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JoA's avatar
4dEdited

I think many pro-animal EAs aren't keen on the term "speciesism", even though it was popularized by Peter Singer - and I find it pretty imperfect too. But here, a concept that highlights how flippant we tend to be when it comes to the experiences of animals that we find weird, boring, or too small to matter, seems important to make sense of the "discourse" (even though it should never be used as an insult to shut down conversations).

Similar feelings about critics of the RP Moral Weights project who come frighteningly close to saying "the project was conducted by people that had the intuition that animals matters somewhat, so it must be massively biased". I don't assume RP's welfare ranges to be perfect, yet I can only agree with the final image!

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JerL's avatar

I broadly agree with you, but this rubbed me the wrong way a little:

>>"Ethics should not be done by PR agencies. We shouldn’t revise our assessments of how many people die from Tuberculosis because it sounds offensive to say that tuberculosis is hundreds of times worse than 9/11."

While you obviously shouldn't revise your estimates about tuberculosis deaths, I do think it's important to worry about being offensive when saying things like this, especially when you're not doing academic philosophy but rather public advocacy for a cause.

Not to say that you've struck a bad balance, or your critics are right, necessarily, but you do sometimes affect a... certain adversarial mode in these debates, and I think it's not unreasonable to take the initiative a little more to make it clear that caring about insect suffering isn't meant to diminish human suffering and blah blah blah: avoid directly saying that insect suffering is "worse" than human suffering, and just use the large numbers to point out that, however it compares to human suffering it's probably immense--to use human suffering more to set a sense of scale than to imply a prioritization.

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