Apologies if I missed it, but are you just assuming that silkworms are morally relevant and capable of suffering? Because if they’re not and you succeeded in banning silk, you would cause a lot of human suffering for no reason (eg by increasing the price of bicycles and making certain medical treatments illegal).
I didn’t research it in detail, and mention in the introduction that I basically assume that they are for the purposes of looking into this, and that this assumption shouldn’t be taken for granted if one was prioritizing work based on this. I don’t really think this is an answerable question right now with currently available information, and I don’t know how to discount on the basis on that uncertainty. I personally am fairly sympathetic to treating many kinds of insects as capable of having valenced experiences, on the basis of Rethink Priorities’ work in that space (though they didn’t look at larval silk specifically), but when I do research in this space, part of the purpose is just purely fact finding. There are a bunch of industries that use billions and trillions of animal, and very little work has been done to study them from an animal welfare lens. At a minimum it seems worth someone spending a few hours considering each of these industries from an animal welfare lens, so I’ve been doing that.
However, I will note that I think that silk bans seem to be possibly also be net-good for humans—silk production seems to involve a fair amount of human rights abuses, including slavery, child labor, etc., and has been campaigned against by human rights groups extensively (see that historical advocacy section for a bit more detail). It seems that several human rights groups explicitly have worked on securing silk bans. I’m not certain of the scale of these harms, so I am not recommending those campaigns from an EA-perspective (or animal welfare silk campaigns for that matter), but I do think that it’s fairly plausible that the benefits of industrial silk do not outweigh the harms to humans.
I think that promoting silk alternatives for its industrial / commercial uses you mention, like the Material Innovation Initiative does, is a pretty promising route to both reduce human and potential animal suffering.
Apologies if I missed it, but are you just assuming that silkworms are morally relevant and capable of suffering? Because if they’re not and you succeeded in banning silk, you would cause a lot of human suffering for no reason (eg by increasing the price of bicycles and making certain medical treatments illegal).
I didn’t research it in detail, and mention in the introduction that I basically assume that they are for the purposes of looking into this, and that this assumption shouldn’t be taken for granted if one was prioritizing work based on this. I don’t really think this is an answerable question right now with currently available information, and I don’t know how to discount on the basis on that uncertainty. I personally am fairly sympathetic to treating many kinds of insects as capable of having valenced experiences, on the basis of Rethink Priorities’ work in that space (though they didn’t look at larval silk specifically), but when I do research in this space, part of the purpose is just purely fact finding. There are a bunch of industries that use billions and trillions of animal, and very little work has been done to study them from an animal welfare lens. At a minimum it seems worth someone spending a few hours considering each of these industries from an animal welfare lens, so I’ve been doing that.
However, I will note that I think that silk bans seem to be possibly also be net-good for humans—silk production seems to involve a fair amount of human rights abuses, including slavery, child labor, etc., and has been campaigned against by human rights groups extensively (see that historical advocacy section for a bit more detail). It seems that several human rights groups explicitly have worked on securing silk bans. I’m not certain of the scale of these harms, so I am not recommending those campaigns from an EA-perspective (or animal welfare silk campaigns for that matter), but I do think that it’s fairly plausible that the benefits of industrial silk do not outweigh the harms to humans.
I think that promoting silk alternatives for its industrial / commercial uses you mention, like the Material Innovation Initiative does, is a pretty promising route to both reduce human and potential animal suffering.