Thanks. I avoid honey because it's easier for me as a vegan to just avoid all foods involving farmed animals. But some of your points seem valid and I'll need to think it over.

Some things I disagreed with:

1. The net-positive vs. net-negative framing, although you addressed this.
2. The claim about not contributing financially by buying honey having no effect - doesn't seem right since the profit margin is still lower that way.
3. Ignoring environmental effects and biodiversity, though I get that the post is in response to a different claim.

Somewhat embarrassed to have remembered the opposite given that I read this just last week. Thanks!

2. That increases in variance are associated with imminent tipping points. The IPCC characterizes the latter as “low confidence” because the same metrics also rise in unforced scenarios.

What about autocorrelation? I [edit: mistakenly] think Ditlevsen & Ditlevsen themselves identify this as a stronger warning sign than variance.

Yes, but if at some point you find out, for example, that your model of morality leads to a conclusion that one should kill all humans, you'd probably conclude that your model is wrong rather than actually go through with it.

It's an extreme example, but at its basis every model is somehow an approximation stemming from our internal moral intuition. Be it that life is better than death, or happiness better than pain, or satisfying desires better than frustration, or that following god's commands is better than ignoring them, etc.

Is not every moral theory based on assumptions that X must be better than Y, around which some model is built?

No, that's not what I think. I think it's rather dangerous and probably morally bad to seek out "negative lives" in order to stop them. And I think we should not be interfering with nature in ways we do not really understand. The whole idea of wild animal welfare seems to me not only unsupported morally but also absurd and probably a bad thing in practice.

If I somehow ran into such a dog and decided the effort to take them to an ultrasound etc. was worth it, then probably yes - but I wouldn't start e.g. actively searching for stray dogs with cancer in order to do that.

In principle - though I can't say I've been consistent about it. I've supported ending our family dog's misery when she was diagnosed with pretty bad cancer, and I still stand behind that decision. On the other hand I don't think I would ever apply this to an animal one has had no interaction with.

On a meta level, and I'm adding this because it's relevant to your other comment: I think it's fine to live with such contradictions. Given our brain architecture, I don't expect human morality to be translatable to a short and clear set of rules.