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Disclaimer: I'm funded by EA for animal welfare work.
Some thoughts:
a. So much of the debate feels like a debate on identities and values. I'd really love to see people nitpicking into technical details of cost-effectiveness estimates instead.
b. I think it's worth reminding that animal welfare interventions are less cost-effective than they were when Simcikas conducted his analysis.
c. I generally feel much more comfortable standing behind Givewell's estimates but Givewell doesn't analyse cost-effectiveness of advocacy work. My biggest misgivings about cost-effectiveness estimates are due to the difficulty of assessing advocacy work. I think we should make a lot more progress on this.
d. People seem to keep forgetting that uncertainty cuts both ways. If the moral worth of animals is too uncertain, that is also a reason against confidently dismissing them.
e. I don't think we have made much progress on the question of "How much important is cage to cage-free transition for a chicken in terms of human welfare?". I don't think Rethink Priorities Welfare ranges answer that question. In general I'm confused about the approach of trying to find overall welfare capacities of different species... (read more)
A few theses that may turn into a proper post:
1. Marginal animal welfare cost effectiveness seems to robustly beat global health interventions. It may look more like 5x or 1000x but it is very hard indeed to get that number below 1 (I do think both are probably in fact good ex ante at least, so think the number is positive).
To quote myself from this comment:
2. The difference in magnitude of cost effectiveness (under any plausible understanding of what that means) between MakeAWish (or personal consumption spendi... (read more)
I don't think this is as robust as it seems. One could easily have moral weights many orders of magnitude away from RP's. For example, if you value one human more than the population of one beehive that's three orders of magnitude lower than what RP gives (more)
The animal welfare side of things feels less truthseeking, more activist, than other parts of EA. Talk of "speciesim" that implies animals' and humans' lives are of ~equal value, seems farfetched to me. People frequently do things like taking Rethink's moral weights project (which kinda skips over a lot of hard philosophical problems about measurement and what we can learn from animal behavior, and goes all-in on a simple perspective of total hedonic utilitarianism which I think is useful but not ultimately correct), and just treat the numbers as if they are unvarnished truth.
If I considered only the immediate, direct effects of $100m spent on animal welfare versus global health, I would probably side with animal welfare despite the concerns above. But I'm also worried about the relative lack of ripple / flow-through effects from animal welfare work versus global health interventions -- both positive longer-term effects on the future of civilization generally, and more near-term effects on the sustainability of the EA movement and social perceptions of EA. Going all-in on animal welfare at the expense of global development seems bad for the movement.
That's not what "speciesism" means. Speciesim isn't the view that an individual human matters more than animals, it's the view that humans matter more because they are human, and not because of some objectively important capacity. Singer who popularized the term speciesism (though he didn't invent it) has never denied that a (typical, non-infant) human should be saved over a single animal.
Good to know! I haven't actually read "Animal Liberation" or etc; I've just seen the word a lot and assumed (by the seemingly intentional analogy to racism, sexism, etc) that it meant "thinking humans are superior to animals (which is bad and wrong)", in the same way that racism is often used to mean "thinking europeans are superior to other groups (which is bad and wrong)", and sexism about men > women. Thus it always felt to me like a weird, unlikely attempt to shoehorn a niche philosophical position (Are nonhuman animals' lives of equal worth to humans?) into the same kind of socially-enforced consensus whereby things like racism are near-universally condemend.
I guess your definition of speciesism means that it's fine to think humans matter more than other animals, but only if there's a reason for it (like that we have special quality X, or we have Y percent greater capacity for something, therefore we're Y percent more valuable, or because the strong are destined to rule, or whatever). Versus it would be speciesist to say that humans matter more than other animals "because they're human, and I'm human, and I'm sticking with my tribe".
Wikipedia's page on "speciesi... (read more)
Rethink's weights unhedged in the wild: the most recent time I remember seeing this was when somebody pointed me towards this website: https://foodimpacts.org/, which uses Rethink's numbers to set the moral importance of different animals. They only link to where they got the weights in a tiny footnote on a secondary page about methods, and they don't mention any other ways that people try to calculate reference weights, or anything about what it means to "assume hedonism" or etc. Instead, we're told these weights are authoritative and scientific because they're "based on the most elaborate research to date".
IMO it would be cool to be able to swap between Rethink, versus squared neuron count or something, versus everything-is-100%. As is, they do let you edit the numbers yourself, and also give a checkbox that makes everything equal 100%. Which (perhaps unintentionally) is a pretty extreme framing of the discussion!! "Are shrimp 3% as important as a human life (30 shrimp = 1 person)! Or 100%? Or maybe you want to edit the numbers to something in-between?"
I think the foodimpacts calculator is a cool idea, and I don't begrudge anyone an attempt to make estimates using a bunch ... (read more)
Some other factors not mentioned here but I sometimes think about:
-PETA used to do welfare campaigns and proudly own up their work on welfare campaigns when they talk about their history. But they stopped doing welfare campaigns around 10 years ago and even published public statements against some of the initiatives. I keep wondering whether that has anything to do with EA entering into space, refusing to fund PETA, and PETA withdrawing from welfare work to differentiate itself from welfare campaigning organisations in response. That would reduce cost-effectiveness of welfare campaigns significantly.
-One part I often see missing from human-animal comparisons is that animal welfare work prevents very extreme types suffering that would be classified as torture in human contexts. If I were to choose between extending a human life for 50 years versus preventing a person from suffering for one full year in a wire coffin, I would choose the latter. Similarly choosing between preventing 20.000 years of non-stop chicken torture vs. saving a human life is a lot different from saving the lives of 20.000 chickens versus saving the life of a human being. I think $5000 is currently able to fund... (read more)
In the abstract I think this would be good, but I'm skeptical that there are great opportunities in the animal space that can absorb this much funding right now! This is like, doubling the EA funds going to animal welfare stuff. I think I would strongly agree with claims like:
I think something that would be closer to 50/50 for me (or I haven't thought about it actually, but on its face seem closer to a midpoint):
I'd strongly disagree with a claim like:
So I listed myself as strongly agreeing, but with all these caveats.
The footnote says that the money can be spent "over any time period", so I think this would allow for several years of more capacity buildup and research to spend this effectively.
Given this precision, I think the claim should be close to something you agree on, if I understood correctly.
