instead only focus on far future effects when doing good. If strong longtermism is true, it isn’t clear how wide the class of decision situations it applies to is, but I think it’s plausible that dietary change is one of those decision situations that may be in scope. This is because there’s a very plausible link between dietary change and moral circle expansion, which has been argued to be very important from a far future perspective.
So I tend to fall in the camp of thinking that ve*ism remains pretty robust even in the face of uncertainties over impact on wild animal populations. I’m not entirely certain about this though and would welcome thoughts.
That makes sense, and I think many longtermist animal advocates roughly agree. One concern I have is about what kinds of moral ideas vegism is reinforcing. For example, vegism is normally strongly associated with environmentalism, so maybe it reinforces the idea of “leaving wild animals alone” or even trying to increase populations of wild animals via habitat restoration and rewilding.
That said, as Jacy Reese has argued, maybe most animal-like suffering in the far future will be created by humans rather than natural, in which case how people view wild-animal suffering could be less relevant than how they view human-inflicted suffering like that in factory farms. OTOH, I think there’s still a question of whether creatures that inhabit virtual worlds or ancestor simulations of the far future would be seen as “wild” or as directly harmed by humans.