Thanks for this! I would be curious to know what you think about the tension there seems to be between allocating resources to Global health & development (or even prioritizing it over Animal Welfare) and rejecting speciesism given The Meat eater problem.
(1) If building human capacity has positive long-term ripple effects (e.g. on economic growth), these could be expected to swamp any temporary negative externalities.
(2) It’s also not clear that increasing population increases meat-eating in equilibrium. Presumably at some point in our technological development, the harms of factory-farming will be alleviated (e.g. by the development of affordable clean meat). Adding more people to the current generation moves forward both meat eating and economic & technological development. It doesn’t necessarily change the total number of meat-eaters who exist prior to our civ developing beyond factory farming.
But also: people (including those saved via GHD interventions) plausibly still ought to offset the harms caused by their diets. (Investing resources to speed up the development of clean meat, for example, seems very good.)
About point 1, you’d first need to prove that the expected value of the future is going to be positive, something which does not sound guaranteed, especially if factory farming were to continue in the future.
Regarding point 2, note that clean meat automatically winning in the long term is really not guaranteed either:
Longtermists tend to be super optimistic that alternative proteins and cultured meat will be more efficient and cheaper, baffling people working in animal welfare.
Thanks, I agree that those are possible arguments for the opposing view. I disagree that anyone needs to “prove” their position before believing it. It’s quite possible to have justified positive credence in a proposition even if it cannot be decisively proven (as most, indeed, cannot). Every possible position here involves highly contestable judgment calls. Certainly nothing that you’ve linked to proves that human life is guaranteed to be net-negative, but you’re still entitled to (tentatively) hold to such pessimism if your best judgment supports that conclusion. Likewise for my optimism.
Yes, “prove” is too strong here, that’s not the term I should have used. And human life is not guaranteed to be net-negative.
But I often see the view that some people assume human action in the future to be net-positive, and I felt like adding a counterpoint to that, given the large uncertainties.
There’s a very general and abstract reason to think it’s more likely to be positive, which is that most people care at least a little bit about promoting good and preventing bad (plus acting like that can be popular even if you personally don’t care), whereas few people wanting to deliberately promote suffering (especially generic suffering, rather than just being able to get vengeance or practice sadism on a small number of victims.)
I mean, factory farming is in itself an obvious counterexample. It’s huge and growing.
I think you are putting too much value on intentions rather than consequences. A lot of harm happening in the world is the result of indifference than cruelty—most people do not actively animals to be harmed, but the most economical way to farm animals is by getting them in crowded conditions, so…
Poor incentives and competition are important here. A lot of suffering is even natural (e.g., a deer dying of hunger or a spider trapping an insect), and sometimes just unwanted (e.g. climate change).
Not sure what is the case? I’m not claiming people don’t do bad things, merely that they don’t do them because they are bad (very often). Factory farming isn’t a counterexample to that: people don’t do it because it causes suffering. Of course it does show people are (collectively) prepared to cause very large amounts of suffering in pursuit of other goals. But there’s no obviousgeneral reason to think that the side effects of people pursuing their goals that they don’t really care about will tend to be bad things more often than good things. Whereas when people do deliberately promote things because of their moral value they (usually) promote the good not the bad. So most of what people do looks just random in terms of whether it promotes the good (for anyone other than their friends and family, and perhaps society as a whole when they participate in trade.)) Whereas people do occasionally attempt to promote the good. Since people pull either at random or in the right direction, the best guess (before you look at the specifics of our track record) is that people will do somewhat more good than harm.
To be clear I’m not saying any of this proves, the future will be good. Just that it provides moderate starting evidence in that direction.
I’m still kind of unconvinced.
If we were talking only about human populations, sure then I’d agree, most efforts seem intended to provoke good things.
But when you look at other species ? I think if you look at the things we do to factory farmed animals or wild animals or animals we just harm because of pollutions or climate change or deep see mining when it starts, we’d label all of that to be bad if it were done to humans.
I’m more interested in actual track record rather than intentions. Our intentions don’t match up super well with ‘overall good in the world increasing’.
One important reason we might do more bad than good in the future is because animals are far more numerous than humans, and most likely dominate from a moral standpoint (besides maybe artificial sentence). Most importantly, our goals are often opposed to theirs : finding more energy, using fossil fuels, using chemicals for making goods, eating meat, making silk, clearing a forest for agriculture and cities… So as we aggregate even more energy, it’s unlikely that our actions are going to be beneficial to animal’s goals given our own objectives.
