Add new comment

Thanks for the comments, Holden. There are a few points of disagreement here, but I know you’re busy so I’ll just respond to the part that I believe matters most.

You seem to be implicitly arguing that factory farming will definitely end eventually, and anything we do now only has the effect of marginally accelerating the end of factory farming. If we take this as axiomatic, I agree that animal advocacy doesn’t look that important in the long term. But to say that x-risk looks much better than animal advocacy you have to argue that either (a) factory-farmed animals are worth way less than humans, or (b) it is overwhelmingly likely that factory farming will end eventually, no matter what we do. I do believe factory farming will end eventually even if we don’t do anything, but it’s not overwhelmingly likely—I’m only about 70% confident of that. If, instead, our actions permanently reduce factory farming, or increase the probability of factory farming ending eventually, animal advocacy looks important even across many future generations.

Additionally, even if factory farming does end, there’s a non-negligible probability that humans’ attitude toward non-human animals (or other kinds of sentient beings that may exist in the future) is extremely important. Our actions have massive effects on wild animals and will continue to do so; although we don’t know much about how to do this now, it’s critically important that we reduce wild-animal suffering. It’s much more likely that this will happen eventually if we do things now that make the moral value of animals more salient. I expect that any method of eliminating factory farming would help because if people don’t eat meat they have less cognitive dissonance, but I’m more optimistic about interventions that actively shift people’s values. (Lewis claims that cage-free campaigns do this; I’m somewhat skeptical but I haven’t heard his arguments yet so I don’t want to make any strong claims.)

In short, to say that animal advocacy doesn’t have a big effect on the medium/long-term future you have to be overwhelmingly confident (>99%) that either non-human animals won’t exist, or society will end up with correct values no matter what we do. I don’t believe this level of confidence is justified.