I disagree-voted, rather than downvoted, but I could understand downvoting on the basis that, like so many animal welfare pieces on the forum, this one smuggles in a ton of unstated and highly controversial beliefs about the value of animals. I feel like pieces like this should come with a disclaimer at the top saying, “warning: this essay rests on highly unconventional beliefs about the value of animal welfare”.
Personally I find repugnant the idea that we should let little kids suffer from malaria because of the chance they might grow up to eat chicken. The same logic could be used to justify school shootings.
smuggles in a ton of unstated and highly controversial beliefs about the value of animals
I understand Rethink Priorities’ median welfare ranges imply valuing animal welfare more than is typical in society. However, I think we should assess such ranges on their merits instead of comparing them to the median view. GiveWell’s moral weights do not depend on the country, which is highly controversial, in the sense the vast majority of people value humans in their country more. However, I would disagree with GiveWell changing their approach to align more closely with societal views, because I do not think welfare intrinsically depends on the country you are born (although the country one is born influences welfare).
Personally I find repugnant the idea that we should let little kids suffer from malaria because of the chance they might grow up to eat chicken.
I relied on the consumption of animals in 2022, so my results do not depend on predictions about future growth.
I estimate a random person globally, and in China, India and Nigeria in 2022 caused 15.5, 34.6, 5.17 and 2.31 times as much suffering to poultry birds and farmed aquatic animals as the person’s happiness. Moreover, I expect the meat-eater problem in those countries to become worse in the nearterm as their real gross domestic product (real GDP) per capita increases. So my results suggest extending human lives there is harmful in the nearterm.
The same logic could be used to justify school shootings.
I would agree it is very unclear whether a random person killing another random person increases or decreases welfare, as I expect the effects on farmed animals to dominate those on humans, and I believe it is very unclear whether the effects on animals are positive or negative, despite my best guess that they are positive nearterm. However, I think the large effects on animals should be seen as a motivation to help animals as cost-effectively as possible, and I do not see how killing people would fit this bill. Even if it decreased animal suffering not only nearterm, but in total, it would decrease the donations of the murder to the best organisations helping animals, which is the dominant consideration given my estimate that one can neutralise the negative effects on animals of one person in 2022 with just a few cents.
GiveWell’s moral weights do not depend on the country, which is highly controversial, in the sense the vast majority of people value humans in their country more. However, I would disagree with GiveWell changing their approach to align more closely with societal views, because I do not think welfare intrinsically depends on the country you are born (although the country one is born influences welfare).
You don’t seem to expect them to devote researcher and writer time towards “reasoning transparency” justifying treating all human lives of approximately equal value though? So I’m not sure why you would expect them to devote more time and effort to coming up with BOTECs to prove that this value is non-negative, an axiomatic GiveWell assumption which is no more hidden than your own longer list of axiomatic assumptions (hedonic welfare characterised by valence symmetry and the approximate accuracy of a long list of assumptions about how to quantify it is the one true way to allocate resources). If you think the meat-eater problem is a compelling reason to avoid averting human DALYs, you’re not going to GiveWell’s list of human DALY averting charities for inspiration any more than someone who believes that true charity begins with looking after people closest to you or involves religious salvation.
FWIW even if we accept your axioms there’s substantial reason to doubt your own conclusion (as you acknowledge with your “low confidence” statement) that saving human lives is bad. Most obviously, you appear to have imputed that the average Indian reliant on donations for lifesaving (typically in poverty) will grow up to consume shrimp (a relatively high-value foodstuff) roughly in proportion to the number of shrimp farms in India (which exports up to 95% of its shrimp production). That estimate that’s probably off by at least one order of magnitude accounts for a large fraction of your estimated negative impact of saving an Indian child’s life
Thanks, David. I felt like your comment misrepresented my post a bit.
You don’t seem to expect them to devote massive amounts of time towards “reasoning transparency” justifying treating all human lives of approximately equal value though?
I do not ask GiveWell for “massive amounts of time” in the context of effects on animals. As of now, I just ask for some time, as they have apparently nothing on their website about such effects.
I do not think they have to justify valuing 1 unit of welfare the same regardless of where and when it is experienced, as I see impartiality as a self-evident starting point. However, I would certainly agree with them valuing happier lives more, and therefore not value saving lives the same regardless of country.
own longer list of axiomatic assumptions (hedonic welfare characterised by valence symmetry and the approximate accuracy of a long list of assumptions about how to quantify it is the one true way to allocate resources)
Moral uncertainty would make conclusions even less robust. However, even under expected total hedonistic utilitarianism, which I strongly endorse, there is more than enough empirical uncertainty for it to be unclear whether saving lives globally, and in China, India and Nigeria is beneficial or harmful. So my conclusion would remain the same. It is also unclear to me whether other moral theories favour or disfavour animals (e.g. saving human lives increases the number of total lives killed nearterm among humans and farmed animals). I would say animals matter a lot on non-hedonic views. I also think one should be very wary of supporting interventions which can easily increase suffering a lot nearterm in the hope that integrating moral uncertainty makes it worthwhile.
Nitpick. I assumed the welfare per time of a practically maximally happy life is proportional to the welfare range. Valence symmetry is a sufficient condition for this, but it is not necessary. I think that assumption seems pretty agnostic, in that it is the simplest I can think of, and does not clearly favour animal or human welfare.
Most obviously, you appear to have imputed that the average Indian reliant on donations for lifesaving (typically in poverty) will grow up to consume shrimp (a relatively high-value foodstuff) roughly in proportion to the number of shrimp farms in India (which exports up to 95% of its shrimp production).
I relied on the shrimp supply (production plus net imports) per capita in 2022, which is what is relevant to assess the effects on animals. I acknowledged the people helped by GiveWell and AIM would cause less harm to animals than random people, but I do think this resolves the meat-eater problem.
The harms would be smaller for a random person helped by such GiveWell’s grants or Ambitious Impact’s organisations. I assume they have an income below that of a random person in the respective country, the supply per capita of meat excluding aquatic animals roughly increases with the logarithm of the real GDP per capita, and I guess so do the number of poultry birds, farmed aquatic animals excluding shrimp, and shrimp per capita. Yet, self-reported life satisfaction also roughly increases with the logarithm of the real GDP per capita. So I believe the harms to farmed animals per person increase roughly linearly with self-reported life satisfaction, at least across countries. As a result, it is unclear to me whether the harms to farmed animals as a fraction of the human benefits would be higher or lower for a random person than for a random person helped by such GiveWell’s grants or Ambitious Impact’s organisations.
That estimate that’s probably off by at least one order of magnitude accounts for a large fraction of your estimated negative impact of saving an Indian child’s life
I did not follow. I estimate saving lives in India would be harmful nearterm even for no consumption at all of shrimp.
