Unitarian views are actually pretty common in the field. It's hard to have all three of these:

1. There is no moral hierarchy between humans, no matter what their mental capacities are.
2. Species-membership itself is merely genetics and it's morally irrelevant. What morally matters is other morally relevant capacities like sentience, consciousness, mental capacities etc.
3. There is some kind of moral hierarchy between humans and animals.

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 rather than just focusing on comparing specific experiences of different individuals. In RP's report, here's how the question of welfare comparison was addressed:

"I estimated the DALY equivalent of a year spent in each type of pain assessed by the Welfare Footprint Project by looking at the descriptions of and disability weights assigned to various conditions assessed by the Global Burden of Disease Study in 2019 and comparing these to the descriptions of each type of pain tracked by the Welfare Footprint Project."

I think this is the core question on this issue and it merits a much longer and thorough analysis. I would love to see a team of biologists, animal behaviour experts and human health experts coming together to produce a more detailed report on this.

f. I think there should be more concrete examples for PR costs of animal welfare work. Animal welfare has been around for sometime and I don't see that it has created notorious enemies for EA that try to drag down the movement. On the contrary it has even brought in new donors for some of the non-animal welfare parts of the movement(The Navigation Fund). EA-supported interventions on animal welfare are generally pretty moderate and popular. Cage-free referendums were always won by over 60% support(78% support in Massachusetts!). End The Cage Age petition got 1.4 million signatures in the EU. EA-supported Nähtamatud Loomad got the NGO of the year award from Estonian president. Animal welfare work has its enemies, but they don't seem to have affected EA that much.

g. On the contrary I found animal welfare quite useful for EA community building. Open Philanthropy donating an additional 5 million dollars to AMF doesn't create new entry opportunities to EA. Whereas many of the EA organisers in Turkey got involved in the movement through the local EA supported animal advocacy organisation. Animal advocacy offers localised, effective and non-monetary ways to contribute. That is pretty useful in low trust or middle income countries.

But overall I think animal welfare spending should be evaluated primarily according to its impact on animals. If someone thinks that some positive or negative side-effect is significant enough they should concretely show it and provide an estimate for it.

h. I feel similarly about ripple effects. If someone is attempting to maximise that kind of outcome, they should choose an intervention that maximises ripple effects. Otherwise both animal advocacy work and global health work have loads of side effects on people's values, ideas, population growth, economic growth and it's an extremely ambitious effort to sum these all up and have a verdict on the overall direction of them. I'm also surprised that people think animal advocacy's effect is isolated on animals only. It's a mass communications work that leaves an impact on millions of people. That is a whole load of ripples.

"I do not believe that any amount of the qualitatively different animal suffering adds up to any amount of human suffering."

I was responding to my interpretation of the sentence above. I agree that it's a common position to assign infinitely higher importance to saving a human life compared to preventing any amount of animal suffering. My understanding of the quote above was that you made an even stronger claim since the expression is "any amount of human suffering", which should include very low amounts of human suffering.

But I still think folk ethics on this issue is overconfident and doesn't take moral uncertainty properly into account. I also think that kind of incommensurability claims face other more general theoretical problems. "Saving" a life is just another expression for extending it, since no intervention makes people immortal. That position would claim 0,0000000001% increase in the chance of prolonging a human life by one day is more important than preventing 1000000000 animals to be born into torture.

I think this level of incommensurability is both contradictory with folk ethics(most people I speak with agree that preventing animal torture is more important than preventing mild human headache) and it's a pretty confident view that assigns a very low weight to the animals' interests. Do you think our reasoning in moral philosophy and understanding of animal biology is reliable enough to be that confident?

ChatGPT seems to have taken it from the training data, without much change. I will replace the translation with this one.

Do you currently think non-human animals are replaceable in a way humans aren't? Can a hedonist argue for that claim consistently?

What keeps you going when you are at your lowest?

In your previous writing on Animal Liberation, you state:

"With the benefit of hindsight, I regret that I did allow the concept of a right to intrude into my work so unnecessarily at this point; it would have avoided misunderstanding if I had not made this concession to popular moral rhetoric."

What do you currently think about using rights and justice jargon when advocating for animals? John Stuart Mill is currently regarded as an early proponent of several movements for rights without much controversy. He often made use of the terms "right" and "liberty" in his writings. On the other hand the word "right" is very loaded in animal advocacy world, with some insisting on a very specific, strictly deontological interpretation of the word. Should people who care about animal welfare dispense with the term "rights" or should they push for a more generic understanding of the term(e.g. fundamental interests that should be protected by the state) and keep using it?