If you are arguing for increasing agricultural land, there are many other ways to accomplish that. You could promote the use of biofuels. Suggest more people get horses as companion animals. Or many other methods. Hyper-focusing on eating cows is weird. At this point is seems like a way to self-rationalize that eating cows is not just ok but on net preferable.

P1: "This 90 year old is about to send a spam message to 100 million people. That will cause ~2000 years of annoyance and suffering. They have only ~4 years of expected mediocre life left, so it would be better to kill them so they can't send the message."

P2: "Why not just take away their phone?"

You've proposed a false dilemma.

Mild downvote here. The conclusions ("I recommend increasing the consumption of beef") do not not follow from the premises ("soil animals have negative lives"), even if true. And the premises are highly uncertain and speculative.

There are perhaps other ways to improve or mitigate soil animal lives, and certainly many other ways to increase agricultural land that do not involve killing and eating cows.

Because of that, it feels like the post is intentionally contrarian for the sake of aggravating others, rather than an earnest attempt to improve the lives of soil animals. I appreciate the detail and raising issues many haven't considered. I'd upvote it if it was framed as raising an issue noting the uncertainty and invitation for consideration, rather than a strong recommendation for something that doesn't follow from the premises.

I understand you are trying to recast the Christian dominion interpretation, but it is worth mentioning that as an ideology it has long been overwhelming opposed or indifferent to animal welfare. Most popular dominion interpretations are in the mold of Rene Descartes, who thought animals automatons. The dominion framing is so severe that the most popular shocking vegan film is named after it.

Furthermore, the modern animal welfare movement is highly correlated with atheism, or at least skeptical approaches to understanding our relationship with non-human animals. It may be easier to push non-religious framings around animals rather than trying to re-interpret dominionism. I'm not sure how successful that will be depending on the culture where you live.

It seems like a fundamental problem is the lack of a moral realist foundation, as "human intentions toward sentient beings" and "what is moral" are different things. Can someone recommend some reading on whether alignment is even a coherent ask, either from a moral realist or moral anti-realist perspective?

The salient question for me is how much does reducing extinction risk change the long run experience of moral patients? One argument is that meaningfully reducing risk would require substantial coordination, and that coordination is likely to result in better worlds. I think it is as or more likely that reducing extinction risk can result in some worlds where most moral patients are used as means without regard to their suffering.

I think an AI aligned to roughly to the output of all current human coordination would be net-negative. I would shift to thinking addressing extinction risk is more important if factory farming stopped, humanity was taking serious steps to address wild animal suffering, all sustainable development goals were met within 5 years of the initial timeline, and global inequality was reduced to something like <0.25 GINI coefficient.

The USDA secretary released a strategy yesterday on lowering egg prices. Explained originally as a WSJ opinion (paywall). Summarized here without the paywall.

Five points to the strategy:

• $500 million for a biosecurity program to limit transmission of avian flu
• $400 million to farmers to recover after an outbreak
• $100 million for vaccines
• Look to ease regulations, especially overriding California Proposition 12 that banned the sale of eggs from caged hens.
• Look to allow temporary imports of eggs

Key concerns:

• Enacting a key-goal of the EATS act to override state humane treatment regulations without legislation
• Imports from lower-welfare countries
• All companies that have committed to going cage-free this year using the USDA response as an excuse to delayed or revoke their commitment.

I'm curious where the non-cage free eggs are going. From my naive position, it seems like the grocery stores and restaurant chains listed here should cover a majority of egg use, and are well above 40% cage-free in aggregate. Do non-chain restaurants explain the difference? Hotels? Food manufacturers? Schools and other public places with cafeterias?

"The important question is whether eating meat and donating is morally better than eating meat and not donating. The answer to that seems like a resounding 'yes'"

Offsetting bad moral actions depends on 1) the action being off-settable, 2) the two actions are inseparable, and 3) presuming a rather extreme form of utilitarianism is morally correct.

In the case you provide, I think it fails on all three parts. The action isn't off-settable. Most moral frameworks would look at the two actions separately. Donating to an animal welfare charity doesn't first require you eat meat, and there is no forced decision to donate or not donate if you eat an animal. And if you accept moral offsetting is better in this case, you are upon to all sorts of the standard utilitarian critiques.

There are also separate justice concerns and whether you are benefiting the appropriate reference class (if you eat cow and donate to shrimp welfare in another country, is that appropriate offsetting?).

I think it's fine to promote the endeavor (or at least its morally permissible). But saying it is morally better isn't well-supported. It's similar to the somewhat non-intuitive finding in moral philosophy that if choosing between A) not donating to charity, B) donating to an ineffective charity, and C) donating to an effective charity, choosing A over B may be morally permissible, but choosing B over C is not.

Do you agree with Susan Wolf's claim in Moral Saints that we ought to consider non-moral values in deciding what we do, and those may be a valid reason to not given more to the worst off? I presume you've written about it before on your blog or in a paper.

A related question is: do you think the gap is greater between our actions and what we think we ought to do, or between what we think ought to do and what we ought to do in some realist meta-normative sense? Is the bigger issue that we lack moral knowledge, or that we don't live up to moral standards?