Non-moderator nudge: Given that most of the comments here are created via voting on the banner, I'd like to discourage people from downvoting comments below zero just for being low effort. I think it's still useful to leave a quick note in this case, so people can see them when browsing the banner. Hopefully positive karma will still do the job of sorting really good ones to the top.
This is probably going to be downvoted to oblivion, but I feel it's worth stating anyway, if nothing else to express my frustration with and alienation from EA.
On a meta level, I somewhat worry that the degree to which the animal welfare choice is dominating the global health one kinda shows how seemingly out-of-touch many EAs have become from mainstream common sense morality views.
In particular, I'm reminded of that quote from the Analects of Confucius:
You can counter with a lot of math that checks out and arguments that make logical sense, but the average person on the street is likely to view the idea that you could ever elevate the suffering of any number of chickens above that of even one human child to be abhorrent.
Maybe the EAs are still technically right and other people are just speciesist, but to me this does not bode well for the movement gaining traction or popular support.
Just wanted to get that out of my system.
Despite working in global health myself, I tend to moderately favor devoting additional funding to animal welfare vs. global health. There are two main reasons for this:
Importance: The level of suffering and cruelty that we inflict on non-human animals is simply unfathomable.
I think the countervailing reason to instead fund global health is:
I don't think most animals are moral patients, and so see work on global health as much more valuable. This isn't as deeply a considered view as I'd like (though I think there's an unfortunate pattern where people who think animals are more likely to matter a lot are more likely to go into attempting to weigh the worth of animals) and people shouldn't put as much weight on this as my other EA-related views.
More in this direction: Weighing Animal Worth, Why I'm Not Vegan.
Can you expand on why you don't think most animals are moral patients?
Roughly, pleasure and suffering matter to the extent that there's an entity experiencing them. I think animals very likely don't have that kind of experience. I also think some humans don't, but I think the consequences of trying to draw distinctions among humans in this way would be pretty terrible and we shouldn't go in that direction. More: The Argument From Marginal Cases.
I would also be curious to hear more about why/if you are >~95% confident that pigs are not entities that experience suffering, while most humans are.[1]
Is it about the ability to have second-order beliefs, the ability to have complex language and certain kinds of social structures, or something else entirely?
I think pigs are much more similar to humans than broiler chickens, so are a better species to examine the difference
Why?
On a purely ideological basis, I would have placed myself as a "strong agree". However, on a more practical level, I am concerned that the most popular animal welfare interventions (specifically corporate campaigns) may have a risk of actually having a negative impact on animal welfare. For example, if corporation X signs a promise to switch to higher welfare standards, its comms/PR around this switch might be so effective that an individual who could otherwise have been convinced to reduce their meat consumption on animal welfare grounds (or even go vegan, the best possible outcome), actually feels satisfied that their choice to continue consuming meat from corporation X is ethical and therefore continues to consume meat at the same or even greater rate. Maybe this is baseless speculation, but intuitively, this feels like a real risk which hasn't been explored enough.
Even though the expected value of corporate campaign work is high, I feel instinctively very uncomfortable donating money to an intervention that has what I worry is a real chance of actually making the issue worse. This might just reflect my personal low appetite for risk.
By contrast, I can't think of an equivalent problem for popular GHD interventions - the worst outcome in this context appears to be that money is donated to an intervention that, in reality, isn't as effective as assumed, and the money could therefore have been better spent elsewhere.
As a result of all of this, I have bumped my response down to only a "slightly agree" rather than a "strong agree".
A couple of survey results which may be interesting in light of this debate:
This is in line with the debate week results showing a strong preference for an additional $100mn going to AW, but the continued preference for a larger total percentage going to GHD seems worth noting.
I basically endorse this post, as well as the use of the tools created by Rethink Priorities that collectively point to quite strong but not overwhelming confidence in the marginal value of farmed animal welfare.
I think the cost-effectiveness of additional spending on animal welfare interventions is much higher than that on global health and development:
I believe animals are much more neglected than humans. I calculated the annual philanthropic spending on farmed animals is 0.0514 % of that on animals plus humans, whereas I determined that the annual disability of farmed animals is 97.2 % that of animals plus humans.
I'm a bit of a Benthamite "The question is not, 'Can they reason?' nor, 'Can they talk?' but rather, 'Can they suffer?'"
For any plausible (to me) guess about which non-human animals are capable of suffering, there are far far more non-human animals living in terrible conditions than humans in similarly bad conditions, and there just seems to be so many underfunded and underexplored ways we could help reduce that suffering. I've also seen some cost-effectiveness estimations that indicate you can help thousands of animals a lot for the same cost as helping one person a lot. ("a lot" being very vague!)
The only reason why I'm not at 100% agree is because helping humans become healthier might cause larger positive flow on effects, and this might add up to more impact in the long run. That's super tentative and could go either way - e.g. it seems possible that helping animals now could lead to our species being more ethical towards sentient beings in the long run too.
99% yes for me.
This is like 50% of the yearly global budget for farmed animals. A lot can be done with this money, and it's not too outrageous an amount that it wouldn't be absorbed efficiently. Speciecism aside, the bang for these bucks could be incredible.
Moreover, if among the spillover effects of this was lower consumption of animal products, this would be an additional win for public health (at least in countries where too much animal products are eaten).
Animal suffering is larger-scale and more neglected. As explained in my post on 'Seeking Ripple Effects', I'm especially moved by the possibility of transformative innovations (e.g. economical lab-grown meat) improving human values at a key juncture in history, even though I think it's very unlikely.
OTOH, I'm a big fan of global health & development on more general and robust 'ripple effect' grounds, which is why I'm close to the center on this one.
- Causing unnecessary suffering is morally bad. Causing intense unnecessary suffering is morally worse.
- Non-humans have the capacity to physically and psychologically suffer. The intensity of suffering they can experience is non-negligible, and plausibly, not that far off from that of humans. Non-humans have a dispreference towards being in such states of agony.
- Non-human individuals are in constant and often intense states of agony in farmed settings. They also live short lives, sometimes less than 1/10th of their natural lifespan, which leads to loss of welfare they would have experienced if they were allowed to live till old age.
- The scale of farmed animal suffering is enormous beyond comprehension; if we only consider land animals, it is around 100 billion; if crustaceans and fish are included, the number is close to 1000 billion; if insects are accounted for, then the number is in several 1000s of billions. Nearly all of these animals have lives not worth living.
