Owen,
Thanks for the two pieces.
I'd be interested to know: do you think your view would be different if you saw the past few hundred years as a period when one group of animals gained a great deal of power, which they used (1) to make their own lives much better and (2) to subject a much larger number of other animals to a great deal of suffering, mainly in order to be able to eat them?
I'm not making an argument that this is the right way of seeing things, though it doesn't seem crazy to me. I'm also not arguing that, if this view is accurate, it's sensible just to project it into the future (ie improvements in human lives will be accompanied by ever-greater suffering of other animals). I'm just drawing attention to the way that, in what you write, you focus on the ways that human lives have improved recently, and that we might expect this to continue, given the ways human societies work, with things being passed on to future generations (knowledge, habits, organisations, material goods); without paying any attention to how this process has also involved inflicting a great deal of suffering on other animals.
It might be that including other animals in the picture makes one feel more ambivalent about the process of development in human societies which we have benefited so richly from, and more wary about what supporting and accelerating this process will bring (the 'human lives getting better' strand which you seem to value highly for benefits long into the future). Or it might be that the suffering of animals is seen as a separate, contingent fact about a narrow period which doesn't have any lessons for what we should expect in the future. Do you have a sense one way or the other? (Perhaps you can't answer if you don't share the premise that lots of animals have suffered as humans have become more powerful, and that this matters.)
I don't think that this necessarily affects the argument that targeting changes in how humans act now is likely to be more important than targeting changes in how animals live now, since the human changes are more likely to be passed on long into the future in some form, and good changes might well have good effects long into the future. But when you write 'I do think that optimising for long-term animal welfare is not the best place to stop in picking an instrumental goal, because it's quite hard to see how things affect it.', you seem to be saying that it's hard to know what would affect the well-being of non-human animals in the long term, in contrast to things that would affect the well-being of humans in the long term. Having a sense of the mixture of gain and suffering across all animals from recent human development might
(1) draw attention to the importance of asking about the long-run well-being of all animals, human and not
(2) make one wonder about whether the future well-being of human and non-human animals are completely independent (thus, better to focus on humans since one can be more confident in the long-run effects) or if there might be an enduring negative relationship
(3) make it less difficult to see what might affect long-term animal welfare (eg more empathy for non-human animals among humans in the short term)
Your essay makes me think of a system where you have three things: a human welfare "bucket," values that control how much flows from human to animal welfare at a given time, and another animal welfare "bucket." And human welfare and values are long-term things, which at any given time feed into animal welfare. And you're saying that expanding the animal welfare bucket is not the best long-term intervention for the ultimate purpose of, say, maximizing the combined human and animal welfare. Given that we assume influencing the far future is possible, I don't see any flaw there.
but do you see practical differences between promoting animal causes in the short term and changing values to prioritize animal welfare?
I haven't spent long enough thinking about it to draw any conclusions with confidence, but prima facie we should expect that if you're optimising for different things you're likely to choose different actions.
One example which at least looks plausible to me is that if you take a long term view one of the major obstacles to shifting values is cognitive dissonance over the fact that many people enjoy eating meat. Rather than trying to shift values today it might be better to get excellent meat substitutes or vat-meat and then shift values after, when it will be easier. There's a chain of steps here, and it could involve investing at the start, or saving until you can implement one of the later steps, depending on which you think will need pushing the most: (i) Develop technologies and production (ii) Normalise use of meat substitutes in society (iii) When these are widespread, build support for ending animal cruelty in farms.
It's also possible that building the effective altruism movement is a better route, if it encourages reflection on values in a way which we think will tend to lead to improvements, or lead to good values more likely to spread further.