This seems like a super hard question, and not one that changes the importance of working to promote animal welfare, so naively (absent some argument for a more informative prior) it should have a 50⁄50 split within animal welfare circles.
My intuition is that many people are drawn into animal welfare specifically because they think that factory farming is clearly net-negative, thus making this an important cause area, while people who think that factory farming is positive are likely to see other EA cause areas as more urgent and gravitate towards them.
Within the “net-negative” camp, in my unanchored “what would I naively expect?” hypothetical, I then imagine dietary preferences breaking down something like:
10%: Approximate veg*nism or approximate reducetarianism. (“Approximate” to allow for carve-outs like bivalves and especially-moral animal products. The group generally strongly encourages all members to have at least one carve-out, because bivalves in particular are such a clear case and dietary purity ethics is a risky attractor to avoid.)
10%: Handshake-itarianism. [...]
Within the “net-positive” camp, I imagine:
10%: Sentience-maximizing diets. If you think animals in factory farms have net-positive lives, then it makes sense to want to increase the number of animals (by eating the most meat-heavy healthy diet possible) while also working to improve their welfare.
10%: Handshake-itarianism. [...]
Handshake-itarianism observes that the ~veg*ns and the sentience-maximizers are sort of offsetting each other’s efforts, and that it can make more sense for Bob the ~Veg*n and Alice the Sentience-Maximizer to pair off and each agree to eat a “compromise” diet (e.g., both eat meat but only on the weekend).
Sentience-maximizing diets would make logical sense, but I don’t think I recall ever meeting anyone (EA or otherwise) who would follow such a diet, while I have met plenty of people (EA or otherwise) who follow approximate veg*nism or approximate reductarianism. For that reason I’d also be surprised if both camps really had the same numbers of Handshake-itarians, simply because there seem to me to be vastly fewer sentience-maximizers to trade with than there are ~veg*ns.
My intuition is that many people are drawn into animal welfare specifically because they think that factory farming is clearly net-negative, thus making this an important cause area, while people who think that factory farming is positive are likely to see other EA cause areas as more urgent and gravitate towards them.
Sentience-maximizing diets would make logical sense, but I don’t think I recall ever meeting anyone (EA or otherwise) who would follow such a diet, while I have met plenty of people (EA or otherwise) who follow approximate veg*nism or approximate reductarianism. For that reason I’d also be surprised if both camps really had the same numbers of Handshake-itarians, simply because there seem to me to be vastly fewer sentience-maximizers to trade with than there are ~veg*ns.