Thanks for this! I would be curious to know what you think about the tension there seems to be between allocating resources to Global health & development (or even prioritizing it over Animal Welfare) and rejecting speciesism given The Meat eater problem.
Two main thoughts:
(1) If building human capacity has positive long-term ripple effects (e.g. on economic growth), these could be expected to swamp any temporary negative externalities.
(2) It’s also not clear that increasing population increases meat-eating in equilibrium. Presumably at some point in our technological development, the harms of factory-farming will be alleviated (e.g. by the development of affordable clean meat). Adding more people to the current generation moves forward both meat eating and economic & technological development. It doesn’t necessarily change the total number of meat-eaters who exist prior to our civ developing beyond factory farming.
But also: people (including those saved via GHD interventions) plausibly still ought to offset the harms caused by their diets. (Investing resources to speed up the development of clean meat, for example, seems very good.)
About point 1, you’d first need to prove that the expected value of the future is going to be positive, something which does not sound guaranteed, especially if factory farming were to continue in the future.
Regarding point 2, note that clean meat automatically winning in the long term is really not guaranteed either:
I recommend reading that post, Optimistic longtermist would be terrible for animals.
Thanks, I agree that those are possible arguments for the opposing view. I disagree that anyone needs to “prove” their position before believing it. It’s quite possible to have justified positive credence in a proposition even if it cannot be decisively proven (as most, indeed, cannot). Every possible position here involves highly contestable judgment calls. Certainly nothing that you’ve linked to proves that human life is guaranteed to be net-negative, but you’re still entitled to (tentatively) hold to such pessimism if your best judgment supports that conclusion. Likewise for my optimism.
Yes, “prove” is too strong here, that’s not the term I should have used. And human life is not guaranteed to be net-negative.
But I often see the view that some people assume human action in the future to be net-positive, and I felt like adding a counterpoint to that, given the large uncertainties.
There’s a very general and abstract reason to think it’s more likely to be positive, which is that most people care at least a little bit about promoting good and preventing bad (plus acting like that can be popular even if you personally don’t care), whereas few people wanting to deliberately promote suffering (especially generic suffering, rather than just being able to get vengeance or practice sadism on a small number of victims.)
I am not sure this is the case?
I mean, factory farming is in itself an obvious counterexample. It’s huge and growing.
I think you are putting too much value on intentions rather than consequences. A lot of harm happening in the world is the result of indifference than cruelty—most people do not actively animals to be harmed, but the most economical way to farm animals is by getting them in crowded conditions, so…
Poor incentives and competition are important here. A lot of suffering is even natural (e.g., a deer dying of hunger or a spider trapping an insect), and sometimes just unwanted (e.g. climate change).
Not sure what is the case? I’m not claiming people don’t do bad things, merely that they don’t do them because they are bad (very often). Factory farming isn’t a counterexample to that: people don’t do it because it causes suffering. Of course it does show people are (collectively) prepared to cause very large amounts of suffering in pursuit of other goals. But there’s no obviousgeneral reason to think that the side effects of people pursuing their goals that they don’t really care about will tend to be bad things more often than good things. Whereas when people do deliberately promote things because of their moral value they (usually) promote the good not the bad. So most of what people do looks just random in terms of whether it promotes the good (for anyone other than their friends and family, and perhaps society as a whole when they participate in trade.)) Whereas people do occasionally attempt to promote the good. Since people pull either at random or in the right direction, the best guess (before you look at the specifics of our track record) is that people will do somewhat more good than harm.
To be clear I’m not saying any of this proves, the future will be good. Just that it provides moderate starting evidence in that direction.
I’m still kind of unconvinced. If we were talking only about human populations, sure then I’d agree, most efforts seem intended to provoke good things. But when you look at other species ? I think if you look at the things we do to factory farmed animals or wild animals or animals we just harm because of pollutions or climate change or deep see mining when it starts, we’d label all of that to be bad if it were done to humans.
I’m more interested in actual track record rather than intentions. Our intentions don’t match up super well with ‘overall good in the world increasing’.
One important reason we might do more bad than good in the future is because animals are far more numerous than humans, and most likely dominate from a moral standpoint (besides maybe artificial sentence). Most importantly, our goals are often opposed to theirs : finding more energy, using fossil fuels, using chemicals for making goods, eating meat, making silk, clearing a forest for agriculture and cities… So as we aggregate even more energy, it’s unlikely that our actions are going to be beneficial to animal’s goals given our own objectives.