Using RP’s 5th and 95th percentile welfare range of shrimp of 0 and 1.15, and maintaining all the other inputs, the harms caused to poultry birds and farmed aquatic animals as a fraction of the direct benefits of human life in 2022 would be:
Globally, 5.61 to 372.
In China, 12.3 and 841.
In India, 1.70 [> 1] and 131.
In Nigeria, 1.12 and 45.3.
Even if saving lives in India was beneficial according to my point estimates, one should keep in mind there is lots of uncertainty. I think one should pursue actions which are robustly beneficial, not ones which can easily cause lots of nearterm harm depending on alternative reasonable assumptions, like a larger welfare range, or different projections about the growth of animal consumption (I assumed no growth at all, which underestimates the harms to animals nearterm).
I do not ask GiveWell for “massive amounts of time” in the context of effects on animals.
I revised this during the time in which you were replying to say “use researcher and writer time” instead, precisely because I didn’t want to give the appearance of misrepresenting your post. Though it would certainly take a massive amount of time for GiveWell to address every detailed contrarian argument that actually humans surviving is bad or that welfare ought to be weighted by country or nationality or potential economic output or religion or proximity to the donor or any other mechanism dreamed up by people who have totally different axiomatic beliefs. It seems rather pointless for an organization focused on quantifying how effective organizations are at preserving human life to spend time explaining the precise nature of their disagreements with people holding the contrary belief that it would be better for humans not to live. Clearly there is no agreement to be found there.[1]
I don’t think animal welfare charities should feel obliged to quantify possible negative impacts on human welfare of their activity in the interests of supposed impartiality either.
I would say animals matter a lot on non-hedonic views
I agree it is possible to conclude that animal welfare should be prioritised over human welfare using other moral frameworks. I actually find deontological arguments for prioritising animal welfare more convincing than ones filled with arbitrary utility estimates. But the specific framing of the argument you want GiveWell to address is based on total welfarist hedonism with valence symmetry and multiple ancillary assumptions about the relative moral weight of animal lives they clearly don’t agree with. Adding the expectation they engage with even more forms of argument that human life is bad would make the proposed standard of reasoning transparency more unreasonable to impose upon them, not less.
I don’t think GiveWell should apportion any more time to the question “what if it’s better for humans to die” than the Shrimp Welfare Project should to “what if shrimps don’t have welfare and all we’re doing is making human lives a little worse”. Both are clearly and transparently incommensurate with their beliefs, and people that think that humans don’t deserve to live given their dietary habits or that shrimps don’t have meaningful welfare ranges can always find and advocate different causes.
I also think one should be very wary of supporting interventions which can easily increase suffering a lot nearterm in the hope that integrating moral uncertainty makes it worthwhile.
I think one should be wary of diverting funding which fairly unambiguously decreases well-established sources of nearterm suffering on the basis of a set of guesses about welfare impacts on aquatic animals with pretty dissimilar biology.[2]
I relied on the shrimp supply (production plus net imports) per capita in 2022
Nothing indicates that this supply statistic subtracts out exports. You linked to some total shrimp production stats, and an ambiguous source you caveated which suggests Indians consume half a kilo of shrimp per capita which would be the majority of their domestic product (despite the fact India is the world’s largest shrimp exporter and exports nearly all their produce). Elsewhere, I’ve seen it suggested India’s per capita consumption of shrimp is of the order of 100 grams (1.6% of overall seafood consumption). That’s less than a restaurant serving per person: it’s clearly not being transported to remote villages to be dished out to kids whose diet is so poor vitamin supplementation meaningfully increases their survival chances!
I suspect most recipients of GiveWell funding in India have never even seen a shrimp.
acknowledged the people helped by GiveWell and AIM would cause less harm to animals than random people, but I do think this resolves the meat-eater problem.
If the majority of people in India helped by GiveWell and AIM eat no aquaculture products whichis likely true, then by the estimates you posted above, it resolves the meat eater problem as presented in this post for those people (specifically the net benefit in human DALYs is greater than the net harms caused to chicken welfare from egg and occasional meat consumption).[3] I agree that you acknowledged that poor people consumed less, but only in the context of dismissing it as a relevant factor[4]
And yes, your estimates don’t factor in future economic growth which could reasonably be expected to increase meat and shrimp consumption by a lot. But you also assume the Shrimp Welfare Project’s India-centred campaigns have no impact on the aquaculture practises they’re campaigning about despite heartily recommending them as effective![5]
I did not follow. I estimate saving lives in India would be harmful nearterm even for no consumption at all of shrimp
At the RP midpoint used in the table in your post, 3.05 of the 4.55 animal harms per year you estimate surviving Indians responsible will be responsible for are attributed to shrimp welfare ergo most[6] of the quantifiable harm is based on [apparently incorrect] assumptions about shrimp consumption. I agree that this still estimates saving lives as net harmful, though it becomes net positive for the average Indian to live (yay!) under your estimates as soon as the rest of aquaculture is omitted from the equation. Which is not insignificant when there’s no scientific consensus about whether sea life experiences welfare at all, never mind how to quantify the impact of aquaculture.
if they were going to enormously expand the scope of their impact calculations to engage with people with fundamentally different starting axioms, it would probably be more productive to do additional calculations to engage with supporters of QALYs or “values of a statistical life”with lower weighting for the poor...
to be fair there are other farmed animals like goats (which are considerably more likely to be consumed by poor non-vegetarians than farmed shrimp) left out of the calculations whose consumption animal welfare enthusiasts can reasonably attach negative weight to, although I don’t think those animals are often factory farmedin India.
I found the argument that as meat consumption was broadly correlated with GDP per capita and life satisfaction is also broadly correlated with GDP per capita unconvincing given the relatively small impact of GDP on satisfaction. If the beneficiaries are typically consuming negligible amounts of animal produce you can’t just write off the net benefit by assuming their lives can’t be worth living!
there seem to be quite a few reasons to believe that shrimp stunning practices actually will change over time in India (it’s not obviously costly, the SWP isn’t the only organization pushing it and seems to be getting at least some positive responses, and India is characterised by influential religions unusually receptive to arguments about invertebrate welfare)
(FWIW I also edited to removed the word “majority” whilst you were drafting your response to try to avoid confusion, though I don’t think it’s incorrect in the sense I’ve used it)
Nothing indicates that this supply statistic subtracts out exports.
Hannah McKay, the 1st author of RP’s analysis with the shrimp supply numbers, had clarified via email these refer to production plus net imports. My sense is that supply often refers to this.
