Just the arguments in the summary are really solid.[1] And while I wasn’t considering supporting sustainability in fishing anyway, I now believe it’s more urgent to culturally/semiotically/associatively separate between animal welfare and some strands of “environmentalism”. Thanks!
Alas, I don’t predict I will work anywhere where this update becomes pivotal to my actions, but my practically relevant takeaway is: I will reproduce the arguments from this post (and/or link it) in contexts where people are discussing conjunctions/disjunctions between environmental concerns and animal welfare.
Hmm, I notice that (what I perceive as) the core argument generalizes to all efforts to make something terrible more “sustainable”. We sometimes want there to be high price of anarchy (long-run) wrt competing agents/companies trying to profit from doing something terrible. If they’re competitively “forced” to act myopically and collectively profit less over the long-run, this is good insofar as their profit correlates straightforwardly with disutility for others.[2]
It doesn’t hold in cases where what we care about isn’t straightforwardly correlated with their profit, however. E.g. ecosystems/species are disproportionately imperiled by race-to-the-bottom-type incentives, because they have an absorbing state at 0.
(Tagging @niplav, because interesting patterns and related to large-scale suffering.)
Just the arguments in the summary are really solid.[1] And while I wasn’t considering supporting sustainability in fishing anyway, I now believe it’s more urgent to culturally/semiotically/associatively separate between animal welfare and some strands of “environmentalism”. Thanks!
Alas, I don’t predict I will work anywhere where this update becomes pivotal to my actions, but my practically relevant takeaway is: I will reproduce the arguments from this post (and/or link it) in contexts where people are discussing conjunctions/disjunctions between environmental concerns and animal welfare.
Hmm, I notice that (what I perceive as) the core argument generalizes to all efforts to make something terrible more “sustainable”. We sometimes want there to be high price of anarchy (long-run) wrt competing agents/companies trying to profit from doing something terrible. If they’re competitively “forced” to act myopically and collectively profit less over the long-run, this is good insofar as their profit correlates straightforwardly with disutility for others.[2]
It doesn’t hold in cases where what we care about isn’t straightforwardly correlated with their profit, however. E.g. ecosystems/species are disproportionately imperiled by race-to-the-bottom-type incentives, because they have an absorbing state at 0.
(Tagging @niplav, because interesting patterns and related to large-scale suffering.)
Also just really interesting argument-structure which I hope I can learn to spot in other contexts.
EDIT: Another way of framing this is that it reduces the amount of slack they have to optimize their exploitation with.
Thanks for tagging me! I’ll read the post and your comment with care.