GiveWell may have made 1 billion dollars of harmful grants, and Ambitious Impact incubated 8 harmful organisations via increasing factory-farming?
The views expressed here are my own, not those of my employers or people who provided feedback.
Summary
I investigate whether saving human lives globally, and in China, India and Nigeria may be harmful accounting for the meat eating problem, i.e. the nearterm increase in farmed animal suffering caused by increasing income or population. The problem is philosophically analysed in Plant (2022).
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 eating 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.
GiveWell has made 1.09 billion dollars of grants impacting people in the countries I mentioned. Ambitious Impact has incubated 8 organisations whose 1st target country was one I mentioned, and whose interventions significantly increase the nearterm consumption of farmed animals.
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 would say at least chickens’ 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.
At the very least, I think GiveWell and Ambitious Impact should practice reasoning transparency, and explain in some detail why they neglect effects on farmed animals.
In addition, I encourage people there to take uncertainty seriously, and, before significant further investigation, only support interventions which are beneficial in the nearterm accounting for effects on farmed animals. This favours interventions which mostly decrease morbidity instead of mortality, improving annual human welfare per capita without significantly affecting life expectancy, like ones in mental health.
GiveWell and Ambitious Impact could also offset the nearterm harm caused to farmed animals by funding the best animal welfare interventions.
I extend my recommendations to GiveWell and Ambitious Impact to all organisations and people supporting interventions significantly increasing the nearterm consumption of farmed animals.
Introduction
I investigate whether saving human lives in China, India and Nigeria may be harmful accounting for the meat eating problem, i.e. the nearterm increase in farmed animal suffering caused by increasing income or population. The problem is philosophically analysed in Plant (2022). Relatedly, you may like Kyle Fish’s post Net global welfare may be negative and declining.
Methods
I obtain the harms caused to poultry birds, and farmed aquatic animals as a fraction of the direct benefits of human life in 2022 from the ratio between:
The sum between the harms caused to poultry birds, farmed aquatic animals excluding shrimp, and shrimp per person in 2022 in disability-adjusted life years (DALYs).
The direct benefits of human life per person in 2022 in terms of averted DALYs.
I calculate the harms caused to each of the 3 groups of animals per person in 2022 in DALYs multiplying:
The animals per person in 2022. I use:
Data on the population, number of poultry birds, and aquaculture production from Our World in Data (OWID).
Data on the shrimp supply per capita by country, and farmed and wild shrimp supply globally from Rethink Priorities (RP). I rely on these global estimates to calculate the farmed shrimp supply per capita by country, although one would ideally use data by country.
My estimate of the mass per farmed fish globally in 2019 of 1.08 kg, which I assume to be the mass per farmed aquatic animal excluding shrimp. One would ideally use data by country, and account for different species.
My estimate of the mass per farmed shrimp globally in 2020 of 0.0322 kg. One would ideally use data by country.
The welfare burden per animal per year. I compute this multiplying:
The welfare per animal per year in animal quality-adjusted life year (AQALYs). For:
Poultry birds, and farmed aquatic animals excluding shrimp, I use my estimate of −2.27 AQALYs for broilers in a conventional scenario, which implies 2.27 animal-years of practically maximally happy life would be needed to neutralise 1 animal-year in the assumed conditions.
Farmed shrimp, I use −7.13 AQALYs, which is a mean between my estimates of −8.77, −4.40 and −4.19 AQALYs for decapod shrimp on an ongrowing farm with air asphyxiation, ice slurry and electrical stunning slaughter, weighted by 95 %, 5 % and 0 %. These weights are informed by my estimates that 95 % and 5 % of the shrimp helped by Shrimp Welfare Project’s Humane Slaughter Initiative, which has focussed on India, were originally slaughtered via air asphyxiation and ice slurry.
The benefits of 1 AQALY in the animals in terms of averted DALYs, which I set to:
I estimate the direct benefits of human life per person in 2022 in terms of averted DALYs from 1 minus the years lived with disability per person in 2022.
Here are the calculations.