- The total dollar spent per unit of suffering experienced is arguably more than a thousand times lower for non-humans compared to humans. This seems unreasonable given the vast number of individuals who suffer in farmed sett
... (read more)You'd have to value animals at ~millionths of humans for scale and neglectedness not to be dispositive. Only countervailing considerations are things around cooperativeness, positive feedback loops, and civilizational stability, all of which are speculative and even sign uncertain
I'm philosophically a longtermist, but suspect better evidenced short termist interventions are comparable to if not much greater than 'direct longtermism' in expectation.
In the long run I think a thriving human descendant-line with better cooperation norms is going to lead to better total phenomenal states than reduced factory farming will.
There is the meat eater problem where more animal lives would likely be lost by increasing the human population. It also seems much more cost effective per dollar to suffering spared to help animals and factory farming is spreading rapidly through Asia and Africa, making this a hingey time.
Animal welfare has much higher EV even under conservative assumptions. IMO only plausible argument against is that the evidence base for animal welfare interventions is much worse, so if you are very skeptical of unproven interventions, you might vote the other way. But you'd have to be very skeptical.
There's not much to add beyond what everyone else has said. I think we would need to be exceedingly confident in particular views about sentience and moral patienthood and capacity for suffering for non-humans to think GHD was better. I very much wish I had written down more of my reasoning from years ago when I was mainly donating to GiveWell, I think I just hadn't thought it over much!
In general, I agree with the position that investing an additional $100m into animal welfare opportunities would be more impactful than global health opportunities even under views that use moral weights on the lower end of the scale for nonhumans, and potentially way more impactful if we use moral weights that grant nonhumans greater capacity for sentience (which I think we probably should).
In short—I think the scale of animal suffering is much larger (even when only considering animal agriculture, and not wild animal welfare); animal ... (read more)
I see no legitimate justification for attitudes that would consider humans as important enough that global health interventions would beat out animal welfare, particularly given the sheer number and scale of invertebrate suffering. If invertibrates are sentient, it seem animal welfare definitely could absorb 100m and remain effective on the margin, and probably also if they are not (which seems unlikely). The reasons I am not fully in favour is mostly because the interaction of animal welfare with population ethics is far stronger than the interaction of global health developments, and given the signifciant uncertainties involved with population ethics, I can't be sure these don't at least significant reduce the benefits of AW over GH work
Most serious EA analysis I've seen seems to conclude helping animals is much more effective (i.e. Rethink Priorities work for example), so that's the view I currently weakly hold. Also, helping humans harms animals via the meat eater problem, reducing its value on net, but there is no large effect the other way. Very open to changing my mind.
I don't believe in complete impartiality. I think we have a stronger moral obligation to those who are closer to us--be it family, friends, or co-nationals. The vast majority of my donations have gone to global health simply because it is much much more cost-effective to help the poorest in the world.
I also think that a blind push to expand the moral circle is misguided. See: https://gwern.net/narrowing-circle.
I think animal welfare is still very underfunded, and the problem is very bad. My main worry is tractabiilty, and whether we actually have levers to pull on to make a significant difference.
I think the money goes a lot further when it comes to helping non human animals then when it comes to helping humans.
I am generally pretty bought into the idea that non human animals also experience pleasure/suffering and I care about helping them.
I think it is probably good for the long term trajectory of society to have better norms around the casual cruelty and torture inflicted on non-human animals.
On the other hand, I do think there are really good arguments for human to human compassion and the elimination of extreme poverty. I am very in favor of th... (read more)
Laura Duffy's analyses of this comes close to my view. On the margin, the question between global health charity and animal charity is something like GiveWell top charities *e.g. AMF) vs. ACE top charity (e.g. The Humane League), which is something like "Would you rather save 1 DALY or 40 years of hens from cages to cage-free.
I'm pretty split between the two and my donation habits reflect this; however, I don't think we know how to scale effective animal interventions past the current funding gaps in the low $10ms. For Global health, we do.
Edit: Learned th... (read more)
Both are shockingly underfunded. But I think future generations will be even more shocked by how we treated (i.e. actively caused great suffering to) farm animals than by how we failed to help humans in dire need.
A few reasons immediately come to mind for me:
- There are many more animals in factory farms than humans (scale)
- The average suffering of these animals is likely worse than the average suffering of humans (because animals are almost uniformly kept in horrendous conditions, while humans are not) (scale)
- My intuition is that the "moral multiplier" of human ability to suffer is not much higher than 1, if at all, for many animals. Animals have central nervous systems and nociceptors just like we do. Mammal suffering in particular might be close to par with humans,
... (read more)I will comment based on my personal experience as a small-scale poultry farmer. Due to space limitations, I chose to use the battery cage system for egg production. Ideally, I would have preferred a cage-free system, but the cost of building such infrastructure was beyond my reach. While it is unfortunate, this highlights the challenges many farmers face. When advocating for improved animal welfare, it is essential to understand these constraints and provide education, as well as financial support, to help farmers transition to more humane and sustainable ... (read more)
I'm right on the fence here, because although animal welfare is severely neglected and there's a lot of important tractable work on it that could use more money, I'm somewhat unconvinced about the value of animals compared to humans, as I'm not a hedonist and think that human experience might well be richer and more intense than animals by many orders of magnitude.
@Toby Tremlett🔹 is there a way to see the final debate week banner? I wanted to include a screenshot in the slides for my local group's next meetup, but can't find a way to access the banner now that debate week is over.
Slightly leaning towards devoting more funds to GHD, even though I think there's enough likelihood that animals can suffer as intensely as humans.
My main reason for favouring GHD slightly is that improvements in human wellbeing, education and (political) empowerment seem paramount to the goal of increasing animal welfare long-term.
I mostly agree with Open Phil Should Allocate Most Neartermist Funding to Animal Welfare by Ariel Simnegar 🔸, as some others have already referenced. My animal moral weights are probably close to RP's, and so higher than Open Phil's.
Open Phil spent around $100M on animal welfare in each of 2021 and 2022.
An extra $100M for animal welfare would be best spread across multiple years, given organizational constraints to scaling. I'd mostly have in mind outreach/campaigns/lobbying targeting corporations, certifiers, institutions and governments, and ballot initiatives for animal welfare policy change.
There might be more direct ways to purchase animal welfare that would scale and still beat global health, but we could probably do much better with higher leverage policy interventions.
Some cost-effectiveness analyses here, here and here.
