Factory farming, and to a lesser extent global poverty, persist because there are some costs to ending them, and the rich aren’t altruistic enough (or the altruists aren’t rich enough) to end them. Importantly, it will not just be that factory farming itself ends, but due to cognitive dissonance, people’s moral views towards nonhumans will likely change a lot too once ~no-one is eating animals. So there will predictably be convergence on viewing c2025 treatment of animals as terrible.
There is an ongoing homogenization of global culture which will probably continue. As the educational and cultural inputs to people converge, it seems likely their beliefs (including moral beliefs) will also converge at least somewhat.
Some fraction of current disagreements about economic/political/moral questions are caused just by people not being sufficiently informed/rational. So those disagreements would go away when we have ~ideal post-human reasoners.
A more ambitious version of the above is that perhaps post-humans will take epistemic humility very seriously, and they will know that all their peers are also very rational, so they will treat their own moral intuitions as little evidence of what the true/best/idealised-upon-reflection moral beliefs are. Then, everyone just defers very heavily to the annual survey of all of (post)humanity’s views on e.g. population axiology rather than backing their own intuition.
(Arguably this doesn’t count as convergence if people’s intuitions still differ, but I think if people’s all-things-considered beliefs, and therefore their actions, converge that is enough.)
A bull case for convergence:
Factory farming, and to a lesser extent global poverty, persist because there are some costs to ending them, and the rich aren’t altruistic enough (or the altruists aren’t rich enough) to end them. Importantly, it will not just be that factory farming itself ends, but due to cognitive dissonance, people’s moral views towards nonhumans will likely change a lot too once ~no-one is eating animals. So there will predictably be convergence on viewing c2025 treatment of animals as terrible.
There is an ongoing homogenization of global culture which will probably continue. As the educational and cultural inputs to people converge, it seems likely their beliefs (including moral beliefs) will also converge at least somewhat.
Some fraction of current disagreements about economic/political/moral questions are caused just by people not being sufficiently informed/rational. So those disagreements would go away when we have ~ideal post-human reasoners.
A more ambitious version of the above is that perhaps post-humans will take epistemic humility very seriously, and they will know that all their peers are also very rational, so they will treat their own moral intuitions as little evidence of what the true/best/idealised-upon-reflection moral beliefs are. Then, everyone just defers very heavily to the annual survey of all of (post)humanity’s views on e.g. population axiology rather than backing their own intuition.
(Arguably this doesn’t count as convergence if people’s intuitions still differ, but I think if people’s all-things-considered beliefs, and therefore their actions, converge that is enough.)
But I agree we shouldn’t bank on convergence!