Results
| Country | World | China | India | Nigeria |
| Poultry birds per person in 2022 | 3.53 | 4.33 | 0.619 | 1.12 |
| Welfare burden per poultry bird per year (DALY) | 0.754 | 0.754 | 0.754 | 0.754 |
| Harms caused to poultry birds per person in 2022 (DALY) | 2.66 | 3.26 | 0.467 | 0.841 |
| Farmed aquatic animals excluding shrimp per person in 2022 | 14.0 | 46.4 | 6.25 | 1.08 |
| Welfare burden per farmed aquatic animal excluding shrimp per year (DALY) | 0.165 | 0.165 | 0.165 | 0.165 |
| Harms caused to farmed aquatic animals excluding shrimp per person in 2022 (DALY) | 2.30 | 7.64 | 1.03 | 0.178 |
| Farmed shrimp per person in 2022 | 32.9 | 74.9 | 11.5 | 4.08 |
| Welfare burden per farmed shrimp per year (DALY) | 0.265 | 0.265 | 0.265 | 0.265 |
| Harms caused to farmed shrimp per person in 2022 (DALY) | 8.73 | 19.9 | 3.05 | 1.08 |
| Harms caused to poultry birds and farmed aquatic animals per person in 2022 (DALY) | 13.7 | 30.8 | 4.55 | 2.10 |
| Direct benefits of human life per person in 2022 in terms of averted DALYs | 0.883 | 0.889 | 0.879 | 0.908 |
| Harms caused to poultry birds and farmed aquatic animals as a fraction of the direct benefits of human life in 2022 | 15.5 | 34.6 | 5.17 | 2.31 |
Discussion
Meat eating problem
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 eating problem in those countries to become worse in the nearterm as their real GDP per capita increases. So my results suggest extending human lives there is harmful in the nearterm.
GiveWell has made 1.09 billion dollars of grants impacting people in the countries I mentioned, overwhelmingly via decreasing mortality and morbidity[1], according to their grants database on 7 December 2024. Ambitious Impact has incubated 8 organisations whose 1st target country was one I mentioned, and whose interventions significantly increase the nearterm consumption of farmed animals, which I considered to be any significantly decreasing human mortality. Such organisations are Charity Science Health (incubated in 2016; firstly targeted India; merged with Suvita), Suvita (2019; India), Ansh (2023; India), Clear Solutions (2023; Nigeria), HealthLearn (2023; Nigeria), Notify Health (2024; Nigeria), Oxygen Access Project (2024; Nigeria), and Taimaka (2024; Nigeria).
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.
Nevertheless, I am not confident that saving human lives in China, India or Nigeria is harmful to animals. Even if it is so for farmed animals nearterm, it can still be beneficial overall:
I would say 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.
I can see saving human lives being beneficial due to decreasing the number of wild animals with negative lives, although no one really knows whether this is the case or not.
It is unclear to me whether saving lives increases or decreases person-years. It increases these nearterm via increasing population, but may decrease them longterm, as lower child mortality is associated with lower fertility, which can lead to a smaller longterm population. Note human welfare may be decreased in this case.
I assume improved human conditions increase the success of animal welfare interventions, for example, via greater willingness to pay for higher welfare products. In any case, I expect more targeted approaches explicitly optimising for animal welfare to be much more cost-effective.
Besides not touching on all of these considerations, many of my modelled inputs are highly uncertain too. 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.
Suggestions
At the very least, I think GiveWell and Ambitious Impact should practice reasoning transparency, and explain in some detail why they neglect effects on farmed animals. 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.
In addition, I encourage people there to take uncertainty seriously, and, before significant further investigation, only support interventions which are beneficial in the nearterm accounting for effects on farmed animals. This favours interventions which mostly decrease morbidity instead of mortality, improving annual human welfare per capita without significantly affecting life expectancy, like ones in mental health.
GiveWell and Ambitious Impact could also offset the nearterm harm caused to farmed animals by funding the best animal welfare interventions. I calculate these are over 100 times as cost-effective as GiveWell’s top charities ignoring their effects on animals. If so, and some funding from GiveWell or Ambitious Impact is neutral due to negative effects on animals, these could be neutralised by donating less than 1 % (= 1⁄100) of that funding to the best animal welfare interventions.
I believe Ambitious Impact is clearly beneficial, as 20.9 % of the organisations they incubated targeted helping animals, including the super cost-effective Shrimp Welfare Project. Nonetheless, it is hard for me to see how that justifies starting organisations apparently causing lots of nearterm harm with unclear longterm effects.
I extend my recommendations to GiveWell and Ambitious Impact to all organisations and people supporting interventions significantly increasing the nearterm consumption of farmed animals. I have focussed on:
GiveWell because:
They are the lead evaluator of global health and development (GHD) interventions.
