Veganism as the Alignment Test for Longtermism

Longtermism asks us to imagine the vastness of the future—trillions of lives, billions of years—and to act today as though those lives matter. It is a stirring vision, but it rests on a fragile assumption: that humanity is capable of aligning on a mission, coordinating across cultures and centuries, and acting with compassion at scale.

Before we leap to the stars, we should ask whether we can pass the first test right in front of us: ending factory farming. Each year, tens of billions of animals are confined and killed in conditions so grim that many philosophers consider their lives net negative. If we cannot align to end this, an atrocity happening in plain sight, what confidence can we have that humanity will succeed in steering the far future somewhere positive?

What the Book Says
Essays on Longtermism acknowledges this point, though [...]

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.