Like Ian Turner I ended up disagreeing and not downvoting (I appreciate the work Vasco puts into his posts).
The shortest answer is that I find the āMeat Eater Problemā repugnant and indicitative of defective moral reasoning that, if applied at scale, would lead to great moral harm.[1]
I donāt want to write a super long comment, but my overall feelings on the matter have not changed since this topic came up on the Forum. In fact, Iād say that one of the leading reasons I consider myself drastically less āEAā since the last ~6 months have gone by is the seeming embrace of the āMeat-Eater Problemā inbuilt into both the EA Community and its core ideas, or at least the more ānaĆÆve utilitarianā end of things. To me, Vascoās bottom line result isnāt an argument that we should prevent children dying of malnutrition or suffering with malaria because of these second-order effects.
Instead, naĆÆve hedonistic utilitarians should be asking themselves: If the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?
embrace of the āMeat-Eater Problemā inbuilt into both the EA Community and its core ideas
Embrace of the meat-eater problem is not built into the EA community. Iām guessing a large majority of EAs, especially the less engaged ones who donāt comment on the Forum, would not take the meat-eater problem seriously as a reason we ought to save fewer human lives.
The EA community still donates far more to global health causes than animal welfareāI think the meat eater problem discourse seems like a much bigger deal than it actually is in the community. I personally think itās all kinda silly and significantly prioritise saving human lives
The EA community still donates far more to global health causes than animal welfare
Donations are dominated by large donors, so this only means large donors tend to donate more to global health and development than animal welfare. The votes in the Animal Welfare vs Global Health Debate Week, and 2024 donation election favoured animal welfare.
But the debate week question and the donation election were about marginal funding, which limits the breadth of the conclusions one can draw from those data. IIRC, many of the discussionsāand at least my own votes trending toward AWāwere heavily influenced by the small percentage of EA funding that is going into AW. Perhaps the EA Survey is the best sense of general community sentiment on the communityās relative cause prio here?
Hi Jason. Oneās top cause is simply that whose best interventions one thinks are the most cost-effective at the margin? I think so. The EA Survey may offer a better perspective due to covering more people, and often presenting results for different levels of engagement with effective altruism, but I do not remember whether there was a question about allocating marginal funding, although I remember there was one about allocating total funding.
The proposition asserted upthread was ā[t]he EA community still donates far more to global health causes than animal welfare.ā If I understood your response correctly, you suggested that this is a function of the largest donorsā decisions. That many of us, including myself, favor giving the marginal last dollar to AW is also a function of those big-donor decisions.
As far as survey data, I specifically had the response to Please give a rough indication of how much you think each of these causes should be prioritized by EAs. I took that wording to invite the respondent to divvy up the entire pie of EA resources. I would read them as suggesting that GHD > AW in the communityās collective ideal cause prio, but by considerably less than donation numbers would imply. Itās of course possible that the 2024 survey will show different outcomes.
There was also this response, although the high SDs make interpretation a bit confusing to me:
If I understood your response correctly, you suggested that this is a function of the largest donorsā decisions. That many of us, including myself, favor giving the marginal last dollar to AW is also a function of those big-donor decisions.
Agreed. I just meant that much more donations to the best global health and development (GHD) interventions than to the best ones in animal welfare (AW) does not necessarily imply that the median donor believes that the former are more cost-effective at the margin than the latter.
As far as survey data, I specifically had the response to Please give a rough indication of how much you think each of these causes should be prioritized by EAs. I took that wording to invite the respondent to divvy up the entire pie of EA resources.
I agree with your interpretation that the question is about allocationg total funding, nor marginal funding. So the results are compatible with people thinking GHD should have a much greater fraction of the resources than AW, but believing the best interventions in GHD are less cost-effective than the best ones in AW.
Itās of course possible that the 2024 survey will show different outcomes.
I guess the results will be more favourable to animal welfare than in 2022, although not as much as one may infer from discussions on the forum, as I think people who are less engaged tend to prioritise GHD relatively more.
The shortest answer is that I find the āMeat Eater Problemā repugnant and indicitative of defective moral reasoning that, if applied at scale, would lead to great moral harm.
My underlying reasoning is that one should increase impartial welfare instead of human welfare, and I think striving to be impartial leads to better outcomes, not great moral harm. Taking the meat-eater problem seriously implies caring a lot more about animals, not at all killing people (which is what you might be implying with āgreat moral harmā). If more people took effects on animals as seriously as people worried about the meat-eater problem do, this would be majorly mitigated, as the consumption of animals with bad lives would decrease a lot.