They have granted lots of money to interventions significantly decreasing human mortality in countries where the meat-eating problem is a major concern.
They have plenty of resources to practice reasoning transparency as well as investigate the effects on farmed animals, estimating “they collectively conduct more than 50,000 hours of research per year”.
The cost-effectiveness analyses of their top charities have hundreds of rows, and include adjustments which change their cost-effectiveness by as little as 1 %, but completely neglect effects on farmed animals that can easily have a way larger impact.
Ambitious Impact because:
They are the lead incubator of GHD organisations.
They have incubated many GHD organisations working in countries where the meat-eating problem is a major concern.
They are less willing to incubate organisations whose cost-effectiveness considering only humans is very uncertain, so I believe they should do as much when the cost-effectiveness accounting for humans and animals is very uncertain.
Joey Savoie, their CEO, said they “consider cross-cause effects in all the interventions we consider/recommend, including possible animal effects and WAS [wild animal suffering] effects”.
I think they intrinsically value not only expected impact, but also about avoiding harm. This agrees with Joey’s quote above, but not with risking causing lots of harm to animals.
Carbon and farmed animal welfare footprint
I estimate greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions have harms to humans of 0.00957 DALY/tCO2eq. The global GHG emissions per capita in 2022 were 6.6 tCO2eq, so I calculate the annual GHG emissions of a random person in 2022 caused harms to humans of 0.0632 DALY (= 0.00957*6.6), i.e. 7.16 % (= 0.0632/0.883) of my estimate for the direct benefits of human life per person in 2022. This is much lower than 1, so I believe extending human lives increases human welfare despite the negative effects of GHG emissions, even without considering indirect effects like humans working on decreasing emissions. As a result, I do not see a clear argument for degrowth on the basis of decreasing the harms to humans from GHG emissions.
I can much more easily see an argument for not extending human lives due to negative effects on farmed animals. My estimate for the harms caused to poultry birds and farmed aquatic animals per person in 2022 of 13.7 DALY is:
217 (= 13.7/0.0632) times my estimate for the harms to humans of the annual GHG emissions of a random person in 2022. Relatedly, I think replacing chicken meat with beef or pork is better than the reverse.
15.5 times my estimate for the direct benefits of human life per person in 2022, which is much higher than 1.
The good news is that the best animal welfare interventions are super cost-effective. I calculate neutralising the harms caused to poultry birds and farmed aquatic animals per person in 2022 only requires donating:
8.20 $ (= 13.7/1.67) to broiler welfare corporate campaigns.
2.98 $ (= 13.7/4.59) to cage-free corporate campaigns.
Despite the above, I follow a plant-based diet, and agree with Marcus Abramovitch’s reasons for doing so.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to Filip Murár, Joey Savoie, Samuel Hilton and Vicky Cox for feedback on the draft[2].
I’m tempted to point out that increasing the population may not increase meat consumption much via effects on prices, that meat consumption among the extreme poor is much lower than on average, that factory farm consumption is likely much smaller for beneficiaries in remote areas not reached by large scale animal agriculture. But that would be intellectually dishonest because none of those are things I strongly believe nor are they my actual reasons to disagree.
My actual reason to disagree is that I place much lower weight on animals than you, and I would axiomatically reject any moral weight on animals that implied saving kids from dying was net negative. I cannot give a tight philosophical defence of that view, but I am more committed to it than I am to giving tight philosophical defences of views. I suspect that if GiveWell were to publish a transparent argument as to why they ignore those effects, it would look similar to my argument—short and unsatisfactory to you. (Note; I work at GiveWell but this is my own view.)
AIM is a more interesting case to consider because they are clearly more cause-agnostic than GiveWell and so can’t (or wouldn’t want to) make the same claim. However, that makes for a very simple hedging/offsetting defense. Given uncertainty about moral weights and risk aversion over the amount of value created, AIM should optimally fund both GHD and AW work.
I upvoted this comment for honesty, but this passage reads to me like committing to a conclusion (“saving kids from dying cannot be net negative”) and then working its way backward to reject the premise (“animals matter morally”, “saving kids from dying causes more (animal) suffering than it creates (human) welfare”) that leads to a contradictory conclusion. That seems like textbook motivated reasoning to me? It doesn’t seem like a good way of doing moral reasoning. I think it would be better to either reject the premise or to argue that the desired conclusion can follow from the premise after all.
