3.4 Could we be in the middle of a moral catastrophe?

Go back to Pythion's epitaph. The people who carved it were not monsters by their own lights. Nearly every society that committed what we now see as a grave moral wrong did so while believing itself decent.

The philosopher Evan G. Williams draws an uncomfortable conclusion from this: we are probably no different. There is likely something we do now, at scale, that future generations will regard as a catastrophe. We might be wrong about who counts, or about what is acceptable to do to them. His argument rests on a simple piece of arithmetic.

Williams doesn't say which practice is the catastrophe. He argues that we should take moral questions more seriously as a research problem, and avoid irreversible steps while we're uncertain.

Where the case for prioritising farmed animals is weakest.

• Moral weight. If animal experiences count for very little, the case falls away whatever the numbers. Many thoughtful people hold this view.
• Durability. It is unclear whether reforms such as cage-free housing lead to lasting change, or only improve a system that stays largely the same. Advocates themselves disagree about reform versus abolition.
• Tractability. Diets, farming livelihoods and food culture change slowly, and political resistance can be strong. That is visible in Dutch debates about livestock numbers.

Kelsey Piper, a journalist who writes about effective altruism, poses a test for any movement that claims to be doing good: would it have got the big moral questions of its own time right?