EA - Could it be a (bad) lock-in to replace factory farming with alternative protein? by Fai

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Could it be a (bad) lock-in to replace factory farming with alternative protein?, published by Fai on September 10, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Epistemic status I have recently been encouraged to write more posts, so I decided to test my fast writing this time with a topic that sat in my mind for very long, and just post it quickly. I haven’t discussed it with anyone, nor checked if the topic has been discussed already, nor done any research. I literally just wrote the whole thing out without doing any new research (or even just search), except when I went back to insert links to some claims. It took me 5 hours to write this. TL;DR Letting technological advancement in alternative protein and economics do most/all of the job of replacing factory farming could be bad, especially from the longtermist perspective. We likely only have one chance to eliminate factory farming (for food) for moral reasons, and we might lose a lot by losing this chance. Why lock-in? The lock-in is this: Unless there are other planets with other intelligent beings doing factory farming, or we somehow restart it after eliminating it, we likely only have one chance to eliminate factory farming (for food) for moral reasons. The moment plant-based alternative/cultivated meat (PB/CM) replaces virtually all factory farming for food (btw, I doubt this will be certain, see this post), we lose the chance to do so for moral reasons. Yes, after that we can still change our laws and say that we “ban” factory farming for food in a time where there is virtually none, but I argue that even the motivation behind making such legal bans matters. This leads to the second section. Why might the lock-in be bad? Let’s first talk about using laws to ban factory farming. We have, coarsely speaking, two options: Ban it when we still have factory farming (btw, please consider supporting the federal ballot initiative to abolish factory farming in Switzerland, September 25) Ban it after we virtually eliminated it for non-morally relevant reasons (and excuse me for emphasizing again, I don’t think it’s 100% guaranteed). The moral character (and therefore the education that is based on it) we show in the two scenarios will be drastically different - It seems much better if we are so morally determined that we simply make a law to ban factory farming, than we eliminate it for economic reasons and then say we ban it. Some of my more particular worries include: If we ban one form of animal exploitation but not all, it might mislead people to think that those that are still legal are morally acceptable. I also worry that using laws to capture our abolition of moral catastrophes after they become economically inviable, can create a false sense of progress - making us feel overly confident about our moral progress and moral capacity, and therefore makes us not informed enough to have good future progress. Another scenario is we simply replace factory farming for food with technologies, without ever banning it. There was a historical example that is very similar: Animal advocates often use the example of automobiles replacing horses being exploited for transportation to explain the importance of technologies in our moral progress. But the same example can also be evidence that the (near) elimination of a moral catastrophe using technological advancement can be bad in the long-term. Horse riding, and the riding of other animals, still exist in different forms of entertainment, such as tourism, sports, and gambling. Yes, they cause much less direct suffering than the use of animals as transports, but the value they communicate is still very bad, and virtually the same - an animal can be caused to exist, raised, and exploited for human use however we like. Also, besides actively communicating speciesist values, the way we ...