Volume XII · The Essentials of Animal Ethics · chapter 13
Longtermist Strategies: Broad and Targeted
Before you read study layer, not part of the original text
Longtermist strategies can be broad (a good impact in almost every scenario, such as increasing consideration for sentient beings) or targeted (a large impact in specific scenarios, such as regulating space exploration or aligning AI); in choosing them, we need humility and widely acceptable goals.
To take care of the future, we can do things that help in almost any situation, like teaching respect, or things that help a lot in one specific situation, like rules for robots. The best thing is to do both, carefully.
Saving money helps with almost any emergency; buying car insurance helps a lot with one specific kind of emergency.
- P1 Broad strategies have a positive impact in a great many scenarios, but a smaller one in each.
- P2 Targeted strategies can have a large impact, but only in the scenario they address.
- P3 Biases and overconfidence can distort the choice.
- C So we need to combine strategies, cultivate humility, and advocate goals that many can accept.
The chapter’s central argument in logical form. If the premises are true, the conclusion follows. To disagree, you have to show which premise is false.
They say “It is better to bet everything on a single solution.”
Answer With so much uncertainty, betting everything on one scenario is risky. Broad strategies protect us against the unexpected.
More objections and answers in Debunking objections.
Original text Luciano Carlos Cunha · Volume XII, p. 47 of the PDF edition · English translation
If our goal is for our decisions to have the best impact for all beings, we need to take their long-term impact into account58. In this regard, there are two main groups of strategies: broad and targeted.
| Strategy | Broad | Targeted |
|---|---|---|
| What it consists of | Trying to have the best possible impact across a wide variety of scenarios. | Trying to have the best possible impact in specific scenarios. |
| Advantage | They will have a positive impact in a great many scenarios, perhaps in almost all of them. | They can have a very large impact if the scenario they address occurs. |
| Disadvantage | This impact is smaller than that of targeted strategies when the scenario for which those are designed occurs. | They may have a very small or even no impact if other scenarios occur. |
The following tables show some examples of broad and :
| Examples of broad strategies | |
|---|---|
| Type | Example |
| Increasing consideration for sentient beings. (IX, ch. 9.3.1). | • Advocating the moral consideration of all sentient beings (focusing on the most neglected, such as aquatic animals and invertebrates, and new forms of sentience that may arise in the future). • Addressing all causes of harm to sentient beings (whether those caused by their exploitation, those due to their situation in the wild as a result of natural processes, or others that may come to exist in the future). • Promoting institutional changes that reinforce the changes in attitude achieved and make future regressions harder. |
| Increasing our capacity for action in the future (IX, ch. 9.3.2). | • Spreading concern for the long-term future and for s-risks (this will lead more people to work on these topics). • Trying to increase the resources of people interested in preventing future suffering. • Increasing our knowledge about the long term. This will allow us to: (1) better understand how to plan strategies; (2) identify strategies not yet considered; and (3) clarify which of the available strategies have the greatest potential. |
| Examples of targeted strategies | |
|---|---|
| Type | Example |
| Focus on avoiding animal exploitation (IX, ch. 9.4.1). | • Preventing new forms of animal exploitation (for example, by banning new forms of exploiting invertebrates for consumption). • Developing proteins and materials of non-animal origin to replace those of animal origin. • Trying to prevent artificial intelligence from being used to improve the efficiency of animal exploitation. |
| Focus on avoiding the suffering of wild animals (IX, ch. 9.4.2). | • Creating and consolidating the field of welfare biology59. • Establishing regulations for space exploration so as to avoid the intentional or accidental spread of life beyond planet Earth (even nonsentient life, since over a long time it could evolve and give rise to sentient beings). |
| Focus on consideration for new forms of sentience (IX, ch. 9.4.3). | • Trying to prevent the engineering of new forms of sentience, both biological and nonbiological. • Trying to secure legal rights for nonbiological sentient entities. • Pursuing a non-anthropocentric alignment of artificial intelligence (that is, ensuring that artificial intelligence does not have anthropocentric values). |
Precautions when choosing longtermist strategies
We have seen some examples of strategies for preventing long-term suffering. Below are some precautions we should take when choosing them60:
| Risk | Precaution |
|---|---|
| Underestimating the complexity of the question | Given the uncertainty about the future, remember that there is probably no single, conclusive answer. We should always remain open to revising our beliefs about which strategies are best, and be prepared to change strategy if necessary. |
| Cognitive biases may lead us to trust certain approaches too much and to dismiss others prematurely. We tend to neglect the possible negative effects of the approaches we initially sympathize with and the possible positive effects of the approaches we initially do not sympathize with. | Remember that we may be biased in our assessments, cultivate epistemic humility, and always seek new information. |
| Certain approaches carry a high risk of leading people who have other priorities to reject reducing s-risks | It is better to advocate goals that can be accepted by a wide range of perspectives. |
We will see more about this last point in the next section.
Practice
Study layer. The answers are based on the chapter’s text.
Which of these is a targeted strategy mentioned in the table?
What precaution does the table recommend in the face of biases?
Food for thought
What attitude of yours helps in almost any possible future?
Author’s notes 3
- 58 This has come to be known as longtermism. It is the subject of ch. 9 of Volume IX of this collection. For more information on longtermism, see (2018); (1984, p. 351-443); (2013), and and Macaskill (2019). ↩
- 59 Welfare biology is the field that would study how animals in their environments are affected from the standpoint of their well-being (and not from the standpoint of the conservation of species or ecosystems). On welfare biology, see and (2020) and et. al. (2021). See also VII, ch. 27. ↩
- 60 This topic is addressed in section 9.5 of Volume IX of this collection. ↩
Sources cited in this text 5
The full list for the volume is in the Volume XII references.
- BECKSTEAD, N. On the overwhelming importance of shaping the far future. Tese (Doutorado em Filosofia). New Brunswick: Rutgers University, 2013.
- FARIA, C.; HORTA, O. Welfare biology. In: FISCHER, B. (org.). The routledge handbook Of animal ethics. New York/London: Routledge - Taylor & Francis group, 2020, p. 455-66.
- GREAVES, H. & MACASKILL, W. The case for strong longtermism. Global Priorities Institute, v. 7, set. 2019.
- PARFIT, D. Reasons and persons. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984.
- SORYL, A. A.; MOORE, A. J.; SEDDON, P. J.; KING, M. R. The Case for Welfare Biology. Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics, v. 34, n. 7, 2021.
Go deeper on each point
The chapters the author points to in the tables above.
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