Deontological [decisions] such as “let’s let any number of animals die to save even a single human life”
There might exist a number of animals (like the number of animals on Earth) such that, if they all died, people would die as a result—ignoring subsistence effects, we kind of need the biosphere to keep working.
Also, if hunting or farming of an animal species is done in a way that creates bio-risks, that’s a problem. I’m not sure where the ‘covid comes from bats’ theory is at now, but the Spanish flu was a big deal and it did come from animals. While I’m not sure of how that happened—i.e. it might not have been factory farming—it seems important that we don’t shot ourselves in the foot, globally.
Additionally, if an animal produces stuff that can be made into medicine, driving them extinct in order to meet current demand is obviously bad.*
In fact, even in terms of consumption and valuing that, over consumption is a problem.*
*If you care about future people at all, wrt. that.
Right now farming animals seems to be a huge risk for zoonosis, if I remember correctly Covid-19 could have spread from exotic animals being sold in high numbers, and it jumped from man to minks in farms, spread like wildfire in the packed environment, gathering all sort of mutations, and then jumped back to man.
Farming animal is also not sustainable at all with the level of tech, resources and consumption we have now. I’d expect the impact of farming to kill at least some tens-millions people in a moderately bad global warming scenario, it’s already producing humanitarian crises now, and I’m afraid global warming increases extinction risks due to how we would be more likely to botch AGI.
I had just suggested the rule for an entirely hypothetical scenario where we are asked to trade human lives against animal lives, because I was trying to discuss the moral situation “trade animal lives and suffering against human convenience” on its own.
There might exist a number of animals (like the number of animals on Earth) such that, if they all died, people would die as a result—ignoring subsistence effects, we kind of need the biosphere to keep working.
Also, if hunting or farming of an animal species is done in a way that creates bio-risks, that’s a problem. I’m not sure where the ‘covid comes from bats’ theory is at now, but the Spanish flu was a big deal and it did come from animals. While I’m not sure of how that happened—i.e. it might not have been factory farming—it seems important that we don’t shot ourselves in the foot, globally.
Additionally, if an animal produces stuff that can be made into medicine, driving them extinct in order to meet current demand is obviously bad.*
In fact, even in terms of consumption and valuing that, over consumption is a problem.*
*If you care about future people at all, wrt. that.
I do agree on everything you said.
Right now farming animals seems to be a huge risk for zoonosis, if I remember correctly Covid-19 could have spread from exotic animals being sold in high numbers, and it jumped from man to minks in farms, spread like wildfire in the packed environment, gathering all sort of mutations, and then jumped back to man.
Farming animal is also not sustainable at all with the level of tech, resources and consumption we have now. I’d expect the impact of farming to kill at least some tens-millions people in a moderately bad global warming scenario, it’s already producing humanitarian crises now, and I’m afraid global warming increases extinction risks due to how we would be more likely to botch AGI.
I had just suggested the rule for an entirely hypothetical scenario where we are asked to trade human lives against animal lives, because I was trying to discuss the moral situation “trade animal lives and suffering against human convenience” on its own.