Two important considerations to strongly favor animal welfare
- Saving a human life is likely net negative due to increased meat consumption and animal suffering. According to a survey, most people believe the welfare of a farmed chicken is negative and equal in size to the positive welfare of a human. Also most people believe the welfare of birds count almost as much as the welfare of humans (they give animal welfare relative to human welfare an 8 on a scale from 0 to 10). But there are more farmed chickens than humans on earth (3 chickens per human),
... (read more)In this post last year, I describe why I think animal welfare is 100-1000x better than global health on the margin. In this post, I describe why I still think that, and give some responses to objections I didn't discuss in the previous post.
I don't really know... I'm suspect some kind of first-order utility calculus which tallies up the number of agents which are helped per dollar weighted according to what species they are makes animal welfare look better by large degree. But in terms of getting the world closer on the path of the "good trajectory", for some reason the idea of eliminating serious preventable diseases in humans feels like a more obvious next step along that path?
I'm fairly convinced by the scale arguments for animal welfare, but have a slight hesitation due to worldview diversification considerations, optics, and a possible lack of room for more funding. If I had to irreversibly allocate the $100m in the next ten minutes, however, I would choose animal welfare.
Humans are just more important. If you disagree, how many chickens would you trade your mother's life for?
This feels right to say, but open to arguments against it.
The only context for me where it would make more sense to spend it on AW, would be if somehow the ripple effect from doing so would benefit humans more than investing it directly into global health.
Maybe by improving nutrition, or improving global morals by not allowing other living beings to suffer, or just having a clear conscience.
I'm not saying an animal suffering is right or acceptable, but it comes second, and will always come second to me, at least while human suffering is still so so high.
This is a provocative question that cuts to the heart of the issue. Let me offer a different hypothetical to illustrate the complexity of making such moral trade-offs.
Imagine a situation where you had to choose between saving the life of a complete stranger or saving the life of your mother. I expect you would choose your mother, and I would likely do the same. The emotional bond we feel outweighs our concern for a stranger.
Now consider an advanced, benevolent alien species observing this dilemma. From their impartial perspective, your mother and the stranger deserve equal moral consideration as sentient beings capable of suffering. The aliens wouldn't prioritize one over the other based on personal attachment or individual characteristics.
Expanding this principle further: a chicken's capacity to suffer deserves moral consideration as well, even if their inner lives differ from ours. The immense scale of animal suffering in factory farms — tens of billions of sentient beings in cruel conditions — is a major ethical catastrophe from an impartial view.
... (read more)Positive knock-on effects from funding animal welfare are likely far greater than from funding global health on the present margin.
I'll try to write a longer comment later, but right now I'm uncertain but lean towards global health because of some combination of the following:
1. I suspect negative lives are either rare or nonexistent, which makes it harder to avoid logic-of-the-larder-type arguments
2. I'm more uncertain about this, but I lean towards non-hedonic forms of consequentialism (RP parliament tool confirms that this generally lowers returns to animals)
3. Mostly based on the above, I think many moral weights for animals are too high
I'm also not sure if the 100 million would g... (read more)
I think animals are generally more efficient/effective as a way of converting money into short-term (the next 50 years) well-being.
My impression is that the mean global health intervention does not significantly improve the long-term future. However, I could definitely be convinced otherwise, and that would get me to change my answer.
All that said, if one is focused on improving the long-term future, it seems suspicious to focus on global health, as opposed to other interventions that are clearly more focused on that.
Humans kill about 1 trillion animals every year. https://sentientmedia.org/how-many-animals-are-killed-for-food-every-day/#:~:text=Chickens:%20206%20million/day,existed%20is%20just%20117%20billion. Many of them lead harsh, painful lives in factory farms and/or die a brutal death. And this doesn't even touch on wild animals suffering from non-human causes.
To contrast, there are only 8 billion humans on Earth.
8 billion is less than 1 trillion.
Large scale animal funding is in a worse state compared to global health. https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/GFkzLx7uKSK8zaBE3/we-need-more-nuance-regarding-funding-gaps
In the interests of furthering the debate, I'll quickly offer several additional arguments that I think can favour global health over animal welfare.
Simulation Argument
The Simulation Argument says that it is very likely we are living in an ancestor simulation rather than base reality. Given that it is likely human ancestors that the simulators are interested in fully simulating, other non-human animals are likely to not be simulated to the same degree of granularity and may not be sentient.
Pinpricks vs. Torture
This is a trolley problem scenario. It's also ... (read more)
I think of this question mostly in terms of the trajectory I think this nudges us towards. It feels like there's something of a hierarchy of needs for humanity as a whole, and getting out of the zone where we have extreme poverty feels like the right first step, in a way that makes me feel more optimistic about wise decision processes being able to rise to the top thereafter.
I'm not certain what current spending looks like; that might make me change my mind here. (I think it's definitely right to start ramping up spending on animal welfare at some point before poverty is entirely eliminated.)
I support lab grown meat research / production, other interventions seem useless. I support "global health" more broadly and strongly, you have less ways to burn money in ways i find useless
I weigh moral worth by degree of sentience based on neuron count as a rough proxy, which naturally tends to weigh helping an equal number of humans more than an equivalent number of any other currently known species.
But the evidence I've seen suggests you could help far more of almost any kind of animals (e.g., chickens) avoid suffering for the same amount of money.
Thanks for your justification! Hamish McDoodles also believed that neuron count weighting would make the best human welfare charities better than the best animal welfare charities. However, after doing a BOTEC of cage-free campaign cost-effectiveness using neuron counts as a proxy, he eventually ended up changing his mind:
So unless you have further disagreements with his analysis, using neuron count weighting would probably mean you should support allocating the 100M to animal welfare rather than global health.
Thank you for justifying your vote for global health!
One counterargument to your position is that, with the same amount of money, one can help significantly more non-human animals than humans. Check out this post. An estimated 1.1. billion chickens are helped by broiler and cage-free campaigns in a given year. Each dollar can help an estimated 64 chickens to a total of 41 chicken-years of life.
This contrasts to needing $5,000 to save a human life through top-ranked GiveWell charities.
