Why do you think it is dishonest for different people to have different levels of commitment and willingness to eliminate animal products or different levels of belief that this is an effective strategy for them? There needn’t be any contradiction in observing that a mixed strategy might be most successful (fact) and different people being moved to different levels of diet change as one front of their animal activism.
Seems like you’re either DxE or you haven’t been vegetarian in this world. The truth is not enough people agree that it is wrong to raise animals in horrid conditions for food. If not enough people agreed about murdering a human outgroup, a strategy of purist outrage wouldn’t work, and you’d probably end up switching to a harm reduction strategy like animal EAs have. 25 lives saved is good. You’re objecting because you think it will work to object and you can save more. You think I would object if I really cared about animals but I think you just don’t understand the reality of the situation. IMHO harm reduction is how we create the change to one day be able to protect animals with outrage alone.
Why do you think it is dishonest for different people to have different levels
The argument is that you should do this “as a mixed strategy”, which would mean that even a group of people with identical beliefs would act differently based on a random factor. Furthermore, I qualified it with:
even if all those people believe exactly the same thing
so they don’t have different levels.
And even in the different levels case, it’s easy for people to pretend they have greater differences than they really do, and their actual differences may not be enough to make the statements truthful.
IMHO harm reduction is how we create the change to one day be able to protect animals with outrage alone.
It may be the case that you can save more animals if some percentage of you lie than if you all tell the truth. Whether it’s okay to lie in a “harmless” way for your ideology is a subject that’s been debated quite a lot in a number of contexts. (I do think it’s okay to lie to prevent the murder of a human outgroup, although even then, you need to be very careful, particularly with widespread lies.)
I don’t appreciate your hostility and assumption of bad faith here. Like I could answer your objections and point out that your hypothetical is misleading (because you’re stipulating that people aren’t different and differences in preferences and motivations are what explain why a mixed strategy works), but it seems like that’s not really your issue.
The concept of “least convenient possible world” comes in here. There may be situations in which a mixed strategy is possible without lying, but your idea applies both to those situations and to less convenient situations where it does require lying.
Direct Action Everywhere— it’s the most deontological animal welfare adjacent to EA. They break into farms and liberate animals and stuff like that. I don’t think it’s on the whole the most effective strategy, although I think there’s a place for it.
Why do you think it is dishonest for different people to have different levels of commitment and willingness to eliminate animal products or different levels of belief that this is an effective strategy for them? There needn’t be any contradiction in observing that a mixed strategy might be most successful (fact) and different people being moved to different levels of diet change as one front of their animal activism.
Seems like you’re either DxE or you haven’t been vegetarian in this world. The truth is not enough people agree that it is wrong to raise animals in horrid conditions for food. If not enough people agreed about murdering a human outgroup, a strategy of purist outrage wouldn’t work, and you’d probably end up switching to a harm reduction strategy like animal EAs have. 25 lives saved is good. You’re objecting because you think it will work to object and you can save more. You think I would object if I really cared about animals but I think you just don’t understand the reality of the situation. IMHO harm reduction is how we create the change to one day be able to protect animals with outrage alone.
The argument is that you should do this “as a mixed strategy”, which would mean that even a group of people with identical beliefs would act differently based on a random factor. Furthermore, I qualified it with:
so they don’t have different levels.
And even in the different levels case, it’s easy for people to pretend they have greater differences than they really do, and their actual differences may not be enough to make the statements truthful.
It may be the case that you can save more animals if some percentage of you lie than if you all tell the truth. Whether it’s okay to lie in a “harmless” way for your ideology is a subject that’s been debated quite a lot in a number of contexts. (I do think it’s okay to lie to prevent the murder of a human outgroup, although even then, you need to be very careful, particularly with widespread lies.)
I don’t appreciate your hostility and assumption of bad faith here. Like I could answer your objections and point out that your hypothetical is misleading (because you’re stipulating that people aren’t different and differences in preferences and motivations are what explain why a mixed strategy works), but it seems like that’s not really your issue.
The concept of “least convenient possible world” comes in here. There may be situations in which a mixed strategy is possible without lying, but your idea applies both to those situations and to less convenient situations where it does require lying.
What is DxE?
Direct Action Everywhere— it’s the most deontological animal welfare adjacent to EA. They break into farms and liberate animals and stuff like that. I don’t think it’s on the whole the most effective strategy, although I think there’s a place for it.