You linked to some total shrimp production stats, and an ambiguous source you caveated
I only used the total shrimp production to estimate the fraction of shrimps which are farmed. The “ambiguous source” you refer to is RP’s analysis of data from the Food and Agriculture Organization, which Hannah caveated “may be unreliable”.
Elsewhere, I’ve seen it suggested India’s per capita consumption of shrimp is of the order of 100 grams (1.6% of overall seafood consumption)
Nitpick. 100 g is the reported consumption of farmed shrimp, not all shrimp.
In the US, per capita shrimp consumption is around 1.9 kg/year while in India it is consumption of farmed shrimp is approximately 100 grams.
I estimate a farmed shrimp supply per capita in India in 2022 of 371 g (not quite “half a kilo”), and the consumption will be lower due to waste. I think the sources still disagree significantly after adjusting for this, but it does not matter for my main point. Even no consumption of shrimp would lead to saving lives in India being harmful neaterm if I kept all my other parameters constant, and there would always be significant uncertainty even if my point estimate suggested the benefits to humans are larger than the harms to animals nearterm.
If the majority of people in India helped by GiveWell and AIM eat no aquaculture products whichis likely true, then by the estimates you posted above, it resolves the meat eater problem as presented in this post for those people (specifically the net benefit in human DALYs is greater than the net harms caused to chicken welfare from egg and occasional meat consumption).
The consumption of poultry birds and farmed aquatic animals per person helped in India in 2022 would have to be less than 19.3 % (= 1/5.17) as large as that of a random person for extending human lives to increase welfare nearterm. In reality, consumption would have to be even lower than that to account for the lower welfare of the people helped, not to mention the possibility of them having negative lives (I estimated 6.37 % of people globally do). Even neglecting the uncertainty in other variable like the welfare ranges, without further research, it is hard for me to see how one can be confident that GiveWell’s grants to India, and the organisations AIM incubated there are beneficial.
But you also assume the Shrimp Welfare Project’s India-centred campaigns have no impact on the aquaculture practises they’re campaigning about despite heartily recommending them as effective!
I alluded to future improvements in the conditions of animals.
I wouldsay at least chickens’ lives can become positive over the next few decades in some animal-friendly countries. Relatedly, I would ideally determine the welfare burden per animal per year by country, although it is unclear to me whether I am over or underestimating it. Furthermore, I guess better worsening conditions now imply a longer time until reaching positive lives, and therefore a longer time until increased consumption of farmed animals being beneficial.
Even no consumption of shrimp would lead to saving lives in India being harmful neaterm if I kept all my other parameters constant, and there would always be significant uncertainty even if my point estimate suggested the benefits to humans are larger than the harms to animals nearterm.
Yes, but I don’t see any reason to assume that the uncertainty skews in favour of humans dying rather than humans surviving. Particularly not when the assumptions you used to reach this conclusion were that that poor Indians receiving nutrition supplementation have access to the same ~11 farmed shrimp per year in their diet as rich Indians, and that the positives of 1 Indian human living for 1 year are no more than the negatives of four shrimp being farmed.
I think in an area of high uncertainty we should default to the idea that humans should survive (and maybe change their dietary preferences) and not to the idea that they should die
The consumption of poultry birds and farmed aquatic animals per person helped in India in 2022 would have to be less than 19.3 % (= 1/5.17) as large as that of a random person for extending human lives to increase welfare nearterm
Sure. But since food choices are skewed heavily by budgets and aquaculture is a premium export market, and the supply chains to send 11 farmed shrimp per year to every man, woman and child in interior villages don’t exist, I don’t think the evidence points to the median GiveWell beneficiary consuming any of the ~13 farmed aquatic animals per year you’ve attributed to them. The idea that GiveWell donations have a non-zero effect on the size of the aquaculture industry at the margin is even more dubious, given that the economics of farming in a region which exports nearly all of its aquaculture products are highly unlikely to factor in a few thousand GiveWell non-beneficiaries dying to their demand calculations and reduce production accordingly.
Others have suggested that proposing that people shouldn’t be allowed to survive on the basis of things they might choose to eat in future. I think it would be worse to condemn them for things they are statistically unlikely to even get the opportunity to eat.
Either way, it’s a view you’re perfectly entitled to and have clearly done some research into, but I don’t think it’s a glaring omission that an organization that considers it axiomatic that human lives are worth saving hasn’t invested time in doing their own “so actually, under what set of assumptions can we conclude humans shouldn’t be saved” calculations.
Yes, but I don’t see any reason to assume that the uncertainty skews in favour of humans dying rather than humans surviving.
Some reasons which push towards saving lives being more harmful nearterm:
The supply per capita of meat excluding aquatic animals, and shrimp are roughly proportional to the logarithm of real GDP per capita, and real GDP per capita has been increasing.
I guess I am underestimating the harms to animals due to using RP’s median welfare ranges, which were calculated assuming a probability of 0 of animals having capacities which are unknown to be present or not. In reality, the probability will be higher than 0, which implies larger welfare ranges, especially for less studied animals like shrimp.
I think in an area of high uncertainty we should default to the idea that humans should survive (and maybe change their dietary preferences) and not to the idea that they should die
I think the focus should be on pursuing robustly good actions, in particular, improving animal welfare, and learning more.
Particularly not when the assumptions you used to reach this conclusion were that that poor Indians receiving nutrition supplementation have access to the same ~11 farmed shrimp per year in their diet as rich Indians
Random Indians, not rich Indians. I would appreciate it if you could represent my post fairly.
I don’t think the evidence points to the median GiveWell beneficiary consuming any of the ~13 farmed aquatic animals per year you’ve attributed to them
I explicitly said in the post “The harms would be smaller for a random person helped by such GiveWell’s grants or Ambitious Impact’s organisations”, and then argued why it is unclear this changes my conclusions.
Random Indians, not rich Indians. I would appreciate it if you could represent my post fairly.
“Random Indians” is a group which includes poor Indians (i.e. recipients of anti-poverty measures, which have non-random targeting) and rich Indians (typically not recipients of GiveWell or AIM charitable interventions). The assumption you make by using a mean consumption figure is that poor Indians and rich Indians alike consume ~11 shrimp per year. That’s what the text you quoted said, and a perfectly fair representation of your post
I actually think it’s an unfair representation of my post to accuse me of misrepresenting you simply because I spelled out the logical implications of your choice of figure, especially when I have also presented multiple reasons why I believe zero would be more representative of the amount they were likely to consume, and even more representative of the marginal impact of a typical GiveWell/AIM recipient surviving on Indian aquaculture production.
I explicitly said in the post “The harms would be smaller for a random person helped by such GiveWell’s grants or Ambitious Impact’s organisations”, and then argued why it is unclear this changes my conclusions.