Instead, naĆÆve hedonistic utilitarians should be asking themselves
Neglecting uncertain effects and overconfidence are hallmarks of naive utilitarianism, but I would say these apply more to supporters of extending human lives than to people worried about the meat-eater problem.
By ignoring uncertain effects on farmed animals, GiveWell and Ambitious Impact are implicitly assuming they are certainly irrelevant. I find this view quite extreme, given the large uncertainty involved, and I am not aware of GiveWell or Ambitious Impact having justified it in anything close to sufficient detail.
I do not take the numbers I present at face value.
Nevertheless, I am not confident that saving human lives globally, and in China, India or Nigeria is harmful to animals:
Even if it is so for farmed animals nearterm, it can still be beneficial overall. For example, I wouldsay at least chickensā lives can become positive over the next few decades in some animal-friendly countries.
Many of my modelled inputs are highly uncertain. However, this means extending human lives globally, and in China, India and Nigeria may be, in the nearterm, not only beneficial, but also hugely harmful.
I donāt think this is an example of ānaive utilitarianismā. Itās a fairly standard EA cause prioritization analysis. Vasco is not arguing that we ought to break the law, or even that we should go against common-sense morality.
Indeed, common-sense morality finds itself in a bit of a pickle on this question: it cannot object to someone arguing that we ought not to donate to global health charities, because (as we see from the world around us) it deems it permissible to let thousands of children die every day of preventable disease. EAs (particularly the more utilitarian/āconsequentialist ones) are the weird ones because we reject the act/āomission distinction.
(For my part, I try to donate in such a way that Iām net-positive from the perspective of both anti-speciesist animal welfare and global health advocates.)
I donāt think ācommon senseā morality necessarily finds itself in a pickle here.
My common sense morality veers the way of JWS and finds no pickle at all.
āThe shortest answer is that I find the āMeat Eater Problemā repugnant and indicitative of defective moral reasoning that, if applied at scale, would lead to great moral harm.ā
Your version of common sense morality might be different and find a pickle here, but I think itās important to take into account that in a lot of peopleās minds (I would guess 99.9 percent of humans) common sense morality would lead them to almost out of hand reject this āproblemā
For the record again even though disagree with it and find it somewhat repugnant, I think itās a reasonable argument.
Common-sense morality has nothing to say about cause prioritisation in the first place, so it rejects the problem only in the sense that it doesnāt subscribe to standard EA cause-neutrality and prioritisation frameworks. Global health EAs also violate common-sense morality when they argue that charity doesnāt begin at home (as in, within oneās own country). This is to be expected: EAs are committed to impartiality and welfarism, and the vast majority of humans are not.
Like Ian Turner I ended up disagreeing and not downvoting (I appreciate the work Vasco puts into his posts).
The shortest answer is that I find the āMeat Eater Problemā repugnant and indicitative of defective moral reasoning that, if applied at scale, would lead to great moral harm.[1]
I donāt want to write a super long comment, but my overall feelings on the matter have not changed since this topic came up on the Forum. In fact, Iād say that one of the leading reasons I consider myself drastically less āEAā since the last ~6 months have gone by is the seeming embrace of the āMeat-Eater Problemā inbuilt into both the EA Community and its core ideas, or at least the more ānaĆÆve utilitarianā end of things. To me, Vascoās bottom line result isnāt an argument that we should prevent children dying of malnutrition or suffering with malaria because of these second-order effects.
Instead, naĆÆve hedonistic utilitarians should be asking themselves: If the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?
I also agree factory farming is terrible. I just want to find pareto solutions that reduce needless animal suffering and increase human flourishing.
Embrace of the meat-eater problem is not built into the EA community. Iām guessing a large majority of EAs, especially the less engaged ones who donāt comment on the Forum, would not take the meat-eater problem seriously as a reason we ought to save fewer human lives.
The EA community still donates far more to global health causes than animal welfareāI think the meat eater problem discourse seems like a much bigger deal than it actually is in the community. I personally think itās all kinda silly and significantly prioritise saving human lives
That seems true in practice but you wouldnāt come to that conclusion reading the forum over the last few months like JWS says
Donations are dominated by large donors, so this only means large donors tend to donate more to global health and development than animal welfare. The votes in the Animal Welfare vs Global Health Debate Week, and 2024 donation election favoured animal welfare.
