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.
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.