The first assumption I’d like to challenge (in this comment) is that we should think more about how to end factory farming and that this should be the goal of the movement. I think that such a goal would be too ambitious and also it’s not even clear if it would be good.
Global meat production is growing because both per capita consumption is growing and the world population is growing.
The graph above doesn’t include fish, eggs, and diary but the first two are also on the rise:
Fish farming has been growing very fast. And all the projections I’ve seen suggest that animal farming will continue to grow. I’ve talked with someone from 50 by 40 who disagreed with those projections because they thought that they don’t take into account innovations in plant-based and cultured meat but I personally haven’t been convinced that those predictions are majorly wrong. To me, when I look at these graphs, I don’t think “how can we better optimize for a faster complete elimination of factory farming?” I think that such a goal is too ambitious for a movement that only gets $200 million per year (and only a fraction of that is EAA) and is fighting against the growing behemoth that is animal agriculture. I think about how we can at least make a dent in all of this suffering that the industry is creating.
I think that the end of factory farming may come due to human extinction, or because transformative AI changes everything, or because cultured meat eventually becomes good and cheap (which doesn’t necessarily require that much investment from EAs maybe). But to me, it’s not obvious that we shouldn’t just let future altruists take care of that. Because only we can help animals that are suffering now and future altruists will also be able to help animals that will be suffering later. Also, even if you do care about the end of factory farming, welfare reforms do contribute to that by making meat more expensive and by making animals closer to neutral well-being. To me doing welfare reforms until farmed animals live neutral lives seems like a legitimate way to solve the issue.
And just because it’s easier to imagine how institutional meat reduction can lead to total elimination of factory farming, doesn’t mean that it actually leads to more progress towards it. To me, to be excited about such campaigns I’d need to see a promising cost-effectiveness estimate. When I looked into such campaigns briefly some years ago, they didn’t seem too exciting but please don’t put much weight on this as I didn’t look into it deeply.
Also, to me it’s not even clear that the end of animal farming would be good for animals in the short term. Animal farming impacts how ~40% of habitable land is used, and hence has a huge impact on wild animal suffering, and we don’t even know if that impact is positive or negative. It’s discussed a bit here and here, although I think we should discuss it much more. If we are saying that the end of factory farming is the ultimate goal, we should at least make sure that this would be a good thing. When I say stuff like this, some people answer that they think that moral circle expansion is the ultimate goal, not the end of factory farming. But then I think that we need to be much more concrete about situations in which moral circle expansion would bring value, how likely they are, etc. And I’m unsure if we’d end up with the same ideas of what to do afterwards. Other people say that they only want to decrease suffering that is caused by humans and not wild animal suffering. If you hold this position, I guess you can just ignore this paragraph. Ending factory farming might also be good for reducing climate change but that’s a different topic.
Regarding the concern about whether it’s useful to think about how to end factory farming, my intuition is that having an endgame in mind will do much to help guide us there. Even if the endgame is just more humane animal farms, I think making that more explicit will help us shape strategies today.
The project of improving farmed animal welfare is a decades-long project, and it seems highly suboptimal to not plan what outcomes we’d like to be achieving decades on down the road.
I’m not saying that we shouldn’t think about ending factory farming at all. I was just arguing against favouring interventions just because it’s easier to imagine how they would completely eliminate factory farming because it’s so far away. Also, I wouldn’t think about the endgame a lot at this stage when we are so far away from it.
Apart from reasons I discussed in the original comment, I’d like to mention one more reason why I think that. It’s very likely that due emerging technologies (AI, cultured meat, large-scale insect farming, etc.), environmental problems, political changes, possible global catastrophises, etc., the World might look very different by the time we are in the endgame (which I imagine in at least 50 years). And it’s difficult to predict how it will look. Hence it’s also very difficult to plan for it. Furthermore, interventions that are tractable now may not stay tractable forever (e.g. people may grow numb to corporate campaigns). Hence, any plan we come up with now will likely need to be changed anyway. It still makes sense to think a bit whether our current actions will be valuable in various plausible future scenarios though.
I’m sympathetic to a lot of what you say in this, including the fact that welfare reforms can and are an important part of the road to ending factory farming. It just unlikely that they will be all of that road (or even most of it).
Regarding the concern about whether we ought to even seek to end factory farming (or animal farming broadly), my views on this have been updated towards the affirmative to this based on Jeff Sebo’s arguments (EAG talk and paper). Essentially, he argues along the moral circle expansion angle: If we’re the sort of people who tolerate the human-caused suffering of factory farms, even if factory/animal farms are someday not so bad, then we’re more likely to accept other forms of exploitation that will lead to significant suffering (e.g. the exploitation of digital minds).
There should be easier ways to argue against exploitation of digital minds than taking down a growing industry worth trillions of dollars and employing a significant portion of the World’s workforce. E.g., direct advocacy for digital minds which can happen in the future when digital minds start being a concern. Future advocates will have a comparative advantage in helping digital minds so it might make sense for us to use our comparative advantage for helping current animals, especially since the EA movement is likely to grow.
Also, I think that what Sebo argues in his talk though is there being more advocacy for animal rights and veganism. That would be enough to have some of the effects that he is talking about.
Also, I do wish that people advocating for changing people’s views would be much more concrete about future scenarios where this end up mattering a lot. That would allow to see if what they are advocating is really the best way to influence those scenarios.