I think "EA orthodoxy" pretty strongly supports this conclusion, so the main question is whether the orthodoxy is trustworthy on this question. One possible concern is that GiveWell's estimates tend to follow a highly skeptical methodology, and I worry that most comparisons with GiveWell aren't comparing apples to apples on that front. I could imagine there being orders of magnitude in this, but from skimming the other comments on the thread I would guess not enough orders of magnitude to bridge all of the gap (i.e. even a GiveWell-skeptical assessment of ... (read more)
I'm pretty confident (~80-90%?) this is true, for reasons well summarized here.
I'm interested in thoughts on the OOM difference between animal welfare vs GHD (i.e. would $100m to animal welfare be 2x better than GHD, or 2000x?)
Animal welfare does more to push the frontiers of moral circle expansion
I think animal welfare is much more cost-effective, my slight skepticism comes from the idea of positive feedback loops and the knock-on effects in other cause areas.
I'd be surprised if there isn't something in the order of at least a 100x to 1000x difference in cost-effectiveness in favour of animal interventions (as suggested here).
Animals are much more numerous, neglected, and have terrible living conditions, so there's simply much more to do. According to FarmKind, $100 donated to the Impact Fund can protect 124 chickens 🐥 from suffering, as well as 61 pigs 🐷, a cow 🐮, 22 fish 🐟, and more than 25 000 shrimps, 𝘢𝘭𝘭 𝘢𝘵 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘴𝘢𝘮𝘦 𝘵𝘪𝘮𝘦. Plus, it offsets ~6.7 tonnes of CO2 🌎. These kinds of ... (read more)
The vast majority of sentient beings are non-human animals, and the problem of animal suffering is far more neglected compared to global health. I think it's also worth noting that we are probably quite biased against taking animal suffering as seriously as we should (we live in an extremely speciesist culture, we belong to the human species, animal suffering tends to be hidden/out of sight, etc).
Low confidence, but my intuition is that animal welfare is more neglected and would have a better ROI in terms of suffering reduced.
epistemic status: extremely quickly written thoughts, haven't thought these through deeply, these are mostly vibes. i spent 10 minutes writing this out. i do not cite sources.
- seems like non-human animals are suffering much more than humans, both in quantity of beings suffering & extent of suffering per being
- it might be that non-human animals are less morally valuable than humans — i think i buy into this to some extent, but, like, you'd have to buy into this to a ridiculously extreme extent to think that humans are suffering more than non-human animals
... (read more)Animal welfare is just so much more neglected, relative to the scale.
However, I don't go all the way to a strong agree since I think the evidence base is weaker and am less certain of finding good interventions; along with a stronger sense of moral responsibility towards humans; along with a bigger "sentience discount" than other moral comparisons between humans and non-human animals.
Reading the discussions here I cannot shake the intuition that utilitarianism with very big numbers is once again resulting in weird conclusions. AW advocates are basically describing earth as hell with a tiny sanctuary reserved for humans that are better off than average. I need more convincing. While I cannot disagree with the math or data, I think better theories of animal suffering are needed. At what point is a brain sufficiently developed, for example, to experience suffering in a way that is morally relevant, that we should care about? Are there qua... (read more)
While I deeply value human welfare, I believe the combination of vast scale, neglectedness, and tractability makes a compelling case for prioritizing animal welfare more than we currently do — especially from an impartial, evidence-based perspective. Many on the opposing side mention that they assign more moral worth to humans than non-humans, but I don't think that view is incompatible with allocating more resources towards animal welfare.
No one is purely impartial. Virtually everyone allocates more resources to themselves than a stranger. Almost every parent will allocate more resources to their children than a stranger. Many choose to allocate more resources to a sibling or close friend in need even if a stranger is in “more” need.
Impartiality is a spectrum, and it is driven by personal beliefs and values. I’m more partial towards humans on this spectrum than many other voters on this poll. From a positive utilitarian perspective, a human life that is saved has more potential to make thei... (read more)
Animal welfare getting so little[1] EA funding, at present, relative to global health, seems to be an artefact of Open Phil’s ‘worldview diversification,’ which imo is a lacklustre framework for decision-making, both in theory and (especially) in practice: see, e.g., Sempere (2022).
Cost-effectiveness analyses I’ve seen indicate that animal welfare interventions, like cage-free campaigns, are really excellent uses of money—orders of magnitude more effective than leading global health interventions.
Though not central to my argument, there’s also the mea... (read more)
Unfair to ask people to consider the ethics of their food while their loved ones are dying of malaria and TB.
I am having a hard time following this. We aren't, to my knowledge, asking people whose loved ones are at significant risk of dying of malaria and TB for money. AFAIK, we're not asking them to prioritize animal welfare over their loved ones in non-finamcial ways either. Could you explain what specifically we're asking of this class of people?
Would you say children don't matter in themselves (only indirectly through others, like their parents or society more generally), when they're too young to "uphold their end of the bargain if allowed to make notes for themselves that they would see before every conversation"?
I considered chickens under different contractualist views here:
... (read more)Reading RP's work in the last months and the posts for debate week has made me more inclined towards AW funding.
JamesÖz's post explaining that the default trajectory for animal welfare is far worse than the default trajectory for global health.
Many global health interventions plausibly have negative effects on animal welfare (e.g., increasing factory farming). The inverse doesn't seem as true.
Due to their neglectedness (and the lack of animal participation in markets) animal interventions are also probably more efficient at converting $$ -> utils
I want to note that this is more consensus than I thought in favour of the proposition. I would have guessed the median was much nearer 50% than it is.
Each individuals qualia being equal, healthier and happier humans actively improve the future whereas healthier and happier animals do not.
seems like the marginal value is much higher
The amount of suffering is orders of magnitudes above in the cause area of animals.
By my count, animal welfare is 100x more neglected than
global health(Edit: global development, not global health — my mistake). I'm unsure how much bigger it is in scale (given that making trades between humans and animals is hard) — but I'd guess it's very very much larger in scale.The neglectedness and intensity of animal suffering would, in a triaging scenario, see me prioritizing it over many global health interventions. I am open to the idea that many animals do actually live lives worth living. That said, I suspect I would rather forego living than spend an existence as an industrially farmed broiler chicken or fish. These are the animals I would spend money on at the margin, with research into the welfare of more liminal animals like crustaceans and insects (probably not large increases for wild for now, since tractability may ... (read more)
Animal welfare space needs considerably more rigorous research (which should be done, but will cost much less than $100m) before knowing if it includes better investments than the top ones in global health.
I really love the visuals of the voting tool, here's how we could make it even better for future iterations.