My argument is that the median survivor due to GiveWell/AIM aid causes zero harm via aquaculture, and even the small minority of survivors who do consume shrimp are unlikely to have any impact upon numbers of shrimp culled in factory farms. I’m aware your post above argues that meat consumption may be linearly related to welfare via the common factor that is GDP, but I don’t think the relatively small diminution in self-reported welfare from lower incomes you’ve considered here is anywhere near enough to doubt that the survival of Indians without access to aquaculture products might be net positive in the welfarist framework you presented!
I feel we’re going in circles here, so I’ll wish you a happy Christmas and am unlikely to continue the discussion.
However, I think the large effects on animals should be seen as a motivation to help animals as cost-effectively as possible, and I do not see how killing people would fit this bill.
I think this is trying to dodge a bullet. It is not a matter of cost effectiveness, it is a matter that letting a child die of malaria because they could each chicken is a terrible idea in many (most) ethical frameworks. Let me reemphasize, but in Elizer Yudkowski words (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Tc2H9KbKRjuDJ3WSS/leaky-generalizations) now:
In my moral philosophy, the local negative utility of Hitler’s death is stable, no matter what happens to the external consequences and hence to the expected utility.
Now, you could argue that similarly to this case, the expected utility of saving the child might be negative even if local utility is pretty positive. It seems to me that this is convicting someone of something bad (eating a chicken) that he has not had time to do yet, and furthermore, on very handwavy probability calculations that could turn out to be wrong!
A clear-thinking EA should strongly oppose “ends justify the means” reasoning.
First, naive calculations that justify some harmful action because it has good consequences are, in practice, almost never correct.
Second, plausibly it is wrong to do harm even when doing so will bring about the best outcome.
Finally, let me say the post itself seems to pit animal welfare against global poverty causes, which I found divisive and probably counterproductive.
I downvoted this post because it is not representative of the values I believe EA should strive for. It may have been sufficient to show disagreement, but if someone goes for the first time into the forum and sees the post with many upvotes, their impression will be negative and may not become engaged with the community. If a reporter reads the forum and reads this, they will negatively cover both EA and animal welfare. And if someone was considering taking the 10% pledge or changing their career to support either animal welfare or global health and read this, they will be less likely to do so.
I am sorry, but I will strongly oppose “ends justify the means” argument put forward by this post.
I don’t think this is the kind of “ends justify the means” reasoning that MacAskill is objecting to. @Vasco Grilo🔸is not arguing that we should break the law. He is just doing a fairly standard EA cause prioritization analysis. Arguing that people should not donate to global health doesn’t even contradict common-sense morality because as we see from the world around us, common-sense morality holds that it’s perfectly permissible to let hundreds or thousands of children die of preventable diseases. Utilitarians and other consequentialists are the ones who hold “weird” views here, because we reject the act/omission distinction in the first place.
(For my part, I try to donate in such a way that I’m net-positive from the perspective of someone like Vasco as well as global health advocates.)
I don’t think this is the kind of “ends justify the means” reasoning that MacAskill is objecting to.
There is also the question of what are the means and ends here. Does the end “increasing human welfare” justify the means “increasing nearterm suffering a lot”?
@Vasco Grilo🔸is not arguing that we should break the law.
Right. As I commented above, it would not make any sense for someone caring about animals to kill people.
As I commented above, it would not make any sense for someone caring about animals to kill people.
You only did so on the ground of not being an effective method, and because it would decrease support for animal welfare. Presumably, if you could press a button to kill many people without anyone attributing it to the animal welfare movement you would, then?
Presumably, if you could press a button to kill many people without anyone attributing it to the animal welfare movement you would, then?
No. I guess that would increase welfare neaterm, but could increase or decrease it overall due to uncertain longer term effects. More importantly, killing people would make me feel bad even if I was the only who would ever know about it. This would decrease my productivity and donations to the best animal welfare interventions, which would be the dominant consideration given my estimate that one can neutralise the negative effects on animals of one person in 2022 with just a few cents.
I strongly endorse impartiality. So, if forced to pick between X and Y, and it is stipulated that X increases impartial welfare more than Y despite involving killing people, I would pick X. However, I do not see anything in the real world coming anywhere close to that.
Do you not worry about moral uncertainty? Unless you’re certain about consequentialism, surely you should put some weight on avoiding killing even if it maximises impartial welfare?
I fully endorse expected total hedonistic utilitarianism (ETHU) in principle. However, I think it is often good to think about the implications of other moral theories as heuristics to follow ETHU well in practice.
Unless you’re certain about consequentialism, surely you should put some weight on avoiding killing even if it maximises impartial welfare?
I think saving human lives increases the number of beings killed via increasing the number of farmed and wild animals killed.
I agree that thinking about other moral theories is useful for working out what utilitarianism would actually recommend.
That’s an interesting point re increasing the total amount of killing, I hadn’t considered that! But I was actually picking up on your comment which seemed to say something more general—that you wouldn’t intrinsically take into account whether an option involved (you) killing people, you’d just look at the consequences (and killing can lead to worse consequences, including in indirect ways, of course).
But it sounds like maybe your response to that is you’re not worried about moral uncertainty / you’re sure about utilitarianism / you don’t have any reason to avoid killing people, other than the (normally very significant) utilitarian reasons not to kill?
But it sounds like maybe your response to that is you’re not worried about moral uncertainty / you’re sure about utilitarianism / you don’t have any reason to avoid killing people, other than the (normally very significant) utilitarian reasons not to kill?
It is not a matter of cost effectiveness, it is a matter that letting a child die of malaria because they could each chicken is a terrible idea in many (most) ethical frameworks.
I understand I endorse expected total hedonistic utilitarianism much more strongly than most people. However, I think one should be very wary of pursuing actions which can easily increase suffering a lot nearterm in the hope that integrating moral uncertainty makes it worthwhile.
Now, you could argue that similarly to this case, the expected utility of saving the child might be negative even if local utility is pretty positive. It seems to me that this is convicting someone of something bad (eating a chicken) that he has not had time to do yet, and furthermore, on very handwavy probability calculations that could turn out to be wrong!
The specific numbers I presented may well be off, as there is lots of uncertainty.
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. Using RP’s 5th and 95th percentile welfare range of shrimp of 0 and 1.15, and maintaining all the other inputs, the harms caused to poultry birds and farmed aquatic animals as a fraction of the direct benefits of human life in 2022 would be:
Globally, 5.61 to 372.
In China, 12.3 and 841.
In India, 1.70 and 131.
In Nigeria, 1.12 and 45.3.
It seems to me that this is convicting someone of something bad (eating a chicken) that he has not had time to do yet
I assumed the lives saved in a given country would consume as much animals as random people in that country in 2022, although I expect the consumption per capita to increase as real GDP per capita increases. I do not think it would make sense to assume a major decrease in the beneficiaries’ consumption of animals after their lives are saved.
