All of Carla_Fin's Comments + Replies
Standards of living even in Saudi Arabia
I'm sure the people whose skin is whipped to bloody shreds are very happy that their tormentors enjoy a high GDP.
A new, fiery religion could appear.
Most religions have historical roots, which are culturally perpetuated. Perhaps new cults can emerge, one might also fear the risk of new brainwashing technology. But why speculate about new religious fundamentalism when the old ones are alive and kicking?
odds <1% of sweeping cultural change
No one said anything about odds this low. They are far higher.
P.S.: ...
it's in the best interests of the children who are being sent to school.
No, but it makes them more useful for economic exploitation by the rich and the politicians in their pockets.
Pretending it's for the children's own good just sounds nicer.
Eliminating poverty only works if poor people don't exist. If you want to save lives, as is often said, then eliminating poverty implies preventing reproduction. Otherwise, standard malthusian logic applies.
How are you going to make sure their reproduction will be below replacement? What guarantee do you have that there are no natalist religious cultures which won't undergo such a fertility transition with increasing wealth? It seems those cultures are among the worst for welfare, e.g. Islam in its various anti-liberty and pro-suffering variations.
To the people who downvote us here (or perhaps just one guy with 2 accounts):
Feel free to provide actual constructive criticism. Or solve the problem of global poverty, child mortality, and animal suffering on your own.
There could also be some overlap in helping developing countries reduce their birth rates, e.g. contracepitve availability, young female education, etc. This could increase per capita gdp, decrease child mortality and improve other metrics, without increasing total meat consumption exponentially. Perhaps this could be more of a focus area in EA.
It's also generally agrees that there's not much reason to expect that there to be a lot of suffering animals in the long run, compared to the amount of animal flourishing, if we're able to travel to new planets, make synthetic meats, create awesome entertainment and scientific experiments without their use, et cetera.
This is not a consensus. Most people don't care about suffering in nature or equivalent ecosystems. There is also no consensus that we should outlaw animal use even if we invent fully functional substitutes.
I personally think it's naive to...
I don't mean to dismiss Muufri, just put the true counterfactual in perspective. If there is a potential market for these products, replaceability is a realistic expectation.
I don't think this dynamic applies to everything equally. I would expect it to apply more for those actions that exist in a market equilibrium, like supplying a substitute for an existing good at a given price. Maybe the same is true for donations, selective consumption, undercover investigations or political activism, but that seems less obvious to me.
Animal products without animals is a great idea.
But if it is profitable, someone will do it for-profit anyway. If it is not profitable, these products will fail in the long run. Perhaps altruistic funding can speed this process up, but it won't make a difference in whether or not these products will have a market in the long run.
Maybe an alternative is to lobby for higher animal welfare standards, lower subsidies of animal products, and undercover investigations to unveil cruelty and lawbreaking in the industry. All of these would work even if the substitute products don't take off, but they also have the implicit effect of supporting the substitutes indirectly by making animal exploitation more expensive.
Even so, the suffering of birth, death and perhaps of being an inarticulate infant can be high enough to make it net-negative for the primary individual. It can even be high enough to outweigh 35 average human life-years if it is severe enough and/or the average experience value of one life-year is low enough or negative.
Even if this isn't true for the majority, it can still be true for the average, e.g. if 1% of life-years contain unusual suffering 100 times as severe as 1 life-year is good.