Very interesting article! Although I would disagree that it would be bad to decrease the number of factory farmed animals if they have positive lives. What we're doing when decreasing the number of factory farmed animals is just shifting the biomass to be in different forms. I think humans are capable of much more positive lives than farmed animals, so in the long term future it would be best to have as much biomass in the form of humans (and possibly pets) as possible. A world where humans eat predominantly plants and cultivated meat would be able to support more humans, and these extra humans would have much better lives than farmed animals.

When it comes to shifting the biomass towards wild animals, I don't know whether it would be good or bad though. I think in the long term future after people start intervening, wild animals would probably also have better lives than farmed animals, because people would value them intrinsically instead of instrumentally. Farms will always be optimised to produce as much output as possible, whereas future "nature reserves" could be optimised for welfare

Are there any rules against using crude language or having a lot of violence in the story?

Thanks for the great post, it was a very enjoyable read.

I'm curious if there are any justification to using qualities such as intelligence, creativity and sociability to determine moral status? They seem pretty arbitrary to me. We might as well consider fluffyness, body weight and visual resolution.

I would think if there is at all something like hierarchical moral status, it would be determined by instrumental qualities such as resource consumption (negative) and altruism (positive)