‘Longtermism’: Making the far-future go well for animals should be top priority of animal rights movement

The scale of future animal suffering is truly incomprehensible. There could be countless future generations that our actions might affect. If we’re serious about wanting to benefit animals, we should mostly be concerned with how our actions affect them over long-time scales. If your animal welfare intervention has no chance of making things better more than a hundred years out, you should probably stop doing it. The core argument for ‘Longtermism’ is that the future is huge. This is one of the big challenges that we’ll need to solve to get a good future, and it’s the most important challenge in the animal welfare space. 

BENTHAM’S BULLDOG: If you’re serious about helping animals, you should be almost entirely concerned with making sure the far future goes well for animals. The core argument for ‘Longtermism’ is that the future is huge. There could be countless future generations that our actions might affect. Thus, in expectation, for every one present individual affected by your actions, there are countless affected future individuals… So what is it that those in the animal movement should do?

First, it’s really important that we don’t spread factory farming or wild animal suffering to space. If you think animals live bad lives, making sure we don’t fill countless planets with the screams of innocent terrified animals is hugely important. Preventing intergalactic factory farms is a no-brainer…

Second, we need to make AI concerned about animal welfare. We are currently building gods of metal; it is reasonably likely that they’ll be indifferent to almost all the well-being and suffering in the world… Making sure that the digital beings who will dominate the future aren’t indifferent to animal welfare is of vital importance.

Third, trying to increase compassion for animals—especially neglected animals like shrimp and wild animals—is likely to make the future go well for animals. A world that cares more about the welfare of animals is less likely to harm them gratuitously without a good reason…

If we’re serious about wanting to benefit animals, we should mostly be concerned with how our actions affect them over long time scales. If your animal welfare intervention has no chance of making things better more than a hundred years out, you should probably stop doing it…

The scale of future animal suffering is truly incomprehensible. This is one of the big challenges that we’ll need to solve to get a good future, and it’s the most important challenge in the animal welfare space. For this reason, if you’re an animal advocate reading this, I cannot implore you enough to think hard about the far future. SOURCE

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