The axes currently aren't labeled and, if I'm being really honest I ended up being too lazy to vote as I would have had to count up the notches manually. I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one (see Beware Trivial Inconveniences).
I also suspect that it makes the results less meaningful. Even though people have wildly different views on what 7/10 or strongly agree means, there's still some degree of social consensus that has implicitly formed around thes... (read more)
Industrialised animal farming is the single biggest cause of suffering, the most neglected / under-reported and under-funded and therefore deserves all the funding it can possibly source. Moreover, reducing animal agriculture would also reduce risks (zoonoses / pandemics); environmental harms and improve human health outcomes. It would be a win-win for multiple cause areas.
Animal welfare is (even) more neglected than global health. My sense is that $100M being spent in a coordinated manner would have an outsized effect on the field. It would help catalyze future organizations and future funding to a greater extent than it would if spent on global health.
How does marginal spending on animal welfare and global health influence the long-term future?
I'd guess that most of the expected impact in both cases comes from the futures in which Earth-originating intelligent life (E-OIL) avoids near-term existential catastrophe and goes on to create a vast amount of value in the universe by creating a much larger economy and colonizing other galaxies and solar systems, and transforming the matter there into stuff that matters a lot more morally than lifeless matter ("big futures").
For animal welfare spending, then, pe... (read more)
I currently agree pretty strongly, because the basic case for the quantity of animal suffering in factory farms is very strong. My uncertainty is over the tractability, and I hope to learn more about that, and adjust my vote, during the week.
In terms of EA charities most commonly cited in these areas only, I think global health charities are much more well evidenced.
I think the most effective animal welfare interventions are probably more effective, I'm just much less sure what they are.
I assume that the primary goal is to reduce extreme suffering or negative experiences. Based on the evidence I've reviewed, efforts to alleviate suffering in factory farming appear to be far more cost-effective in achieving this goal.
I don't see compelling evidence that improvements in global health significantly enhance worldwide peace and security, which could potentially reduce existential risks from advanced AI. This connection would have been, in my view, the strongest argument for prioritizing global health interventions.
While I believe global health... (read more)
It's almost impossible to predict the long term effect.
Humans are the only actors that can produce moral force. But the problem is, how much AW will change indirectly by spending on GH? I have neither evidence nor instict to guide me on this.
This question lacks the context of how we use money, so our answers would vary a lot without a consensus.
”It would be better for EA practitioners to spend ..." is different from "It would be better for existing major organizations to spend ..." in terms of cost effectiveness.
My feeling is slanted towards disagree, but I'm sure it's biased. I simply don't know much about AW, so I choose neutral.
Animal welfare is more important and more neglected, although tractability is less clear.
Seems likely correct. I'm not fully certain because I wouldn't be that surprised to be wrong. It is much easier to help animals than people on the margin.
I update a bit more because I haven't read good arguments against and have seen some possible arguments debunked.
The default trajectory for animal welfare looks grim, extremely grim, and does not seem about to reach a tipping point anytime soon. I do believe that a pig that shrieks is in pain, and that inflicting this pain is immoral.
I am more uncertain when it comes to tractability. I also favor pluralism and tend to view things with an inner preferential voting system to adjudicate my moral uncertainties.
Not high confidence. I'm guessing 100m is tiny for global health and large for animal welfare. Still, I value human well-being over animal well-being, other things equal.
Uncertain of how big of a %-increase a $100m addition is for the animal advocacy movement. But definitely a lot higher than for global health. While animal advocacy is much more neglected I'm wondering how much more funding it can effectively absorb, or how fast the cost-effectiveness would decline. Given the scale of the problem probably not that fast? For global health, I believe this funding wouldn't have substantial decreasing marginal returns. (Some quick thoughts without having read others' comments)
One point that I think does not get discussed enough (though I will be happy to be corrected on this) is that animal welfare work in many cases is going up against resistance from some of the biggest and most politically powerful industries in the world. I did see a reference to animal welfare being more politicized in this post, but I think it needs to be emphasized more that it's not just "politicized" but in fact is in opposition to the political power of huge corporate entities like Tyson Foods, JBS, Smithfield, etc. who from what I can tell have just ... (read more)
There are more sentient beings affected by factory farming and the problem is more neglected.
Animal welfare is much more neglected than global human health. Even if there were strong arguments on scale and solvability in the opposite direction, I don't believe they can tip the scale.
I recently learned that the animal welfare accounts for only 3% of EA's funding, which seems far from proportional to other causes, taking into account the number of people affected, the degree of certainty that the pain exists (it's not hypothetical) and the intensity of the pain experienced. It therefore seems to me to be too neglected.
It's much easier to fundraise for GH&D (less "weird" / more legible)
As several posts here have already highlighted, the total suffering endured by animals is far greater than that experienced by humans—unless we consider animal moral weights to be hundreds or thousands of times less important than our own.
Moreover, as shown by the Rethink Priorities researches, the cost-effectiveness of the best animal welfare organizations could be a lot more effective than the best short-term alternatives for humans.
Yet, funding for animal causes represents only a small fraction of Open Philanthropy's budget, which seems inconsistent.
If ... (read more)
I believe that I, like many visitors on the Forum, would usually be very careful to vote on either end of an extreme. The reason I opted to move all in into animal welfare is that, while I acknowledge and put some credence on views around ripple effects and moral uncertainty (in the sense of placing some weight on societal consensus views), these views primarily have an influence on my view of how global philanthropic spending should be allocated.
However, when it comes to an additional $100m, the (difference of) neglectedness completely wipes out the... (read more)
Mostly the meat-eater problem, also cost-effectiveness analyses. Also higher neglectedness on priors.
(Placement confidence: fairly low)
I'm envisioning putting the $100MM in a trust and (as an initial strategy) spending ~$15MM extra a year until expended.
I think others have stated the general case for animal welfare as particularly neglected (although I do not agree with many of those posts asserting an astronomical difference for various reasons). So I'll focus this comment on why I didn't initially place further along on the animal-welfare side:
(1) I tentatively think AW work can be particularly high effectiveness because it is often so leveraged; ... (read more)
If it can be spent over any period of time, this removes my biggest concern (that we wouldn't find $100m worth of good opportunities for animals).
I am voting based on my prior that animal work is more impactful as it is more neglected and there are so many more animals.
I support both clauses. I see a moral argument or at least a reasonable justification for favoring humans over animals, holding measured 'ability to feel pain constant'.