But the debate week question and the donation election were about marginal funding, which limits the breadth of the conclusions one can draw from those data. IIRC, many of the discussionsāand at least my own votes trending toward AWāwere heavily influenced by the small percentage of EA funding that is going into AW. Perhaps the EA Survey is the best sense of general community sentiment on the communityās relative cause prio here?
Hi Jason. Oneās top cause is simply that whose best interventions one thinks are the most cost-effective at the margin? I think so. The EA Survey may offer a better perspective due to covering more people, and often presenting results for different levels of engagement with effective altruism, but I do not remember whether there was a question about allocating marginal funding, although I remember there was one about allocating total funding.
I had these results in mind.
The proposition asserted upthread was ā[t]he EA community still donates far more to global health causes than animal welfare.ā If I understood your response correctly, you suggested that this is a function of the largest donorsā decisions. That many of us, including myself, favor giving the marginal last dollar to AW is also a function of those big-donor decisions.
As far as survey data, I specifically had the response to Please give a rough indication of how much you think each of these causes should be prioritized by EAs. I took that wording to invite the respondent to divvy up the entire pie of EA resources. I would read them as suggesting that GHD > AW in the communityās collective ideal cause prio, but by considerably less than donation numbers would imply. Itās of course possible that the 2024 survey will show different outcomes.
There was also this response, although the high SDs make interpretation a bit confusing to me:
Thanks for sharing, Jason! Strongly upvoted.
Agreed. I just meant that much more donations to the best global health and development (GHD) interventions than to the best ones in animal welfare (AW) does not necessarily imply that the median donor believes that the former are more cost-effective at the margin than the latter.
I agree with your interpretation that the question is about allocationg total funding, nor marginal funding. So the results are compatible with people thinking GHD should have a much greater fraction of the resources than AW, but believing the best interventions in GHD are less cost-effective than the best ones in AW.
I guess the results will be more favourable to animal welfare than in 2022, although not as much as one may infer from discussions on the forum, as I think people who are less engaged tend to prioritise GHD relatively more.
Hi JWS.
My underlying reasoning is that one should increase impartial welfare instead of human welfare, and I think striving to be impartial leads to better outcomes, not great moral harm. Taking the meat-eater problem seriously implies caring a lot more about animals, not at all killing people (which is what you might be implying with āgreat moral harmā). If more people took effects on animals as seriously as people worried about the meat-eater problem do, this would be majorly mitigated, as the consumption of animals with bad lives would decrease a lot.
Neglecting uncertain effects and overconfidence are hallmarks of naive utilitarianism, but I would say these apply more to supporters of extending human lives than to people worried about the meat-eater problem.
I do not take the numbers I present at face value.
I donāt think this is an example of ānaive utilitarianismā. Itās a fairly standard EA cause prioritization analysis. Vasco is not arguing that we ought to break the law, or even that we should go against common-sense morality.
Indeed, common-sense morality finds itself in a bit of a pickle on this question: it cannot object to someone arguing that we ought not to donate to global health charities, because (as we see from the world around us) it deems it permissible to let thousands of children die every day of preventable disease. EAs (particularly the more utilitarian/āconsequentialist ones) are the weird ones because we reject the act/āomission distinction.
(For my part, I try to donate in such a way that Iām net-positive from the perspective of both anti-speciesist animal welfare and global health advocates.)
I donāt think ācommon senseā morality necessarily finds itself in a pickle here.
My common sense morality veers the way of JWS and finds no pickle at all.
āThe shortest answer is that I find the āMeat Eater Problemā repugnant and indicitative of defective moral reasoning that, if applied at scale, would lead to great moral harm.ā
Your version of common sense morality might be different and find a pickle here, but I think itās important to take into account that in a lot of peopleās minds (I would guess 99.9 percent of humans) common sense morality would lead them to almost out of hand reject this āproblemā
For the record again even though disagree with it and find it somewhat repugnant, I think itās a reasonable argument.
Common-sense morality has nothing to say about cause prioritisation in the first place, so it rejects the problem only in the sense that it doesnāt subscribe to standard EA cause-neutrality and prioritisation frameworks. Global health EAs also violate common-sense morality when they argue that charity doesnāt begin at home (as in, within oneās own country). This is to be expected: EAs are committed to impartiality and welfarism, and the vast majority of humans are not.