TL;DR: This is a post about a personal arc of going from pro-natalist to not pro-natalist. I lay out my reasons, mainly animal welfare.
I have been a regular listener to Simone and Malcolm Collins’s pro-natalism podcast since they posted about their pro-natalist cause area on EA Forum in 2022. Since maybe 2021 I’ve gone on an arc of
first being fairly neutral to then
being strongly pro-natalist,
third being pro-natalist but not rating it as an effective cause area, and now
entering a fourth phase where I might reject pro-natalism altogether.
I value animal welfare and at least on an intellectual level I care equally about their welfare and humanity’s. For every additional human we bring into existence at a time in history where humans have never eaten more meat per capita, on expectation, you will get years of animal suffering induced by the additional consumer demand for more meat. This is known as the meat-eater problem, but I haven’t seen anyone explicitly connect it to pro-natalism yet. It seems like an obvious connection to make.
The average consumer creates demand for around 25 caged chickens a year
The average American consumes 130 kg in animal flesh per year, and the average UK resident consume 80 kg per year, with the rest of Europe not far behind. In both of those countries, poultry is the most-consumed kind of meat, and factory farming (caged or barn-raised) is the predominant method of raising chickens in both those countries.
We can ball-park estimate the duration of caged chicken suffering supported by eating habits in those countries, by assuming
100kg meat consumed per person per year, approximating the numbers above
50% of meat consumed is poultry (the most common meat consumed in the UK and the US)
That would indicate every person on average creates economic demand for around 4 years of farmed chicken suffering for every 1 year of human life.
People in developing countries eat less meat than those in developed countries, but they are rapidly catching up with developed countries. Consumption patterns around the world differ, where pork or seafood are the leading meat type. The welfare impact of those differs from the welfare impact of eating chicken, but is not clearly better or worse to me.
Value judgements
It does seem reasonable that—depending on your view about a chicken’s capacity to suffer—you might think that 4 years of farmed chicken suffering is worth a year of human life. But keep in mind that we are not here considering the value of keeping an existing human alive for an extra year, but whether to promote a cause area that will cause parents to create new human lives.
To me, 4 years of chicken suffering for every year of a new human life mitigates the value of bringing in a new human into the world down to about even. Consequently, pro-natalism seems roughly net-neutral to me. Others might place the existence exchange rate at some strongly different point and that would influence the position they take. ReThink Priorities estimates a welfare range for chickens at around 1⁄3 of humans, and such estimates are important when considering the pro-natal-animal-welfare trade-off. A prior analysis here on EA forum estimated a trade-off of about 1:1 of human life to poultry suffering caused.
This does not apply to the individual decisions of conscientious consumers
This is not an argument against the value of having your own kids, who you then raise with appropriate respect for the welfare of other sentient creatures. While you can’t control their choices as adults, if you raise them right, your expectation they will cause large amounts of suffering will be substantially reduced, potentially enough to make it a net positive choice.
However, pro-natalism as a political movement aimed at raising birthrates at large will likely cause more animal suffering outweighing the value of human happiness it will create. For a political movement aimed at raising birthrates a good starting point seems to be that the marginal additional human life caused will result in increased meat consumption at similar marginal rates to the current rate of meat consumption.
This argument will not apply in the ‘long term’
In the long term, we will hopefully invent forms of delicious meat like cultured meat that do not involve sentient animal suffering. The average person might still eat some farmed meat at the time, but hopefully, with delicious cultured meat options available, public opinion may allow for appropriate animal welfare for farmed animals, such that those farmed animals’ lives are at least net positive. When that happens, pro-natalism might make more sense.
But we don’t know when cultured meat will appear. It is possible that widespread adoption is several decades away, in a slower AGI timeline world or where some form of cultural or legal turn prevents the widespread adoption of cultured meat even if it is technically possible.
All-things-considered, perhaps pro-natalism might again be a net-positive (if not among the most impactful) cause area after there’s a clear, continuous decline in meat consumption caused by some factor (like the appearance of good cultured meat) that seems like it will plausibly drive consumption of factory farmed meat to very low levels. This kind of transformation is likely to take a decade to complete, based on the transformation speed of past trends, and could easily be faster or slower. The speed of that transformation is an important consideration for deciding when pronatalism might again be a net-positive cause area. One must also make a value judgement based on evidence and population ethics positions (do you value maximizing average utility or total utility) about the relative value of bringing into being one new human vs. the negative value of bringing in to being the number of factory farmed chickens, pigs, fish, and shrimp that person will consume.
Increasing the population now is not a robust means of making the long-term future go well.
I anticipate some people will argue that more humans will make the long term future go well because in expectation this will create more people going into the long term. I think this is a reasonable position to take but I don’t find it convincing because of the problem of moral cluelessness: there is far too much random chaos (in the butterfly effect sense of the term) for us to have any idea what the effect of more people now will be on the next few generations.
