Countries which had their developpement level increase have increased their exploitation of non-human animals. See for example the explosion of factory farming in Chinaoverthe last decades.
To me, your statement is simply false, unless we were only talking pets, but that would be silly since they are in such a minority.
Moreover, I'd argue that the reverse is correct: making progress regarding the animal exploitation would benefit hugely human beings for several independant reasons:
Famine:
Humanity is raising and killing 90+ billion land animals each year, yet there is somehow still human people starving eventhough they are only 7 billion. For one example, it is estimated that "replacing all animal-based items in the U.S. diet with nutritionally equivalent plant-based alternatives would free enough land to feed an additional 350 million people"
Talk of "speciesim" that implies animals' and humans' lives are of ~equal value, seems farfetched to me.
I have yet to hear someone defend that. So far, everytime I have heard this idea, it was from a speciesist person who failed to understand the implication of rejecting speciesism. Basically just as a strawman argument.
Thanks for the reply.
One of the issue I had with the term minimalist is that it has another meaning. But as you said "the descriptor 'minimalist' can refer to minimalism regarding how many fundamental assumptions a theory requires", so basically the other meaning actually applies.
I should add that we ultimately decided to reduce the emphasis on value commensurability in this book, because the value commensurability argument for minimalist views was not so centrally relevant here, wasn't laid out in sufficient detail yet, and might work better as its own separate argument at some point. But the book still refers to it in a few places.
I'm not exactly sure what you mean in this paragraph.
EDIT: now I get it
And I agree that the word 'minimizing' might be easily associated with typical consequentialism thinking so it might indeed not be the best.
bruh