However, I'm convinced by the evidence that funding to support programs like corporate campaigns for cage-free eggs are likely to be effective, and have vastly higher welfare gains per dollar, by most reasonable measures of relative chicken/human welfare.
The animal welfare space has very little funding and $100 million is likely to make a substantial positive difference, both directly/immediately, and in shifting cultural and political attitudes.
I don't think animal interventions are worse but I do I think the statement is wild speculation. I don't think EAs can effectively compare interventions between very different cause areas.
I suspect most EAs don't actually think through their own cause prioritisation, I think they instead defer to others, and thus don't view the consensus as compelling evidence to change my mind.
Evidence that ripple-effects of interventions are negligible would change my mind though. I find the EV calculations for the short-term supremacy of animal welfare interventio... (read more)
I am very convinced by the arguments presented in Ariel Simnegar's "Open Phil Should Allocate Most Neartermist Funding to Animal Welfare". I still have uncertainty in moral weights so am not 100% agree
In a nutshell - there is more suffering to address in non-human animals, and it is a more neglected area.
Human welfare seems much less neglected than the welfare of factory farm animals. Even just an egg may represent many hours of suffering to produce. If insects are not so much less sentient than humans, their welfare could be a huge deal too.
So I favor animal welfare. But it's even better when it's backed by strategic thinking and a clear theory of impact. The total number of future sentient beings could be many orders of magnitude greater than the number of existing ones. We are unable to "feel how big" those numbers are, but it matters a lot, and it's no... (read more)
The main reasons for going as far to the animal welfare side as I did:
-I suspect there are more unexplored opportunities to have an outsized impact on the animal welfare side due to neglectedness.
-The scale of the problem is very larger (~100 billion lives a year in meat production, and that's not even the entire problem).
-The meat eater problem plays a part as well. If you save someone and they go on eating meat, that could have a negative impact as well. However, this line of argumentation might be a can of worms.
Global health still has some weight due t... (read more)
Animal welfare seems likely more tractable, substantially more important, and vastly more neglected.
It seems plausible animals have moral patienthood and so the scale of the problem is larger for animals whilst also having higher tractability. At the same time, you have cascading effects of economic development into better decision making. As a longtermist, this makes me very uncertain on where to focus resources. I will therefore put myself centrally to signal my high uncertainty.
I based my vote on the fact that I have close to 0 doubt about the fact that antispecism is true (the fact that you can't discriminate someone on the base of his specie).
If you consider antispecism true, you have to take in consideration that humanity is a really small part of all animals living. Moreover, we have pretty good reasons to think that animals are living in worse conditions than humans (pretty obvious for farm animals that live in industrial farms, more challenging intuitively for wild animals but many studies make us things that sufferin... (read more)
Their suffering is worse when considering amount of suffering x amount of people. Animal welfare work could include expanding the moral circle, which could end up benefiting global health, but I don't expect the reverse to be true.
No clue, tough question
Several factors make me confident regarding the importance of this choice : the sheer scale and intensity of the suffering involved, the lower cost of helping nonhuman individuals in farms compared to humans, and the comparative small size of the aniimal welfare / advocacy movement giving $100m a potentially more important long-term impact.
Animal welfare is much more neglected than global health (though maybe a bit less tractable).
I'm very unsure, but slightly lean towards animal welfare due to the heuristic that the further outside typical moral circles the more neglected are the opportunities
Last time I checked, improving the lives of animals was much cheaper than improving human lives; and I don't think that arguments saying that humans have more moral weight are enough to compensate.
I think most of my reservations are mostly deontological, plus a few fringe possibilities
under neartermism, which is not my view but which may be the spirit of the question, animal welfare seems obviously better because non-human animals are extremely neglected by human civilization, either left to die in the wild or cut up in mechanized torture facilities.
under longtermism, it's basically a question of which could positively effect the values of the first agent superintelligence. probably neither would have a strong effect, but conditional on an effect being had, i'd guess it would route through the increased moral progress caused by animal welfare advocacy, somehow leading to a less human-centric forever-value.
(100% under neartermism, ~80% under longtermism in recognition of uncertainty)
My soft sense is that great opportunities in the animal space face greater funding constraints than in the global health space.
I am quite receptive to caveats about how easy it is so scale current orgs and interventions, but that seems more of a practical issue (than can partially be solved through more money?).
Other than that, I just think it's a crazy scale of very neglected suffering and the sooner we figure out how to make significant changes to the system the better.
I haven't seen any convincing and coherent framework that can analytically equate animal lives to human lives, but I am open to having my mind changed. My current position is informed mostly by my (flawed) intuition
I tend to agree with Ariel Simnegar's "Open Phil Should Allocate Most Neartermist Funding to Animal Welfare", however I still have some uncertainty in moral weights.
I read somewhere that around 2% of EA donations are allocated towards animal welfare. I don't know what an ideal world's split would be, but it would have AW funding at a lot higher than 2%.
Somewhat neutral, though I concur that animal welfare is more neglected and that a straightforward shortterm calculation is on the animal welfare side. However:
With AI, ensuring longevity for many people may be a better use, though I'm uncertain about the exact costs. Animals are more interchangeable than humans, and will die within not that long regardless, which means that ensuring more humans live longer lives is more valuable. The more people that live longer, the more that are able to participate in a possible longevity escape velocity. (Theoret... (read more)
Interesting to note that, as it stands, there isn't a single comment on the debate week banner in favor of Global Health. There are votes for global health (13 in total at time of writing), but no comments backing up the votes. I'm sure this will change, but I still find it interesting.
One possible reason is that the arguments for global health > animal welfare are often speciesist and people don't really want to admit that they are speciesist - but I'm admittedly not certain of this.
The $100m is much more likely to make irreversible progress on solving animal welfare issues than it is on global health, because the latter is way less neglected.
99 % of sentience is non human animals + the worst suffering in the world are the animal ones.
I know this is a debate, but one thing I want to touch on is that animal welfare and human welfare are not necessarily in conflict. I think initiatives like preventing the rise of factory farming in the developing world could be really great for both animals and humans. Animals wouldn't have to exist in horrible conditions, and humans could (as far as I know; don't have sources with me right now) have greater food, water, and resource security, reduced ecological/climate devastation, and reduced risk of disease, to name a few things. I think it's important to think about ways in which we can jointly improve animal welfare and global health, because we all ultimately want to create a better world.
