I think if you put some weight on viewpoint pluralism you should mostly not conclude that other peoples’ lives aren’t valuable because those people will make the wrong moral choices.
I don’t really understand this stance, could you explain what you mean here?
Like Sammy points out with the Hitler example, it seems kind of obviously counterproductive/negative to “save a human who was then going to go torture and kill a lot of other humans”.
Would you disagree with that? Or is the pluralism you are suggesting here specifically between viewpoints that suggest animal suffering matters and viewpoints that don’t think it matters?
As I understand worldview diversification stances, the idea is something like: if you are uncertain about whether animal welfare matters, then you can take a portfolio approach where with some fraction of resources, you try to increase human welfare at the cost of animals and with a different fraction of resources you try to increase animal welfare. The hope being that this nets out to positive in “world’s where non-human animals matter” and “world’s where only humans matter”.
Are you suggesting something like that or is there a deeper rule against “not concluding that the effects of other people’s lives are net negative” when considering the second order effects of whether to save them that you are pointing to?
I’m not proposing any sort of hard rule against concluding that some people’s lives are net negative/harmful. As a heuristic, you shouldn’t think it’s bad to save the lives of ordinary people who seem to be mostly reasonable, but who contribute to harmful animal agriculture.
The pluralism here is between human viewpoints in general. Very naively, if you think every human has equal insight into morality you should maximize the lifespan and resources that go to any and all humans without considering at all what they will do. That’s too much pluralism, of course, but I think refraining from cheaply saving human lives because they’ll eat meat is too far in the other direction.
I think if you put some weight on viewpoint pluralism you should mostly not conclude that other peoples’ lives aren’t valuable because those people will make the wrong moral choices.
Im getting at that most people would would not go out of their way to save baby Hitler. I value Hitler’s life, but I also wouldn’t save his life.
I don’t really understand this stance, could you explain what you mean here?
Like Sammy points out with the Hitler example, it seems kind of obviously counterproductive/negative to “save a human who was then going to go torture and kill a lot of other humans”.
Would you disagree with that? Or is the pluralism you are suggesting here specifically between viewpoints that suggest animal suffering matters and viewpoints that don’t think it matters?
As I understand worldview diversification stances, the idea is something like: if you are uncertain about whether animal welfare matters, then you can take a portfolio approach where with some fraction of resources, you try to increase human welfare at the cost of animals and with a different fraction of resources you try to increase animal welfare. The hope being that this nets out to positive in “world’s where non-human animals matter” and “world’s where only humans matter”.
Are you suggesting something like that or is there a deeper rule against “not concluding that the effects of other people’s lives are net negative” when considering the second order effects of whether to save them that you are pointing to?
I’m not proposing any sort of hard rule against concluding that some people’s lives are net negative/harmful. As a heuristic, you shouldn’t think it’s bad to save the lives of ordinary people who seem to be mostly reasonable, but who contribute to harmful animal agriculture.
The pluralism here is between human viewpoints in general. Very naively, if you think every human has equal insight into morality you should maximize the lifespan and resources that go to any and all humans without considering at all what they will do. That’s too much pluralism, of course, but I think refraining from cheaply saving human lives because they’ll eat meat is too far in the other direction.