A clear-thinking EA should strongly oppose “ends justify the means” reasoning.
Agreed. Does the end “increasing human welfare” justify the means “increasing nearterm suffering a lot”?
First, naive calculations that justify some harmful action because it has good consequences are, in practice, almost never correct.
Agreed. However, I think you are implying not saving human lives is the harmful action. In my view, saving human lives can easily be the harmful action via causing lots of suffering to farmed animals.
Second, plausibly it is wrong to do harm even when doing so will bring about the best outcome.
Is it right to cause lots of harm nearterm in the hope that it increases welfare due to longterm effects?
Agreed. Does the end “saving human lives” justify the means “increasing nearterm suffering a lot”?
I think this is mixing things up. Switching “saving lives” with “increasing nearterm suffering a lot” is not symmetric because of two key points. First, one is the cause (saving the life) and the other the consequence, and as such the increasing suffering is not really a means. Second, and most importantly, the suffering only happens if the saved child decides he will actually each chicken. This highlights the key issue I have with this line of reasoning: I think people can make decisions. After all, I heard the arguments for animal welfare and I switched to a plant-based diet. Convicting people because of something people in their statistical group class do is morally wrong. For example, I would find it wrong to argue against letting an immigrant into a country because his or her reference class commits crimes with a certain frequency. And I would similarly find it dystopian to preventatively incarcerate people because the statistical group they belong to tends to commit certain crimes.
When you argue that “we should let a child who lives in a certain village in Nigeria die” of malaria because Nigerians eat chicken, you are convicting the child for something he has not done yet, just something people in her country do. This I strongly find morally repugnant. This is probably a result of using utilitarianism, but even utilitarianism has limits and I strongly feel this is one of them.
The specific numbers I presented may well be off, as there is lots of uncertainty.
Let me emphasize: this is not an issue of cost-effectiveness or cause prioritization. You are not saying that it is preferable to prioritize spending the resources on cause X rather than on cause Y. You are saying that it is preferable to not spend the resources at all, and let the child die. I don’t like that. You would be telling Peter Singer that actually, the drowning child should drown not because of the suit or whatever, but because the child might act unmorally in the future.
First, one is the cause (saving the life) and the other the consequence, and as such the increasing suffering is not really a means.
Fair enough. I have changed “saving human lives” to “increasing human welfare”, which is as much of a consequence/effect as increasing nearterm animal consumption.
This highlights the key issue I have with this line of reasoning: I think people can make decisions. After all, I heard the arguments for animal welfare and I switched to a plant-based diet.
I think it is great you switched to a plant-based diet, but this is the exception. The vast majority of people eat animal-based foods, so one should not assume the people whose lives are saved will follow a plant-based diet. People can certainly make decisions, but these resemble the past decisions of people in similar conditions, so one should not depart a lot from these (such as by assuming the people who are saved will follow a plant-based diet) without good reasons.
You are saying that it is preferable to not spend the resources at all, and let the child die. I don’t like that.
I am very uncertain about whether saving the lives of children globally, and in China, India and Nigeria is good or bad, although I guess it is harmful nearterm. So I do not know whether it is better or worse than just burning the granted money, but this has implications for cause prioritisation, as I think there are interventions which are much more robustly beneficial. In particular, ones improving the conditions of animals.
Given that EAs are tentatively committed to impartiality and welfarism, I don’t think the beliefs are particularly unconventional on this Forum.
It is also highly controversial to state that charity doesn’t begin at home (as in, within one’s country) and that we should instead equally consider the welfare of people no matter where they live. But it shouldn’t be controversial on this Forum.
Sophisticated (as opposed to naive) utilitarians shouldn’t break the law or violate commonly accepted negative duties. But they can say that one should donate to Cause X instead of Cause Y (and common-sense morality says it’s fine to donate to neither!) So I disagree that the same logic could be used to justify breaking the law.
I disagree-voted, rather than downvoted, but I could understand downvoting on the basis that, like so many animal welfare pieces on the forum, this one smuggles in a ton of unstated and highly controversial beliefs about the value of animals. I feel like pieces like this should come with a disclaimer at the top saying, “warning: this essay rests on highly unconventional beliefs about the value of animal welfare”.
Personally I find repugnant the idea that we should let little kids suffer from malaria because of the chance they might grow up to eat chicken. The same logic could be used to justify school shootings.
Thanks, Ian.
I understand Rethink Priorities’ median welfare ranges imply valuing animal welfare more than is typical in society. However, I think we should assess such ranges on their merits instead of comparing them to the median view. GiveWell’s moral weights do not depend on the country, which is highly controversial, in the sense the vast majority of people value humans in their country more. However, I would disagree with GiveWell changing their approach to align more closely with societal views, because I do not think welfare intrinsically depends on the country you are born (although the country one is born influences welfare).
I relied on the consumption of animals in 2022, so my results do not depend on predictions about future growth.
I would agree it is very unclear whether a random person killing another random person increases or decreases welfare, as I expect the effects on farmed animals to dominate those on humans, and I believe it is very unclear whether the effects on animals are positive or negative, despite my best guess that they are positive nearterm. However, I think the large effects on animals should be seen as a motivation to help animals as cost-effectively as possible, and I do not see how killing people would fit this bill. Even if it decreased animal suffering not only nearterm, but in total, it would decrease the donations of the murder to the best organisations helping animals, which is the dominant consideration given my estimate that one can neutralise the negative effects on animals of one person in 2022 with just a few cents.
You don’t seem to expect them to devote researcher and writer time towards “reasoning transparency” justifying treating all human lives of approximately equal value though? So I’m not sure why you would expect them to devote more time and effort to coming up with BOTECs to prove that this value is non-negative, an axiomatic GiveWell assumption which is no more hidden than your own longer list of axiomatic assumptions (hedonic welfare characterised by valence symmetry and the approximate accuracy of a long list of assumptions about how to quantify it is the one true way to allocate resources). If you think the meat-eater problem is a compelling reason to avoid averting human DALYs, you’re not going to GiveWell’s list of human DALY averting charities for inspiration any more than someone who believes that true charity begins with looking after people closest to you or involves religious salvation.
FWIW even if we accept your axioms there’s substantial reason to doubt your own conclusion (as you acknowledge with your “low confidence” statement) that saving human lives is bad. Most obviously, you appear to have imputed that the average Indian reliant on donations for lifesaving (typically in poverty) will grow up to consume shrimp (a relatively high-value foodstuff) roughly in proportion to the number of shrimp farms in India (which exports up to 95% of its shrimp production). That estimate that’s probably off by at least one order of magnitude accounts for a large fraction of your estimated negative impact of saving an Indian child’s life
Thanks, David. I felt like your comment misrepresented my post a bit.