Human life is more valuable to me than that of an animal
With the current state of things, I do not believe that 100m will produce as much positive outcomes in specific areas of animal welfare, (say, sensitization, cash incentives for cage-free farming) compared to specific areas of global health, (say, maternal health, finding solutions to AMR, malaria prevention, NTD's).
Animal welfare has been neglected by governments and funding and yet with every growth in the human population, there is an increase in the compromise of the welfare of animals.
Being the executive director of ACE, I'm obviously quite biased. Then again, I joined ACE because I was convinced of the need for more funding for animal health and wellbeing.
At ACE, once our current busy period has ended, we'll dive into the perspectives and arguments presented in this debate week as a team and likely post here and on our blog our reflection.
After just skimming this week's content, the arguments that I personally find most convincing come down to (1) scale and extent of suffering, (2) how little money effective animal advocacy is currentl... (read more)
The scale of animal suffering is much greater than global health crisis and receives comparatively less attention.
Roughly 60% of all mammals are raised for food globally and over 85% of the world eats or seeks a diet consisting of animal meat and a larger percent for animal based foods. Assuming this investment produces healthier animals that do not require antibiotics or other mass livestock farming practices that negatively impact humans, the investment is a net positive long-term. Healthier food could lead to a healthier society which improves economies in various ways.
The question is too vague to agree with to the nth degree. However, global health is heavil... (read more)
the scale/degree of suffering is much higher
The scale of animal suffering and exploitation is vast, yet it remains one of the most neglected moral crises of our time. Beyond its ethical implications, animal farming is a key driver of some of the most pressing global public health challenges, including antibiotic resistance, zoonotic pandemics, and the rise of chronic diseases. Heart disease, the leading cause of death globally, is closely linked to the consumption of animal products—meat, eggs, and dairy—laden with saturated fat, endotoxins, and inflammatory compounds. By shifting away from animal f... (read more)
Rethink Priorities moral weights
Animals win on scale & neglectedness while humans win on my (and maybe God's) speciesism bias (but if God exists I think He would appreciate us trying to help out animals i.e. His creations).
Many individuals and organizations are already concerned with global health and actively working to improve it. However, animal welfare requires a significant initial effort to elevate this pressing ethical issue in the public's priorities.
Yet another thing to mention, although not directly related to human welfare vs non-human animal welfare... What about the moral value of AI, of digital entities? They are already far more complex and human-like than shrimp. When do they reach non-zero value?
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ZcJDL4nCruPjLMgxm/ae-studio-sxsw-we-need-more-ai-consciousness-research-and
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/pieSxdmjqrKwqa2tR/avoiding-the-bog-of-moral-hazard-for-ai
As an aside, I don't think someone writing an "activist" comment disqualifies them from being truthseeking.
I used to find it absurd to think one could justify spending on animals when they could be spending on humans. Over years, I changed my mind, between discussing consciousness and moral weights with others, reading many relevant writings, and watching relevant documentaries. I wrote a post explaining why I changed my mind, and engaged extensively with hundreds of comments.
So far, nobody has posed an argument for prioritizing global health over animal welfare which I've found convincing. If the case for animal welfare is indeed correct, then marginal global health funding could be doing orders of magnitude more good if instead allocated to animal welfare. I don't think it means I have bad epistemics, or that my writings aren't worth engaging with, if my actions are following the logical conclusions of my changed beliefs.
If global health is indeed better at the margin than animal welfare, then I would love to know, because that would mean I've been causing enormous harm by allocating my time and donations to preventing us from reducing more suffering. I strive to remain as open-m... (read more)
Another meta thing about the visuals is that I don't like the +[number] feature that makes it so can't tell, at a glance, that the voting is becoming very tilted towards the right side
healthy humans take care of their animals
Since animal welfare is highly related to the reality of human health like that of diet and pathogenic diseases, animal welfare is an important issue to tackle with.
Spending money on animal welfare (specifically veganism) will automatically benefit the global health of humans, and will spare the horrible lives of millions of animals
Animal Welfare is so neglected... it is just mind-blowing.
I have a strong prior for people being much, much more important than animals.
I consider AI safety to be the primary overwhelming cause area in Global Health and Animal Welfare. But I think that even considering saving the lives of all human and animals doesn't begin to recognize the scope of the issue. This is about extinction. So you must also consider the moral weight of all the future lives lost. I think also that considering life from a hedonistic standpoint of enjoyment/suffering, as if it could sum to a total and thus judge the life worthwhile or not by the total is fundamentally incorrect. I think it's super weird that so ma... (read more)
Animals ought not be fungible to humans!
The marginal effect of increased spending (say $1 billion) on animal welfare is likely to be far greater than the marginal impact of an extra $1 billion on global health. Granted that public health challenges in low and middle-income countries can at times be substantially lessened with relatively small inputs (e.g., niacin enrichment of corn meal), overall, the impact of relatively small amounts of strategically invested money can have a significant impact on the animal space. For example, I believe the support ($1-2 million) Open Philanthropy has provide... (read more)
I can't think of a single intervention commonly supported by animal rights groups that wouldn't also improve "[human] global health". Animal agriculture also contributes significantly to climate change, so doing whatever we can to transition to plant-based food systems and protect wild animals from excessive habitat destruction benefits us all ultimately.
Through the ancient art of "multiplication" we can see how important it is to stop the current situation where trillions are being tortured to death.
- I feel like animal welfare is based on incorrect philosophical arguments. I do not think that animals (sentient) suffer in the same sense that humans (sapient) suffer. I do not believe that any amount of the qualitatively different animal suffering adds up to any amount of human suffering. They are non-commensurate. For more detail, see here: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Htu55gzoiYHS6TREB/sentience-matters?commentId=wusCgxN9qK8HzLAiw In accordance with this view, I argue that not a single dollar should be spent on animal suffering while there is s
... (read more)In analyzing the $100 Million Dilemma—whether to prioritize saving human lives or endangered species—a more profound conceptual framework can be developed by integrating several underexplored dimensions that transcend the typical ethical and ecological perspectives.
1. Ecological Economics of Sustainability vs. Externalities of Anthropocentrism
A key tension in this debate stems from the difference between immediate, human-centered interventions and systemic, ecosystem-centered conservation. The decision is framed as a zero-sum choice, when in reality,... (read more)