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shumpitostick t1_itpstm5 wrote

That's not true that his only focus is on individual actions though. In his Animal Liberation, there's a whole section of the book where he talks about the mostly unnecessary cruelty of Animal Experimentation, and how it should be solved by advocacy and changing the laws. The Effective Altruism movement for with Singer is considered to be somewhat of an ideological father, uses advocacy, grassroots movements, lobbying, etc in a variety of issues.

However, in some issues individual action can be the best way. Some issues, like Veganism for example that Singer is an advocate of, do not have enough public support at this point to change laws and policies. Same with poverty alleviation. I'm sure pretty much everybody in the movement would be happy to see countries give foreign aid in the forms that have been shown to be effective. However countries generally see foreign aid as a tool to buy influence and that's unlikely to change soon.

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Amphy64 t1_itpxp5t wrote

Disagree, I think in the UK we easily have sufficient public support for veganism, and at absolute minimum for welfare legislation that would have the inevitable effect of drastically reducing then likely eliminating meat consumption, it's the actions and practical understanding that haven't caught up. It's an edgelord minority willing to look at animal ag. and go 'this is fine', very few think or want to say that.

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shumpitostick t1_itqfnyu wrote

Are you vegan? Because honestly I think you're a bit naive about the public support for animal welfare. There are quite a lot of people who don't give a single shit about animal welfare. They're not the deciding factors when it comes to this kind of politics though. It's the farmers. Farmers are one of the strongest lobby groups in most countries and they oppose anything that hurts their bottom line. I'm from Israel, we have the highest percentage of vegans in the world and we had a big campaign a while ago to stop importing livestock (they would suffer a lot on the trip). The campaign failed.

I'm not saying that you can't find public support for some animal welfare policies, and many groups in the Effective Altruism space do work on that, but it's usually stuff like "hey maybe you can't keep this chicken in an individual cage where she literally can't move and instead put her in a cage with other chickens where she maybe will be able to take a few steps without stepping into another chicken". We're very far from like, banning slaughterhouses.

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