I do not ask GiveWell for “massive amounts of time” in the context of effects on animals. As of now, I just ask for some time, as they have apparently nothing on their website about such effects.
I do not think they have to justify valuing 1 unit of welfare the same regardless of where and when it is experienced, as I see impartiality as a self-evident starting point. However, I would certainly agree with them valuing happier lives more, and therefore not value saving lives the same regardless of country.
Moral uncertainty would make conclusions even less robust. However, even under expected total hedonistic utilitarianism, which I strongly endorse, there is more than enough empirical uncertainty for it to be unclear whether saving lives globally, and in China, India and Nigeria is beneficial or harmful. So my conclusion would remain the same. It is also unclear to me whether other moral theories favour or disfavour animals (e.g. saving human lives increases the number of total lives killed nearterm among humans and farmed animals). I would say animals matter a lot on non-hedonic views. I also think one should be very wary of supporting interventions which can easily increase suffering a lot nearterm in the hope that integrating moral uncertainty makes it worthwhile.
Nitpick. I assumed the welfare per time of a practically maximally happy life is proportional to the welfare range. Valence symmetry is a sufficient condition for this, but it is not necessary. I think that assumption seems pretty agnostic, in that it is the simplest I can think of, and does not clearly favour animal or human welfare.
I relied on the shrimp supply (production plus net imports) per capita in 2022, which is what is relevant to assess the effects on animals. I acknowledged the people helped by GiveWell and AIM would cause less harm to animals than random people, but I do think this resolves the meat-eater problem.
I did not follow. I estimate saving lives in India would be harmful nearterm even for no consumption at all of shrimp.
Even if saving lives in India was beneficial according to my point estimates, one should keep in mind there is lots of uncertainty. I think one should pursue actions which are robustly beneficial, not ones which can easily cause lots of nearterm harm depending on alternative reasonable assumptions, like a larger welfare range, or different projections about the growth of animal consumption (I assumed no growth at all, which underestimates the harms to animals nearterm).
I revised this during the time in which you were replying to say “use researcher and writer time” instead, precisely because I didn’t want to give the appearance of misrepresenting your post. Though it would certainly take a massive amount of time for GiveWell to address every detailed contrarian argument that actually humans surviving is bad or that welfare ought to be weighted by country or nationality or potential economic output or religion or proximity to the donor or any other mechanism dreamed up by people who have totally different axiomatic beliefs. It seems rather pointless for an organization focused on quantifying how effective organizations are at preserving human life to spend time explaining the precise nature of their disagreements with people holding the contrary belief that it would be better for humans not to live. Clearly there is no agreement to be found there.[1]
I don’t think animal welfare charities should feel obliged to quantify possible negative impacts on human welfare of their activity in the interests of supposed impartiality either.
I agree it is possible to conclude that animal welfare should be prioritised over human welfare using other moral frameworks. I actually find deontological arguments for prioritising animal welfare more convincing than ones filled with arbitrary utility estimates. But the specific framing of the argument you want GiveWell to address is based on total welfarist hedonism with valence symmetry and multiple ancillary assumptions about the relative moral weight of animal lives they clearly don’t agree with. Adding the expectation they engage with even more forms of argument that human life is bad would make the proposed standard of reasoning transparency more unreasonable to impose upon them, not less.
I don’t think GiveWell should apportion any more time to the question “what if it’s better for humans to die” than the Shrimp Welfare Project should to “what if shrimps don’t have welfare and all we’re doing is making human lives a little worse”. Both are clearly and transparently incommensurate with their beliefs, and people that think that humans don’t deserve to live given their dietary habits or that shrimps don’t have meaningful welfare ranges can always find and advocate different causes.
I think one should be wary of diverting funding which fairly unambiguously decreases well-established sources of nearterm suffering on the basis of a set of guesses about welfare impacts on aquatic animals with pretty dissimilar biology.[2]
Nothing indicates that this supply statistic subtracts out exports. You linked to some total shrimp production stats, and an ambiguous source you caveated which suggests Indians consume half a kilo of shrimp per capita which would be the majority of their domestic product (despite the fact India is the world’s largest shrimp exporter and exports nearly all their produce). Elsewhere, I’ve seen it suggested India’s per capita consumption of shrimp is of the order of 100 grams (1.6% of overall seafood consumption). That’s less than a restaurant serving per person: it’s clearly not being transported to remote villages to be dished out to kids whose diet is so poor vitamin supplementation meaningfully increases their survival chances!
I suspect most recipients of GiveWell funding in India have never even seen a shrimp.
If the majority of people in India helped by GiveWell and AIM eat no aquaculture products which is likely true, then by the estimates you posted above, it resolves the meat eater problem as presented in this post for those people (specifically the net benefit in human DALYs is greater than the net harms caused to chicken welfare from egg and occasional meat consumption).[3] I agree that you acknowledged that poor people consumed less, but only in the context of dismissing it as a relevant factor[4]
And yes, your estimates don’t factor in future economic growth which could reasonably be expected to increase meat and shrimp consumption by a lot. But you also assume the Shrimp Welfare Project’s India-centred campaigns have no impact on the aquaculture practises they’re campaigning about despite heartily recommending them as effective![5]
At the RP midpoint used in the table in your post, 3.05 of the 4.55 animal harms per year you estimate surviving Indians responsible will be responsible for are attributed to shrimp welfare ergo most[6] of the quantifiable harm is based on [apparently incorrect] assumptions about shrimp consumption. I agree that this still estimates saving lives as net harmful, though it becomes net positive for the average Indian to live (yay!) under your estimates as soon as the rest of aquaculture is omitted from the equation. Which is not insignificant when there’s no scientific consensus about whether sea life experiences welfare at all, never mind how to quantify the impact of aquaculture.
if they were going to enormously expand the scope of their impact calculations to engage with people with fundamentally different starting axioms, it would probably be more productive to do additional calculations to engage with supporters of QALYs or “values of a statistical life”with lower weighting for the poor...
bearing in mind that there isn’t even scientific consensus on whether they experience welfare at all, never mind the welfare impact of aquaculture
to be fair there are other farmed animals like goats (which are considerably more likely to be consumed by poor non-vegetarians than farmed shrimp) left out of the calculations whose consumption animal welfare enthusiasts can reasonably attach negative weight to, although I don’t think those animals are often factory farmedin India.