Personally I think it’s very much not obvious whether the meat eating problem is genuine. But given that the goodness of a very large part of the EA project so far hinges on it not being real, and given that it’s far from obvious whether it’s real, I think it would be useful to make progress on that question. So I’m glad that @Vasco Grilo🔸 and others are trying to make progress on it and a little discouraged to see some pushback (from several commenters) that doesn’t really engage with Vasco’s arguments/calculations.
(It does seem like, as @Ben Millwood🔸 has commented, any harm caused to animals by donating to global health charities is much smaller than the harm of not giving to animal charities. So maybe a better and more palatable framing for the meat eating problem is not, “Is giving to global health charities net negative/positive?” but “Is giving to global health charities more/less cost-effective than giving to animal charities?”)
I don’t really route my moral reasoning through EA principles (impartiality and welfarism) and I don’t claim it is great. I own up to my moral commitments, which are undeniably based on my life experiences. I am Indian. I’m not going to be convinced that the world would be better if children around me were dead. I’m just not! If that’s motivated reasoning, then so be it.
The purpose of my comment was to engage with Vasco’s argument in the way that is most resonant with me, and I suspect with other people who prioritize GHD. You’re saying it’s discouraging that people aren’t engaging with the argument analytically. I’m saying that analytical engagement is not the only legitimate kind of engagement.
In fact, I think that when analytical disagreement is the only permitted form of disagreement, that encourages much more motivated reasoning and frustrating argumentation. Imagine I had instead made a comment questioning whether GiveWell beneficiaries are really eating factory farmed meat, and Vasco then did a bunch of careful work to estimate how much that was a concern. I would be wasting their time by making an argument that doesn’t correspond to my actual beliefs. Is that a better discursive norm?
Thanks. I take you to say roughly that you have certain core beliefs that you’re unwilling to compromise on, even if you can’t justify those beliefs philosophically. And also that you think it’s better to be upfront about that than invent justifications that aren’t really load-bearing for you. (Let me know if that’s a misrepresentation.)
I think it’s virtuous that you’re honest about why you disagree (“I place much lower weight on animals”) and I think that’s valuable for discourse in that it shows where the disagreement lies. I don’t have any objection to that. But I also think that saying you just believe that and can’t/won’t justify it (“I cannot give a tight philosophical defence of that view, but I am more committed to it than I am to giving tight philosophical defences of views”) is not particularly valuable for discourse. It doesn’t create any opening for productive engagement or movement toward consensus. I don’t think it’s harmful exactly, I just think more openness to examining whether the intuition withstands scrutiny would be more valuable.
(That is a question about discourse. I think there’s also a separate question about the soundness of the decision procedure you described in your original comment. I think it’s unsound, and therefore instrumentally irrational, but I’m not the rationality police so I won’t get into that.)
Thanks for the transparency, Karthik! I wish more people simply admitted they are not aiming to be impartial whenever they deep down think that is the case.
I think this is an alternative way of rejecting the conclusions without dropping impartiality.
Thanks, Erich.
Here is Ben’s comment (the link above is broken). I also like the prioritisation framing, and commented in the same post that the meat eating problem is mostly a distraction in that sense. However, it still seems worth analysing it to arrive to more accurate beliefs about the world, and because, in some hard to specify way, many value decreasing the probability of causing harm more than prioritising the most cost-effective interventions.
Thanks, I fixed the link. And the rest of your comment seems right to me.
Hi Karthik,
Your comment inspired me to write my own quick take, which is here. Quoting the first paragraph as a preview:
I decided to spin off a quick take rather than replying here, because I think it would be interesting to have a discussion about non-dogmatism in a context that’s somewhat separated from this particular context, but I wanted to mention the quick take as a reply to your comment, since it’s relevant.
It is admirable that you acknowledge that you are not using “reason and evidence to do the most good” and that you presumably accept that you have no leg to stand on when trying to persuade nativists who assign zero weight to people who live in other countries to give more to those who live abroad.
I am using reason and evidence to do the most good within my circumscribed moral framework, of which I don’t aim to persuade anyone at all.
If you don’t aim to persuade anyone else to agree with your moral framework and take action along with you, you’re not doing the most good within your framework.
(Unless your framework says that any good/harm done by anyone other than yourself is morally valueless and therefore you don’t care about SBF, serial killers, the number of people taking the GWWC pledge, etc.)
