I I think this is an interesting dilemma, and I am sympathetic to some extent (even as an animal rights activist). At the heart of your concern are 3 things:
Being too radical risks losing popular support
Being too radical risks being wrong and causing more harm than good
How do we decide what ethical system is right or preferable without resorting to power or arbitrariness?
I think in this case, 2) is of lesser concern. It does seem like adults tend to give far more weight to humans than animals (a majority of a sample would save 1 human over 100 dogs), though interestingly children seem to be much less speciesist (Wilks et al., 2020). But I think we have good reasons to give substantial moral weight to animals. Given that animals have central nervous systems and nociceptors like we do, and given that we evolved from a long lineage of animals, we should assume that we inherited our ability to suffer from our evolutionary ancestors rather than uniquely developing it ourselves. Then there’s evidence, such as (if I remember correctly) that animals will trade off material benefits for analgesics. And I believe the scientific consensus has consistently and overwhelmingly been that animals feel pain. Animals are also in the present and the harms are concrete, so animal rights is not beset by some of the concerns that, say, long-termist causes are. So I think the probability that we will be wrong about animal rights is negligible.
I sympathize with the idea that being too radical risks losing support. I’ve definitely had that feeling myself in the past when I saw animal rights activists who preferred harder tactics, and I still have my disagreements with some of their tactics and ideas. But I’ve come to see the value in taking a bolder stance as well. From my experience (yes, on a college campus, but still), many people are surprisingly willing to engage with discussions about animal rights and about personally going vegan. Some are even thankful or later go on to join us in our efforts to advocate for animals. I think for many, it’s a matter of educating them about factory farming, confronting them with the urgency of the problem, and giving them space to reflect on their values. And even if you don’t believe in the most extreme tactics, I think it’s hard to defend not advocating for animal rights at all. Just a few centuries ago, slavery was still widely accepted and practiced, and abolitionism was a minority opinion which often received derision and even threats of harm. The work of abolitionists was nevertheless instrumental in getting society to change its attitudes and its ways such that the average person today (at least in the West) would find slavery abhorrent. Indeed, people would roundly agree that slavery is wrong even if they were told to imagine that the enslaved person’s welfare increased due to their slavery (based on a philosophy class I took years ago). To make progress toward the good, society needs people who will go against the current majority.
And this may lead to the final question of how we decide what is right and what is wrong. This I have no rigorous answer to. We are trapped between the Scylla of dogmatism and the Charybdis of relativism. Here I can only echo the point I made above. I agree that we must give some weight to the majority morality, and that to immediately jump ten steps ahead of where we are is impractical and perhaps dangerous. But to veer too far into ossification and blind traditionalism is perhaps equally dangerous. I believe we must continue the movement and the process towards greater morality as best we can, because we see how atrocious the morality of the past has been and the evidence that the morality of the present is still far from acceptable.
I I think this is an interesting dilemma, and I am sympathetic to some extent (even as an animal rights activist). At the heart of your concern are 3 things:
Being too radical risks losing popular support
Being too radical risks being wrong and causing more harm than good
How do we decide what ethical system is right or preferable without resorting to power or arbitrariness?
I think in this case, 2) is of lesser concern. It does seem like adults tend to give far more weight to humans than animals (a majority of a sample would save 1 human over 100 dogs), though interestingly children seem to be much less speciesist (Wilks et al., 2020). But I think we have good reasons to give substantial moral weight to animals. Given that animals have central nervous systems and nociceptors like we do, and given that we evolved from a long lineage of animals, we should assume that we inherited our ability to suffer from our evolutionary ancestors rather than uniquely developing it ourselves. Then there’s evidence, such as (if I remember correctly) that animals will trade off material benefits for analgesics. And I believe the scientific consensus has consistently and overwhelmingly been that animals feel pain. Animals are also in the present and the harms are concrete, so animal rights is not beset by some of the concerns that, say, long-termist causes are. So I think the probability that we will be wrong about animal rights is negligible.
I sympathize with the idea that being too radical risks losing support. I’ve definitely had that feeling myself in the past when I saw animal rights activists who preferred harder tactics, and I still have my disagreements with some of their tactics and ideas. But I’ve come to see the value in taking a bolder stance as well. From my experience (yes, on a college campus, but still), many people are surprisingly willing to engage with discussions about animal rights and about personally going vegan. Some are even thankful or later go on to join us in our efforts to advocate for animals. I think for many, it’s a matter of educating them about factory farming, confronting them with the urgency of the problem, and giving them space to reflect on their values. And even if you don’t believe in the most extreme tactics, I think it’s hard to defend not advocating for animal rights at all. Just a few centuries ago, slavery was still widely accepted and practiced, and abolitionism was a minority opinion which often received derision and even threats of harm. The work of abolitionists was nevertheless instrumental in getting society to change its attitudes and its ways such that the average person today (at least in the West) would find slavery abhorrent. Indeed, people would roundly agree that slavery is wrong even if they were told to imagine that the enslaved person’s welfare increased due to their slavery (based on a philosophy class I took years ago). To make progress toward the good, society needs people who will go against the current majority.
And this may lead to the final question of how we decide what is right and what is wrong. This I have no rigorous answer to. We are trapped between the Scylla of dogmatism and the Charybdis of relativism. Here I can only echo the point I made above. I agree that we must give some weight to the majority morality, and that to immediately jump ten steps ahead of where we are is impractical and perhaps dangerous. But to veer too far into ossification and blind traditionalism is perhaps equally dangerous. I believe we must continue the movement and the process towards greater morality as best we can, because we see how atrocious the morality of the past has been and the evidence that the morality of the present is still far from acceptable.