Thanks for sharing this, I upvoted it. It’s cool to see efforts aimed at moving the overton window on nonhuman sentience. In general I feel positively about this article and have a lot of respect for your work.
One worry I have about this type of public communication is that it runs the risk of distracting people from the more glaring problem of factory farming.
Caring about pigs is already way outside the overton window. If we spill a lot of ink on really speculative claims in public-facing media, there’s a risk that people will conflate two very different phenomena:
An extreme moral catastrophe that we know is happening (factory farming)
An important but very speculative area of academic philosophy (microbe sentience etc.)
The former has a clear solution (eat plants), the latter might be completely intractable. The former involves lives that are almost certainly net-negative, the latter involves lives of unknown quality. The former is robustly terrible according to any sane worldview, the latter may hinge on population ethics and your approach to Pascal’s Mugging.
I think you could have better communicated this distinction, perhaps by having a paragraph early in the article that states in very clear terms how bad factory farming is.
Relatedly, there are a few parts of the article that try to communicate true and useful points but risk playing into misguided pro-meat tropes. Examples:
“If meat is murder, does that mean antibacterial soap is, too?”
Paragraph on plant sentience. The “plants have feelings” claim is actually an argument against eating meat, but most people don’t know this.
I think your overarching concern is very valid and writers on the fringe should take it seriously.
There were some constraints that made it infeasible to address your particulars.
That said, in my view, it’s actually this paragraph that made it well worth publishing:
“If there’s not enough at stake on Earth with respect to these complex moral considerations, consider that there are people who want to ‘help humanity flourish among the stars.’ They hope to colonize the galaxies, ensuring that trillions upon trillions of people have the opportunity to exist. Folks like Elon Musk are already eyeing nearby planets. But Musk’s dream is my worst nightmare. Life on Earth is difficult enough—if we can’t effectively reduce the suffering that happens on Earth, why multiply it across the universe?”
It is this that would be, as you put it, the “extreme moral catastrophe.” Not factory farming on Earth alone.
Thanks for sharing this, I upvoted it. It’s cool to see efforts aimed at moving the overton window on nonhuman sentience. In general I feel positively about this article and have a lot of respect for your work.
One worry I have about this type of public communication is that it runs the risk of distracting people from the more glaring problem of factory farming.
Caring about pigs is already way outside the overton window. If we spill a lot of ink on really speculative claims in public-facing media, there’s a risk that people will conflate two very different phenomena:
An extreme moral catastrophe that we know is happening (factory farming)
An important but very speculative area of academic philosophy (microbe sentience etc.)
The former has a clear solution (eat plants), the latter might be completely intractable. The former involves lives that are almost certainly net-negative, the latter involves lives of unknown quality. The former is robustly terrible according to any sane worldview, the latter may hinge on population ethics and your approach to Pascal’s Mugging.
I think you could have better communicated this distinction, perhaps by having a paragraph early in the article that states in very clear terms how bad factory farming is.
Relatedly, there are a few parts of the article that try to communicate true and useful points but risk playing into misguided pro-meat tropes. Examples:
“If meat is murder, does that mean antibacterial soap is, too?”
Paragraph on plant sentience. The “plants have feelings” claim is actually an argument against eating meat, but most people don’t know this.
I think your overarching concern is very valid and writers on the fringe should take it seriously.
There were some constraints that made it infeasible to address your particulars.
That said, in my view, it’s actually this paragraph that made it well worth publishing:
“If there’s not enough at stake on Earth with respect to these complex moral considerations, consider that there are people who want to ‘help humanity flourish among the stars.’ They hope to colonize the galaxies, ensuring that trillions upon trillions of people have the opportunity to exist. Folks like Elon Musk are already eyeing nearby planets. But Musk’s dream is my worst nightmare. Life on Earth is difficult enough—if we can’t effectively reduce the suffering that happens on Earth, why multiply it across the universe?”
It is this that would be, as you put it, the “extreme moral catastrophe.” Not factory farming on Earth alone.
You can read more about this from me here: https://www.forbes.com/sites/briankateman/2022/09/06/optimistic-longtermism-is-terrible-for-animals/amp/.
Thank you for your comment!