Karthik could also believe that any attempt to persuade someone to do what Karthik believes is best, would backfire, or that it is intrinsically wrong to persuade another person to do what Karthik believes is good, if they do not already believe the thing is good anyway. Though I agree with the general thrust of your comment.
I’m not sure what you’re looking for. I’ve made it clear that I’m not here to persuade you of my position, and I’m not going to be philosophically strongarmed into doing so. I was just trying to elaborate on a view that I suspect (and upvotes suggest) is common to other people who are not persuaded by Vasco’s argument.
Thanks, Karthik.
The prices would have to increase by an unreasoble amount for this to change my conclusions. For a random person globally, and in China, India and Nigeria in 2022 to cause as much suffering to poultry birds and farmed aquatic animals as the person’s happiness, the animal suffering would have to be 6.45 % (= 1⁄15.5), 2.89 % (= 1⁄34.6), 19.3 % (= 1⁄5.17) and 43.3 % (= 1⁄2.31) of the one I calculated. In addition, I have assumed no growth in the consumption of animals per capita, whereas I expect this to increase as real GDP per capita increases.
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.
Great point. This is the kind of consideration supporters of extending human lives would ideally investigate. Note it is also harder for life-saving interventions to reach remote areas.
Nitpick. I think valuing animal welfare as highly as I do implies saving lives in many countries is harmful nearterm, but the overall effect may well be beneficial or harmful (not just harmful).
I do not see how AIM being beneficial overall justifies them starting organisations which may well be causing lots of harm nearterm.
It wasn’t my intention to throw out random objections to make you respond to them. I don’t take seriously any of the claims I offered in the first paragraph.
I would axiomatically reject the former position in addition to the latter, so this distinction doesn’t matter to me.
In the worlds where animals have low moral weight, their GHD work is very positive. In the world where animals have high moral weight, their AW work is very positive. The portfolio approach is a way to maximize expected utility under risk aversion. This point is made here and I elaborate more in replies.
The portfolio approach should be considered across the whole world, not AIM. There are already lots of efforts to help humans, so I have a hard time seeing how the optimal global portfolio involves AIM incubating many organisations which help humans, but may easily be causing lots of harm nearterm.
I assume your argument also depends on the type of risk aversion. I think improving the conditions of farmed animals has a much lower chance of being harmful than saving human lives.
I reject risk aversion with respect to impartial welfare (although it makes all sense to be risk averse with respect to money) because it implies rejecting self-evident principles.
I am interested in knowing if some of the downvoters mind to explain their decision to downvote (vs or in addition to disagreeing vote)?
Disclaimer, I weak upvoted, as for many other posts I read that I find to have potentially meaningful contributions and communication style that are proper enough.
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 “Meat Eater Problem” repugnant and indicitative of defective moral reasoning that, if applied at scale, would lead to great moral harm.[1]
I don’t 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, I’d say that one of the leading reasons I consider myself drastically less ‘EA’ since the last ~6 months have gone by is the seeming embrace of the “Meat-Eater Problem” inbuilt into both the EA Community and its core ideas, or at least the more ‘naïve utilitarian’ end of things. To me, Vasco’s bottom line result isn’t an argument that we should prevent children dying of malnutrition or suffering with malaria because of these second-order effects.
Instead, naïve 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. I’m guessing a large majority of EAs, especially the less engaged ones who don’t 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 welfare—I think the meat eater problem discourse seems like a much bigger deal than it actually is in the community. I personally think it’s all kinda silly and significantly prioritise saving human lives
That seems true in practice but you wouldn’t 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 discussions—and at least my own votes trending toward AW—were 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 community’s relative cause prio here?
Hi Jason. One’s 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 “[t]he EA community still donates far more to global health causes than animal welfare.” If I understood your response correctly, you suggested that this is a function of the largest donors’ 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 community’s collective ideal cause prio, but by considerably less than donation numbers would imply. It’s 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 “great moral harm”). 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 don’t think this is an example of “naive utilitarianism”. It’s 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/consequentialist ones) are the weird ones because we reject the act/omission distinction.
(For my part, I try to donate in such a way that I’m net-positive from the perspective of both anti-speciesist animal welfare and global health advocates.)
I don’t think “common sense” morality necessarily finds itself in a pickle here.
My common sense morality veers the way of JWS and finds no pickle at all.
“The shortest answer is that I find the “Meat Eater Problem” repugnant and indicitative of defective moral reasoning that, if applied at scale, would lead to great moral harm.”