Pro-natalist success would cause so much animal suffering it is not even a net-positive cause area
TL;DR: This is a post about a personal arc of going from pro-natalist to not pro-natalist. I lay out my reasons, mainly animal welfare.
I have been a regular listener to Simone and Malcolm Collins’s pro-natalism podcast since they posted about their pro-natalist cause area on EA Forum in 2022. Since maybe 2021 I’ve gone on an arc of
first being fairly neutral to then
being strongly pro-natalist,
third being pro-natalist but not rating it as an effective cause area, and now
entering a fourth phase where I might reject pro-natalism altogether.
I value animal welfare and at least on an intellectual level I care equally about their welfare and humanity’s. For every additional human we bring into existence at a time in history where humans have never eaten more meat per capita, on expectation, you will get years of animal suffering induced by the additional consumer demand for more meat. This is known as the meat-eater problem, but I haven’t seen anyone explicitly connect it to pro-natalism yet. It seems like an obvious connection to make.
The average consumer creates demand for around 25 caged chickens a year
The average American consumes 130 kg in animal flesh per year, and the average UK resident consume 80 kg per year, with the rest of Europe not far behind. In both of those countries, poultry is the most-consumed kind of meat, and factory farming (caged or barn-raised) is the predominant method of raising chickens in both those countries.
We can ball-park estimate the duration of caged chicken suffering supported by eating habits in those countries, by assuming
100kg meat consumed per person per year, approximating the numbers above
50% of meat consumed is poultry (the most common meat consumed in the UK and the US)
About 2kg of meat per chicken
A chicken can be expected to live around 9 weeks before slaughter
That would indicate every person on average creates economic demand for around 4 years of farmed chicken suffering for every 1 year of human life.
People in developing countries eat less meat than those in developed countries, but they are rapidly catching up with developed countries. Consumption patterns around the world differ, where pork or seafood are the leading meat type. The welfare impact of those differs from the welfare impact of eating chicken, but is not clearly better or worse to me.
Value judgements
It does seem reasonable that—depending on your view about a chicken’s capacity to suffer—you might think that 4 years of farmed chicken suffering is worth a year of human life. But keep in mind that we are not here considering the value of keeping an existing human alive for an extra year, but whether to promote a cause area that will cause parents to create new human lives.
To me, 4 years of chicken suffering for every year of a new human life mitigates the value of bringing in a new human into the world down to about even. Consequently, pro-natalism seems roughly net-neutral to me. Others might place the existence exchange rate at some strongly different point and that would influence the position they take. ReThink Priorities estimates a welfare range for chickens at around 1⁄3 of humans, and such estimates are important when considering the pro-natal-animal-welfare trade-off. A prior analysis here on EA forum estimated a trade-off of about 1:1 of human life to poultry suffering caused.
This does not apply to the individual decisions of conscientious consumers
This is not an argument against the value of having your own kids, who you then raise with appropriate respect for the welfare of other sentient creatures. While you can’t control their choices as adults, if you raise them right, your expectation they will cause large amounts of suffering will be substantially reduced, potentially enough to make it a net positive choice.
However, pro-natalism as a political movement aimed at raising birthrates at large will likely cause more animal suffering outweighing the value of human happiness it will create. For a political movement aimed at raising birthrates a good starting point seems to be that the marginal additional human life caused will result in increased meat consumption at similar marginal rates to the current rate of meat consumption.
This argument will not apply in the ‘long term’
In the long term, we will hopefully invent forms of delicious meat like cultured meat that do not involve sentient animal suffering. The average person might still eat some farmed meat at the time, but hopefully, with delicious cultured meat options available, public opinion may allow for appropriate animal welfare for farmed animals, such that those farmed animals’ lives are at least net positive. When that happens, pro-natalism might make more sense.
But we don’t know when cultured meat will appear. It is possible that widespread adoption is several decades away, in a slower AGI timeline world or where some form of cultural or legal turn prevents the widespread adoption of cultured meat even if it is technically possible.
All-things-considered, perhaps pro-natalism might again be a net-positive (if not among the most impactful) cause area after there’s a clear, continuous decline in meat consumption caused by some factor (like the appearance of good cultured meat) that seems like it will plausibly drive consumption of factory farmed meat to very low levels. This kind of transformation is likely to take a decade to complete, based on the transformation speed of past trends, and could easily be faster or slower. The speed of that transformation is an important consideration for deciding when pronatalism might again be a net-positive cause area. One must also make a value judgement based on evidence and population ethics positions (do you value maximizing average utility or total utility) about the relative value of bringing into being one new human vs. the negative value of bringing in to being the number of factory farmed chickens, pigs, fish, and shrimp that person will consume.
Increasing the population now is not a robust means of making the long-term future go well.
I anticipate some people will argue that more humans will make the long term future go well because in expectation this will create more people going into the long term. I think this is a reasonable position to take but I don’t find it convincing because of the problem of moral cluelessness: there is far too much random chaos (in the butterfly effect sense of the term) for us to have any idea what the effect of more people now will be on the next few generations.