>What is a strong definition or test for necessity?
In this context I'm defining it as whether we need to do it to survive.
> Our ability to have power and therefore responsibility is a result of incredible amounts of time undergoing evolution that resulted in us being the beings we are today. Our interventions could rob other creatures from achieving similar levels of power, responsibility, or understanding. How does that fit in with your ethics beliefs? What if we created interventions to accelerate other animals abilities to "think empathetically." Do we have a responsibility to do that? What if it requires a natural process (applying natural selection to animals that do not display empathy/do not have empathy genes).
If we're talking about the current state of the world, our interventions are actually resulting in the deaths of countless individuals as well as the extinction of the majority of nonhuman life on Earth. Arguably what comes after environmental collapse may very well be the death of a large number, if not the majority of humans as well.
Animal industry is directly responsible for a lot of this in the form of the direct killing of wild animals for food and other products, as well as indirectly in the form of environmental destruction from farming animals.
An argument to end animal industry is in fact an argument to allow the most nonhuman life to proliferate, which serves your hypothetical about allowing others to survive and evolve.
If we're talking about my hypothetical of ending all suffering, that could go any which way. Are we ending suffering just by neurally neutering all creatures and allowing them to only experience pleasure, even as they're being devoured alive? Are we somehow genetically modifying all carnivores and omnivores to become herbivores, and then modifying plant life to be able to supply the global population, and then again ensuring that their fertility rates and lifespans are such that their populations remain static? Are we leaving everything as it is and then just segregating all herbivores from the carnivores and then airdropping in packages of Beyond Antelope to all those carnivores on a weekly basis?
Who knows man, depending on how you choose to go about it you could still allow nonhuman life to go on existing and evolving. Although granted, the course of their evolution would be altered by our actions, just as the course of their evolution is inevitably being altered by our current actions, and as they will be regardless of what we do or don't do just based on our dominance of the planet and inevitable influence upon all life on it.
My argument is simply that in the real world, we stop torturing and killing fellow sentient beings when we don't have to. I think it's not an unreasonable position to hold, and it seems as if it would benefit the majority of life on Earth, humans included, as opposed to harming it.
> What about the flip side, what if we could cause pleasure. Do we have a responsibility to cause pleasure?
> What if we started taking animals and hooking electrodes up to the pleasure centers of their brains, and turned the machine on for the rest of their natural lives, while feeding them ethical nutrients via IV. Is that a philosophically good thing to do?
> If there are no beings, there is no suffering. That's an easy answer. If we had a theoretical hyper-heroin that would function against all animals, we could drug every creature into a happy ending. Is that a philosophically satisfying intervention?
Fully automated luxury Earth dildos for all animals and insects, at work 24/7.
Who knows? If we could ascertain consent that would probably be the guiding principle. Some people would want some sort of existence consisting of pure pleasure, some would not. If we really want to get into it I would argue that even those who would not have never experienced absolutely all encompassing drug induced euphoria, it's hard to not want something that every neuron in your brain is telling you is nirvana.
I'm not arguing we should do this, I frankly don't know whether it's more dystopian to submit all living things to nonconsensual pleasure comas or to simply let them live out their lives with all the agony that may entail.
However what I will say is that all this is pretty far off the rails, and unattached to the reality we currently inhabit and the abilities we currently possess within it.
The reality we currently inhabit is one in which we are exterminating all nonhuman life on Earth, and torturing billions of animals to death per year in the most horrific ways imaginable, simultaneously destroying the environment which will result in unimaginable amounts of human suffering and death, just because we enjoy the taste. We can instead choose to be kind to those who share this world with us, they and we would be better off for it.