Your version of common sense morality might be different and find a pickle here, but I think it’s important to take into account that in a lot of people’s minds (I would guess 99.9 percent of humans) common sense morality would lead them to almost out of hand reject this “problem”
For the record again even though disagree with it and find it somewhat repugnant, I think it’s 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 doesn’t subscribe to standard EA cause-neutrality and prioritisation frameworks. Global health EAs also violate common-sense morality when they argue that charity doesn’t begin at home (as in, within one’s own country). This is to be expected: EAs are committed to impartiality and welfarism, and the vast majority of humans are not.
I did not vote on the post, but I considered downvoting it on the grounds that Vasco has made versions of this argument many times across the Forum, and I think repetition is bad for discourse. If I had a nickel for every time I’ve read “I Fermi-estimate that corporate campaigns for chicken welfare are 1000x GiveWell”, I could offset the harms caused by several meat eaters /j
Hi Karthik.
In my last analysis, I suggested accounting for farmed animals would decrease the cost-effectiveness of GiveWell’s top charities by 8.72 %. The post I have published now discusses other countries with higher consumption per capita of animals, models the effects on farmed aquatic animais by country, relies on data about consumption instead of production, and reports decreases in cost-effectiveness over 100 % which make saving human lives harmful nearterm.
This was funny (in a good way). I wonder whether you are also against repeating that the best interventions in global health and development help humans way more cost-effectively than random organisations.
My statement was a bit churlish by glossing over the differences in arguments you make at different points. However, I think it’s fair because they all have the same crux (moral weights).
Definitely. I think that could arguably be a valuable message for outreach to ordinary people, but a post on the forum that looked like that would not be a useful or substantive contribution.
If someone pointed out on the forum that cash transfers in high income countries are among the most cost-effective interventions without making any reference to GiveDirectly’s cash transfer in low income countries, I think it would be good for someone to comment that money goes further in lower income countries. The person may not be aware of this. I do not think it would make sense for such comment to be downvoted just because most readers are already aware of it.
Thanks Karthik I second this. I usually up vote Vascos posts but this felt like too much.
I for one have had enough of heading the same arguments about the meat eating hypothesis for now. I understand it, think it’s a fair argument but don’t think it’s a strong enough factor to stop me or anyone else saving human lives.
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.
I strong downvoted because the title is unnecessarily provocative and in my opinion gives a misleading impression. I would rather not have this kind of thing on my forum feed
Hi Neel. I think the title is fine because it includes “may” and ”?”, and one can reasonably answer “yes” to the question posed.
Trying to be constructive: perhaps one response to this could be for people to support family planning interventions, which empower women in developing countries to exert choice over whether and when they get pregnant. This has a tonne of benefits for human wellbeing and gender equity, and it also seems good, downstream, for farmed animals, for folks who are concerned by the conundrum raised in this post. Some discussion of the general case for family planning as a good value for money intervention is here: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/zgBmSgyWECJcbhmpc/family-planning-a-significant-opportunity-for-impact
Thanks for the comment, and welcome to the EA Forum! I think family planning interventions increase welfare nearterm via decreasing human population nearterm when farmed animals have negative lives. However, I do not know whether this is good or bad overall because the longer term effects on animals can be harmful or beneficial.
I also think family planning interventions decrease person-years, so I can easily see them decreasing human welfare (relatedly).
I appreciate you writing this up at the top level, since it feels more productive to engage here than on one of a dozen comment threads.
I have substantive and ‘stylistic’ issues with this line of thinking, which I’ll address in separate comments. Substantively, on the ‘Suggestions’ section:
Why? It seems clear that you aren’t GiveWell’s target audience. You know that, and they know that. Unless someone gives me a reason to think that Animal Welfare advocates were expecting to be served by GiveWell, I don’t see any value in them clarifying something that seems fairly obvious.
Unless the differences on human welfare are incredibly narrow or the impacts on animal welfare are enormous, this seems like a very bad idea. In general, donating $100 to a charity with suboptimal impacts on human welfare but improved impacts on animal welfare is going to be strictly worse—for both human and animal welfare—than donating $90 to the best human welfare charity and $10 to the best animal welfare charity.
Similarly, investigating the exact size of the effects mostly seems like a waste of time to me. I wrote this up in more detail a few years ago; was addressing a longtermist cluelessness critique but you can pretty much cut/paste the argument. To save a click-through, the key passage is:
Equally, GiveWell or AIM’s donors can offset if they are worried about this. That seems much better than GiveWell making the choice for all their donors.
