GROWING UP, MOST of the stories I heard about animals featured charismatic megafauna—“flagship species,” as they were called. Elephants and tigers were the main attraction in zoos; dolphin shows were the primary draw at aquariums; and nonprofit organizations like the World Wildlife Fund celebrated pandas. In the news, the biggest stories about animals featured species like gorillas, lions, and orcas. This is largely still true today, and in a way it makes sense. These animals, with their sheer size, enigmatic behavior, and endangered status, can captivate the human imagination and command attention like few other creatures can, eliciting deep emotional responses from people around the world.
Yet the past decade has seen increasing pushback against this idea of prioritizing the welfare of megafauna while ignoring less charismatic creatures. The view that we should extend our moral concern to more than just animals with faces is becoming more mainstream. But if we stop simply prioritizing the welfare of animals that are “majestic” or “cute,” how should we prioritize species? Should we be concerned about the welfare of fish, bivalves, or insects? What about microorganisms? If meat is murder, does that mean antibacterial soap is, too?
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Thanks for sharing this, I upvoted it. It's cool to see efforts aimed at moving the overton window on nonhuman sentience. In general I feel positively about this article and have a lot of respect for your work.
One worry I have about this type of public communication is that it runs the risk of distracting people from the more glaring problem of factory farming.
Caring about pigs is already way outside the overton window. If we spill a lot of ink on really speculative claims in public-facing media, there's a risk that people will conflate two very different phenomena:
The former has a clear solution (eat plants), the latter might be completely intractable. The former involves lives that are almost certainly net-negative, the latter involves lives of unknown quality. The former is robustly terrible according to any sane worldview, the latter may hinge on population ethics and your approach to Pascal's Mugging.
I think you could have better communicated this distinction, perhaps by having a paragraph early in the article that states in very clear terms how bad factory farming is.
I think your overarching concern is very valid and writers on the fringe should take it seriously.
There were some constraints that made it infeasible to address your particulars.
That said, in my view, it’s actually this paragraph that made it well worth publishing:
“If there’s not enough at stake on Earth with respect to these complex moral considerations, consider that there are people who want to ‘help humanity flourish among the stars.’ They hope to colonize the galaxies, ensuring that trillions upon trillions of people have the opportunity to exist. Folks like Elon Musk are already eyeing nearby planets. But Musk’s dream is my worst nightmare. Life on Earth is difficult enough—if we can’t effectively reduce the suffering that happens on Earth, why multiply it across the universe?”
It is this that would be, as you put it, the “extreme moral catastrophe.” Not factory farming on Earth alone.
You can read more about this from me here: https://www.forbes.com/sites/briankateman/2022/09/06/optimistic-longtermism-is-terrible-for-animals/amp/.
Thank you for your comment!