Comments
If I weren't interested in creating more new beings with positive lives I'd place greater priority on:
- Ending the suffering and injustice suffered by animals in factory farming
- Ending the suffering of animals in the wilderness
- Slowing ageing, or cryonics (so the present generation can enjoy many times more positive value over the course of their lives)
- Radical new ways to dramatically raise the welfare of the present generation (e.g. direct brain stimulation as described here)
I haven't thought much about what would look good from a conservative Christian worldview.
I'm struggling to think of much written on this topic - I'm a philosopher and reasonably sympathetic to person-affecting views (although I don't assign them my full credence) so I've been paying attention to this space. One non-obvious consideration is whether to take an asymmetric person-affecting view (extra happy lives have no value, extra unhappy lives has negative value) or a symmetric person-affecting view (extra lives have no value).
If the former, one is pushed towards some concern for the long-term anyway, as Halstead argues here, because there will be lots of unhappy lives in the future it would be good to prevent existing.
If the latter - which I think, after long-reflection, is the more plausible version, even though it is more prima facie unintuitive - then that is practically sufficient, but not necessary, for concentrating on the near-term, i.e. this generation of humans; animals won't, for the most part, exist whatever we choose to do. I say not necessary because one could, in principle, think all possible lives matter and still focus on near-humans due to practical considerations.
But 'prioritise current humans' still leaves it wide-open what should you do. The 'canonical' EA answer for how to help current humans is by working on global (physical) health and development. It's not clear to me that this is the right answer. If I can be forgiven for tooting my own horn, I've written a bit about this in this (now somewhat dated) post on mental health, the relevant section being "why might you - and why might you not - prioritise this area [i.e. mental health]".
You could rescue or even buy animals from factory farms. Plausibly, doing this for factory farmed chickens could be very cost-effective with such person-affecting views. Buying them from factory farms in developing countries, especially, perhaps. Buying factory farmed animals would be pretty uncooperative with the rest of the animal movement, though, and if you assign some moral weight to asymmetric or symmetric totalist views, this could be pretty bad in expectation (although the expected effect on supply is less than one per animal saved, so this might not look actively harmful with symmetric views).
EDIT: The value of information question is interesting. Suppose it would take you 2 months to research and carry out a rescue/buy for factory farmed chickens raised for meat. Then it wouldn't be worth even looking into, because the chickens alive when you start will all have been killed already. But if someone does enough of the work for you that you could do it within about a month, then it could be worth it to do. Egg-laying hens live longer, probably about a year or two.
Working on abortion might be similar for someone who thought death was bad.
Yes, agree you could save existing animals. I'd actually forgotten until you jogged my memory, but I talk about that briefly in my thesis (chapter 3.3, p92) and suppose saving animals from shelters might be more cost-effective than saving humans (given a PAV combined with deprivationism about the badness of death).