The first assumption I’d like to challenge (in this comment) is that we should think more about how to end factory farming and that this should be the goal of the movement. I think that such a goal would be too ambitious and also it’s not even clear if it would be good.
Take a look at these graphs from https://ourworldindata.org/meat-production
Global meat production is growing because both per capita consumption is growing and the world population is growing.
The graph above doesn’t include fish, eggs, and diary but the first two are also on the rise:
Fish farming has been growing very fast. And all the projections I’ve seen suggest that animal farming will continue to grow. I’ve talked with someone from 50 by 40 who disagreed with those projections because they thought that they don’t take into account innovations in plant-based and cultured meat but I personally haven’t been convinced that those predictions are majorly wrong. To me, when I look at these graphs, I don’t think “how can we better optimize for a faster complete elimination of factory farming?” I think that such a goal is too ambitious for a movement that only gets $200 million per year (and only a fraction of that is EAA) and is fighting against the growing behemoth that is animal agriculture. I think about how we can at least make a dent in all of this suffering that the industry is creating.
I think that the end of factory farming may come due to human extinction, or because transformative AI changes everything, or because cultured meat eventually becomes good and cheap (which doesn’t necessarily require that much investment from EAs maybe). But to me, it’s not obvious that we shouldn’t just let future altruists take care of that. Because only we can help animals that are suffering now and future altruists will also be able to help animals that will be suffering later. Also, even if you do care about the end of factory farming, welfare reforms do contribute to that by making meat more expensive and by making animals closer to neutral well-being. To me doing welfare reforms until farmed animals live neutral lives seems like a legitimate way to solve the issue.
And just because it’s easier to imagine how institutional meat reduction can lead to total elimination of factory farming, doesn’t mean that it actually leads to more progress towards it. To me, to be excited about such campaigns I’d need to see a promising cost-effectiveness estimate. When I looked into such campaigns briefly some years ago, they didn’t seem too exciting but please don’t put much weight on this as I didn’t look into it deeply.
Also, to me it’s not even clear that the end of animal farming would be good for animals in the short term. Animal farming impacts how ~40% of habitable land is used, and hence has a huge impact on wild animal suffering, and we don’t even know if that impact is positive or negative. It’s discussed a bit here and here, although I think we should discuss it much more. If we are saying that the end of factory farming is the ultimate goal, we should at least make sure that this would be a good thing. When I say stuff like this, some people answer that they think that moral circle expansion is the ultimate goal, not the end of factory farming. But then I think that we need to be much more concrete about situations in which moral circle expansion would bring value, how likely they are, etc. And I’m unsure if we’d end up with the same ideas of what to do afterwards. Other people say that they only want to decrease suffering that is caused by humans and not wild animal suffering. If you hold this position, I guess you can just ignore this paragraph. Ending factory farming might also be good for reducing climate change but that’s a different topic.
Regarding the concern about whether it’s useful to think about how to end factory farming, my intuition is that having an endgame in mind will do much to help guide us there. Even if the endgame is just more humane animal farms, I think making that more explicit will help us shape strategies today.
The project of improving farmed animal welfare is a decades-long project, and it seems highly suboptimal to not plan what outcomes we’d like to be achieving decades on down the road.
I’m not saying that we shouldn’t think about ending factory farming at all. I was just arguing against favouring interventions just because it’s easier to imagine how they would completely eliminate factory farming because it’s so far away. Also, I wouldn’t think about the endgame a lot at this stage when we are so far away from it.
Apart from reasons I discussed in the original comment, I’d like to mention one more reason why I think that. It’s very likely that due emerging technologies (AI, cultured meat, large-scale insect farming, etc.), environmental problems, political changes, possible global catastrophises, etc., the World might look very different by the time we are in the endgame (which I imagine in at least 50 years). And it’s difficult to predict how it will look. Hence it’s also very difficult to plan for it. Furthermore, interventions that are tractable now may not stay tractable forever (e.g. people may grow numb to corporate campaigns). Hence, any plan we come up with now will likely need to be changed anyway. It still makes sense to think a bit whether our current actions will be valuable in various plausible future scenarios though.
I’m sympathetic to a lot of what you say in this, including the fact that welfare reforms can and are an important part of the road to ending factory farming. It just unlikely that they will be all of that road (or even most of it).
Regarding the concern about whether we ought to even seek to end factory farming (or animal farming broadly), my views on this have been updated towards the affirmative to this based on Jeff Sebo’s arguments (EAG talk and paper). Essentially, he argues along the moral circle expansion angle: If we’re the sort of people who tolerate the human-caused suffering of factory farms, even if factory/animal farms are someday not so bad, then we’re more likely to accept other forms of exploitation that will lead to significant suffering (e.g. the exploitation of digital minds).
There should be easier ways to argue against exploitation of digital minds than taking down a growing industry worth trillions of dollars and employing a significant portion of the World’s workforce. E.g., direct advocacy for digital minds which can happen in the future when digital minds start being a concern. Future advocates will have a comparative advantage in helping digital minds so it might make sense for us to use our comparative advantage for helping current animals, especially since the EA movement is likely to grow.
Also, I think that what Sebo argues in his talk though is there being more advocacy for animal rights and veganism. That would be enough to have some of the effects that he is talking about.
Also, I do wish that people advocating for changing people’s views would be much more concrete about future scenarios where this end up mattering a lot. That would allow to see if what they are advocating is really the best way to influence those scenarios.