I found the argument that as meat consumption was broadly correlated with GDP per capita and life satisfaction is also broadly correlated with GDP per capita unconvincing given the relatively small impact of GDP on satisfaction. If the beneficiaries are typically consuming negligible amounts of animal produce you can’t just write off the net benefit by assuming their lives can’t be worth living!
there seem to be quite a few reasons to believe that shrimp stunning practices actually will change over time in India (it’s not obviously costly, the SWP isn’t the only organization pushing it and seems to be getting at least some positive responses, and India is characterised by influential religions unusually receptive to arguments about invertebrate welfare)
(FWIW I also edited to removed the word “majority” whilst you were drafting your response to try to avoid confusion, though I don’t think it’s incorrect in the sense I’ve used it)
Hannah McKay, the 1st author of RP’s analysis with the shrimp supply numbers, had clarified via email these refer to production plus net imports. My sense is that supply often refers to this.
I only used the total shrimp production to estimate the fraction of shrimps which are farmed. The “ambiguous source” you refer to is RP’s analysis of data from the Food and Agriculture Organization, which Hannah caveated “may be unreliable”.
Nitpick. 100 g is the reported consumption of farmed shrimp, not all shrimp.
I estimate a farmed shrimp supply per capita in India in 2022 of 371 g (not quite “half a kilo”), and the consumption will be lower due to waste. I think the sources still disagree significantly after adjusting for this, but it does not matter for my main point. Even no consumption of shrimp would lead to saving lives in India being harmful neaterm if I kept all my other parameters constant, and there would always be significant uncertainty even if my point estimate suggested the benefits to humans are larger than the harms to animals nearterm.
The consumption of poultry birds and farmed aquatic animals per person helped in India in 2022 would have to be less than 19.3 % (= 1/5.17) as large as that of a random person for extending human lives to increase welfare nearterm. In reality, consumption would have to be even lower than that to account for the lower welfare of the people helped, not to mention the possibility of them having negative lives (I estimated 6.37 % of people globally do). Even neglecting the uncertainty in other variable like the welfare ranges, without further research, it is hard for me to see how one can be confident that GiveWell’s grants to India, and the organisations AIM incubated there are beneficial.
I alluded to future improvements in the conditions of animals.
Yes, but I don’t see any reason to assume that the uncertainty skews in favour of humans dying rather than humans surviving. Particularly not when the assumptions you used to reach this conclusion were that that poor Indians receiving nutrition supplementation have access to the same ~11 farmed shrimp per year in their diet as rich Indians, and that the positives of 1 Indian human living for 1 year are no more than the negatives of four shrimp being farmed.
I think in an area of high uncertainty we should default to the idea that humans should survive (and maybe change their dietary preferences) and not to the idea that they should die
Sure. But since food choices are skewed heavily by budgets and aquaculture is a premium export market, and the supply chains to send 11 farmed shrimp per year to every man, woman and child in interior villages don’t exist, I don’t think the evidence points to the median GiveWell beneficiary consuming any of the ~13 farmed aquatic animals per year you’ve attributed to them. The idea that GiveWell donations have a non-zero effect on the size of the aquaculture industry at the margin is even more dubious, given that the economics of farming in a region which exports nearly all of its aquaculture products are highly unlikely to factor in a few thousand GiveWell non-beneficiaries dying to their demand calculations and reduce production accordingly.
Others have suggested that proposing that people shouldn’t be allowed to survive on the basis of things they might choose to eat in future. I think it would be worse to condemn them for things they are statistically unlikely to even get the opportunity to eat.
Either way, it’s a view you’re perfectly entitled to and have clearly done some research into, but I don’t think it’s a glaring omission that an organization that considers it axiomatic that human lives are worth saving hasn’t invested time in doing their own “so actually, under what set of assumptions can we conclude humans shouldn’t be saved” calculations.
Some reasons which push towards saving lives being more harmful nearterm:
The supply per capita of meat excluding aquatic animals, and shrimp are roughly proportional to the logarithm of real GDP per capita, and real GDP per capita has been increasing.
I guess I am underestimating the harms to animals due to using RP’s median welfare ranges, which were calculated assuming a probability of 0 of animals having capacities which are unknown to be present or not. In reality, the probability will be higher than 0, which implies larger welfare ranges, especially for less studied animals like shrimp.
I think the focus should be on pursuing robustly good actions, in particular, improving animal welfare, and learning more.
Random Indians, not rich Indians. I would appreciate it if you could represent my post fairly.
I explicitly said in the post “The harms would be smaller for a random person helped by such GiveWell’s grants or Ambitious Impact’s organisations”, and then argued why it is unclear this changes my conclusions.
“Random Indians” is a group which includes poor Indians (i.e. recipients of anti-poverty measures, which have non-random targeting) and rich Indians (typically not recipients of GiveWell or AIM charitable interventions). The assumption you make by using a mean consumption figure is that poor Indians and rich Indians alike consume ~11 shrimp per year. That’s what the text you quoted said, and a perfectly fair representation of your post
I actually think it’s an unfair representation of my post to accuse me of misrepresenting you simply because I spelled out the logical implications of your choice of figure, especially when I have also presented multiple reasons why I believe zero would be more representative of the amount they were likely to consume, and even more representative of the marginal impact of a typical GiveWell/AIM recipient surviving on Indian aquaculture production.
My argument is that the median survivor due to GiveWell/AIM aid causes zero harm via aquaculture, and even the small minority of survivors who do consume shrimp are unlikely to have any impact upon numbers of shrimp culled in factory farms. I’m aware your post above argues that meat consumption may be linearly related to welfare via the common factor that is GDP, but I don’t think the relatively small diminution in self-reported welfare from lower incomes you’ve considered here is anywhere near enough to doubt that the survival of Indians without access to aquaculture products might be net positive in the welfarist framework you presented!
I feel we’re going in circles here, so I’ll wish you a happy Christmas and am unlikely to continue the discussion.
I think this is trying to dodge a bullet. It is not a matter of cost effectiveness, it is a matter that letting a child die of malaria because they could each chicken is a terrible idea in many (most) ethical frameworks. Let me reemphasize, but in Elizer Yudkowski words (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Tc2H9KbKRjuDJ3WSS/leaky-generalizations) now:
Now, you could argue that similarly to this case, the expected utility of saving the child might be negative even if local utility is pretty positive. It seems to me that this is convicting someone of something bad (eating a chicken) that he has not had time to do yet, and furthermore, on very handwavy probability calculations that could turn out to be wrong!
Let me also quote William MacAskill comments on “What We Owe the Future” and his reflections on FTX (https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/WdeiPrwgqW2wHAxgT/a-personal-statement-on-ftx):
Finally, let me say the post itself seems to pit animal welfare against global poverty causes, which I found divisive and probably counterproductive.