Stylistically, some commenters don’t seem to understand how this differs from a normal cause prioritisation exercise. Put simply, there’s a difference between choosing to ignore the Drowning Child because there are even more children in the next pond over, and ignoring the drowning children entirely because they might grow up to do bad things. Most cause prioritisation is the former, this post is the latter.
As for why the latter is a problem, I agree with JWS’s observation that this type of ‘For The Greater Good’ reasoning leads to great harm when applied at scale. This is not, or rather should not be, hypothetical for EA at this point. No amount of abstract reasoning for why this approach is ‘better’ is going to outweigh what seems to me to be very clear empirical evidence to the contrary, both within EA and without.
Beyond that issue, it’s pretty easy to identify any person, grant, or policy as plausibly-very-harmful if you focus only on possible negative side effects, so you end up with motivated reasoning driving the answers for what to do.
For example, in this post Vasco recommends:
But why stop at farmed animals? What about wild animals, especially insects? What about the long-term future? If taking Expected Total Hedonistic Utilitarianism seriously as Vasco does, I expect these effects to dominate farmed animals. My background understanding is that population increase leads to cultivation of land for farming and reduces wild animal populations and so wild animal suffering quite a bit.. So I could equivalently argue:
These would then tend to be the opposite set of interventions to the prior set. It just goes round and round. I think there are roughly two reasonable approcahes here:
Pick something that seems like a clear good - ‘save lives’, ‘end factory farming’, ‘save the world’ - and try to make it happen without tying yourself into knots about side-effects.
Really just an extension of (1), but if you come across a side effect that worries you, add that goal as a second terminal goal and split your resources between the goals.
By contrast, if your genuine goal is to pick an intervention with no plausible chance of causing significant harm, and you are being honest with yourself about possible backfires, you will do nothing.
Thanks, Alex.
Many people who donate to GiveWell’s interventions care about animal welfare, often donating to animal welfare interventions at the same time. Some of these people may want to know about harms caused to animals nearterm due to supporting GiveWell’s interventions. Some of these people may even endorse RP’s median welfare ranges, although still support GiveWell’s interventions due to not wanting to maximise impartial welfare. In general, people have complex preferences about their giving, so I think it is better to be transparent instead of assuming no one would care about the additional information.
I agree. However, it would still be good to go from your 2nd allocation to one where the 10 $ still go to the best animal welfare organisation, but the 90 $ go to an intervention which is more cost-effective than the best human welfare intervention, which may be one global health and development intervention with improved impacts on animals.
I agree with this prioritisation framing, and commented 4 months ago the meat eating problem is mostly a distraction in this sense. However, many people do not think there is a single most important thing, and so may be open to donating to a global health and development interventions with improved impacts on animals even if donating to animal welfare would be more cost-effective. In addition, it still seems worth analysing the meat eating problem to arrive to more accurate beliefs about the world, and because, in some hard to specify way, many value decreasing the probability of causing harm more than prioritising the most cost-effective interventions.
GiveWell has made many other choices for all of their donors, and the ones related to how much they value saving lives (as a function of age), and increasing income influence way more money than what would be needed to offset potential negative impacts on animals.
I think GiveWell is sufficiently transparent here—its value proposition is that donating a few thousand dollars will, in expectancy, save the life of a child under five in the developing world. Whether or not this is a good thing is largely left as an exercise to the reader. I do not expect GiveWell to do my moral philosophy homework for me.
I also think it’s fairly obvious that people tend to eat meat and cause carbon emissions, that more children in a heavily resource-constrained country means spreading available resources more thinly across the country’s children, and so on. Because these things are fairly obvious, donors who are concerned about the sign value of the saving-lives output are free to conduct their own research.
If GiveWell dwelled a ton on the upside collateral effects of saving a life—such as harping on the possibility that the life you can save will cure cancer—then I would be more favorably inclined to a view that it was inappropriately selective in its presentation of second-order effects.
Some have argued that saving lives in developing countries does not actually raise the size of the population because people have less children when they feel more of them will likely survive or due to some other mechanism.
