Does anyone know of any politicians in America who are utilitarians (or into animal welfare) and who are better than just someone who votes the right way on most bills? FWIW earlier I was looking for vegan politicians, and it seems Dennis Kucinich is the only even moderately high ranking one, and he got redistricted out of his seat (though Jared Polis also seems to be pretty good, and has a vegan partner).

Alas, I can't think of any offhand. If there were any candidates running with an animal-welfare party, I would most likely vote for them for memetic reasons. Absent that, it's not clear how to vote. The Greens favor animal rights, but they also (more conspicuously) favor preservation of massive amounts of suffering in the wilderness.

Let us know if you come up with further ideas.

Alan Dawrst wrote:Alas, I can't think of any offhand. If there were any candidates running with an animal-welfare party, I would most likely vote for them for memetic reasons. Absent that, it's not clear how to vote. The Greens favor animal rights, but they also (more conspicuously) favor preservation of massive amounts of suffering in the wilderness.

Let us know if you come up with further ideas.

Yeah, it's too bad that the greens aren't actually a utilitarian party. I guess in the end maybe it's just worth voting for the less irrational party in the hopes that it slowly brings America to be a more rational, and hopefully more utilitarian, society.

Hutch wrote:The Greens favor animal rights, but they also (more conspicuously) favor preservation of massive amounts of suffering in the wilderness.

I think we should be wary of this type of claim; for one thing many greens won't have even heard or thought of the wild animal suffering issue. For another, while I tend towards agreeing, I think the issue of whether the wild is net negative is far from settled, and I certainly think there's a large difference between thinking it's probably false, and thinking it's true but that we should preserve it anyway.

Arepo wrote:I think we should be wary of this type of claim; for one thing many greens won't have even heard or thought of the wild animal suffering issue.

Yeah, I was being a bit sardonic with that sentence. What I really meant was that Greens favor preservation of nature, and nature contains massive amounts of suffering. Both of these are undisputed. Putting them together as I did is not quite true at face value.

Arepo wrote:I think the issue of whether the wild is net negative is far from settled

Care to go on?