I downvoted this post because it is not representative of the values I believe EA should strive for. It may have been sufficient to show disagreement, but if someone goes for the first time into the forum and sees the post with many upvotes, their impression will be negative and may not become engaged with the community. If a reporter reads the forum and reads this, they will negatively cover both EA and animal welfare. And if someone was considering taking the 10% pledge or changing their career to support either animal welfare or global health and read this, they will be less likely to do so.
I am sorry, but I will strongly oppose “ends justify the means” argument put forward by this post.
I don’t think this is the kind of “ends justify the means” reasoning that MacAskill is objecting to. @Vasco Grilo🔸is not arguing that we should break the law. He is just doing a fairly standard EA cause prioritization analysis. Arguing that people should not donate to global health doesn’t even contradict common-sense morality because as we see from the world around us, common-sense morality holds that it’s perfectly permissible to let hundreds or thousands of children die of preventable diseases. Utilitarians and other consequentialists are the ones who hold “weird” views here, because we reject the act/omission distinction in the first place.
(For my part, I try to donate in such a way that I’m net-positive from the perspective of someone like Vasco as well as global health advocates.)
Thanks, JBentham.
There is also the question of what are the means and ends here. Does the end “increasing human welfare” justify the means “increasing nearterm suffering a lot”?
Right. As I commented above, it would not make any sense for someone caring about animals to kill people.
You only did so on the ground of not being an effective method, and because it would decrease support for animal welfare. Presumably, if you could press a button to kill many people without anyone attributing it to the animal welfare movement you would, then?
No. I guess that would increase welfare neaterm, but could increase or decrease it overall due to uncertain longer term effects. More importantly, killing people would make me feel bad even if I was the only who would ever know about it. This would decrease my productivity and donations to the best animal welfare interventions, which would be the dominant consideration given my estimate that one can neutralise the negative effects on animals of one person in 2022 with just a few cents.
I strongly endorse impartiality. So, if forced to pick between X and Y, and it is stipulated that X increases impartial welfare more than Y despite involving killing people, I would pick X. However, I do not see anything in the real world coming anywhere close to that.
Do you not worry about moral uncertainty? Unless you’re certain about consequentialism, surely you should put some weight on avoiding killing even if it maximises impartial welfare?
Hi Isaac.
I fully endorse expected total hedonistic utilitarianism (ETHU) in principle. However, I think it is often good to think about the implications of other moral theories as heuristics to follow ETHU well in practice.
I think saving human lives increases the number of beings killed via increasing the number of farmed and wild animals killed.
Thanks Vasco! :)
I agree that thinking about other moral theories is useful for working out what utilitarianism would actually recommend.
That’s an interesting point re increasing the total amount of killing, I hadn’t considered that! But I was actually picking up on your comment which seemed to say something more general—that you wouldn’t intrinsically take into account whether an option involved (you) killing people, you’d just look at the consequences (and killing can lead to worse consequences, including in indirect ways, of course). But it sounds like maybe your response to that is you’re not worried about moral uncertainty / you’re sure about utilitarianism / you don’t have any reason to avoid killing people, other than the (normally very significant) utilitarian reasons not to kill?
Yes.
Hi Pablo.
I understand I endorse expected total hedonistic utilitarianism much more strongly than most people. However, I think one should be very wary of pursuing actions which can easily increase suffering a lot nearterm in the hope that integrating moral uncertainty makes it worthwhile.
The specific numbers I presented may well be off, as there is lots of uncertainty.
I assumed the lives saved in a given country would consume as much animals as random people in that country in 2022, although I expect the consumption per capita to increase as real GDP per capita increases. I do not think it would make sense to assume a major decrease in the beneficiaries’ consumption of animals after their lives are saved.
Agreed. Does the end “increasing human welfare” justify the means “increasing nearterm suffering a lot”?
Agreed. However, I think you are implying not saving human lives is the harmful action. In my view, saving human lives can easily be the harmful action via causing lots of suffering to farmed animals.
Is it right to cause lots of harm nearterm in the hope that it increases welfare due to longterm effects?
I think this is mixing things up. Switching “saving lives” with “increasing nearterm suffering a lot” is not symmetric because of two key points. First, one is the cause (saving the life) and the other the consequence, and as such the increasing suffering is not really a means. Second, and most importantly, the suffering only happens if the saved child decides he will actually each chicken. This highlights the key issue I have with this line of reasoning: I think people can make decisions. After all, I heard the arguments for animal welfare and I switched to a plant-based diet. Convicting people because of something people in their statistical group class do is morally wrong. For example, I would find it wrong to argue against letting an immigrant into a country because his or her reference class commits crimes with a certain frequency. And I would similarly find it dystopian to preventatively incarcerate people because the statistical group they belong to tends to commit certain crimes.
When you argue that “we should let a child who lives in a certain village in Nigeria die” of malaria because Nigerians eat chicken, you are convicting the child for something he has not done yet, just something people in her country do. This I strongly find morally repugnant. This is probably a result of using utilitarianism, but even utilitarianism has limits and I strongly feel this is one of them.
Let me emphasize: this is not an issue of cost-effectiveness or cause prioritization. You are not saying that it is preferable to prioritize spending the resources on cause X rather than on cause Y. You are saying that it is preferable to not spend the resources at all, and let the child die. I don’t like that. You would be telling Peter Singer that actually, the drowning child should drown not because of the suit or whatever, but because the child might act unmorally in the future.
Fair enough. I have changed “saving human lives” to “increasing human welfare”, which is as much of a consequence/effect as increasing nearterm animal consumption.
I think it is great you switched to a plant-based diet, but this is the exception. The vast majority of people eat animal-based foods, so one should not assume the people whose lives are saved will follow a plant-based diet. People can certainly make decisions, but these resemble the past decisions of people in similar conditions, so one should not depart a lot from these (such as by assuming the people who are saved will follow a plant-based diet) without good reasons.
I am very uncertain about whether saving the lives of children globally, and in China, India and Nigeria is good or bad, although I guess it is harmful nearterm. So I do not know whether it is better or worse than just burning the granted money, but this has implications for cause prioritisation, as I think there are interventions which are much more robustly beneficial. In particular, ones improving the conditions of animals.
Given that EAs are tentatively committed to impartiality and welfarism, I don’t think the beliefs are particularly unconventional on this Forum.
It is also highly controversial to state that charity doesn’t begin at home (as in, within one’s country) and that we should instead equally consider the welfare of people no matter where they live. But it shouldn’t be controversial on this Forum.
Sophisticated (as opposed to naive) utilitarians shouldn’t break the law or violate commonly accepted negative duties. But they can say that one should donate to Cause X instead of Cause Y (and common-sense morality says it’s fine to donate to neither!) So I disagree that the same logic could be used to justify breaking the law.