This would refute the central point of your case if true. What are your thoughts?
https://www.gatesnotes.com/2018-Annual-Letter?WT.mc_id=02_13_2018_02_AnnualLetter2018_Explainer_BG-YT_&WT.tsrc=BGYT
Thanks for the comment, John. From the abstract of David Roodman’s paper on The Impact of Life-Saving Interventions on Fertility (written in 2014), which is the best research I am aware of on the topic:
This suggests saving lives in low income countries decreases fertility, as you said, but still increases longterm population, because the drop in fertility is smaller than the drop in mortality.
In any case, if saving lives did not change longterm population, it would still increase population nearterm. Right after saving the life, the population will be counterfactually larger by 1 person (who was just saved). Consequently, saving lives would still increase person-years, and therefore the consumption of animals.
Saving lives could decrease person-years, and therefore the consumption of animals, if it sufficiently decreases longterm population. However, besides this going against David Roodman’s main conclusions, it could then easily decrease human welfare, as it would then decrease the total number of human years lived. Moreover, it may decrease animal welfare too if farmed animals already had good lives by the time human population is significantly decreased.
Vasco could you consider changing the “meat eater problem” to the “meat eating problem” @JWS or “meat eating backfire” as @Michaelstjules suggested? I think it’s a more helpful framing.
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/oFBPxdJf3yboLEq2G/shortform
Hi Nick,
I do not think the specific term matters much. I mention effects on animals lots of times, so it should be clear that these are the problem, not saving lives per se.
Hi Vasco,
I lean much more to your side than Nick’s on the subject matter, but I strongly agree with Nick and Michael’s suggestion that saying the “meat eating problem” is much less provoking than the “meat eater problem”. You can actually count myself as another data point that this terminology change makes me feel less uncomfortable. (even as someone who believe this effect is probably real in the short term)
Thanks, Fai. I have changed “meat-eater” to “meat eating”.
I agree it doesn’t matter too much like you say, but it is a 30 second change that you could potentially make in good faith which could turn blame away from the people involved and focus directly on the problem itself. There’s also a (low chance but real) potential EA future PR issue here with that framing I think...
I feel so uncomfortable whenever people discuss the so-called “meat eater problem.” Two counterarguments:
1 - This is a case of utilitarianism gone to far. Contrary to what one could conclude by applying pure utilitarianism, saving someone’s life is good even if they go on to do bad things. It is not the moral responsibility of GiveWell/GHD donors to worry about how ethical the people they help are.
2 - The conclusions of the argument are repugnant and absurd. The discussion always seems to come up in response to saving the lives of poor people in third world countries, and I have a sense that some people don’t react super viscerally to what’s actually being said because the humans in question are so distant from them.
Imagine this argument was being applied to people in your own country. For example, what if someone proposed encouraging doctors to go on strike in hopes that doing so would cause more people, some of whom eat meat, to die. That would be wrong.
What’s being proposed here is completely equivalent to that scenario. People are proposing denying people basic healthcare—healthcare which is broadly available to the global rich—in hopes that they die and therefore don’t eat meat.
Even the more nuanced proposals—such as eliminating support for physical healthcare in favor of mental healthcare—are repugnant. Imagine being a doctor and seeing two patients—one depressed and one dying of malaria. It might be okay to help the depressed person over the one with malaria for certain reasons (e.g., you only have the resources to help one and you’re more likely to succeed at helping the depressed person). It would wrong to help the person with depression in hopes that the person with malaria dies and stops eating meat.
Hi Rebecca.
Would you agree with saving the life of a suicide bomber who was about to be shot to prevent a detonation which would kill lots of people? In this case, saving the life of the bomber would imply not saving the lives of lots of people. If one prefers not to save the bomber in order to minimise the number of killings, one should also be open to not saving humans in order to minimise the number of animals killed?
The farmed animals in question are even more morally distant, so I am more worried about people being biased towards underestimating the effects on animals.
Hey Vasco, on a constructive intention, let me explain how I believe I can be a utilitarian, maybe hedonistic to some degree, value animals highly and still not justify letting innocent children die, which I take as a sign of the limitations of consequentialism. Basically, you can stop consequence flows (or discount them very significantly) whenever they go through other people’s choices. People are free to make their own decisions. I am not sure if there is a name for this moral theory, but it would be roughly what I subscribe to.
I do not think this is an ideal solution to the moral problem, but I think it is much better than advocating to let innocent children die because of what they may end up doing.
Thanks, Pablo. I appreciate the effort to be construcive. However, I have a hard time parsing what you are suggesting. All moral actions depend on humans’ decisions to some extent, so it looks like everything would be in equal footing. One could argue we should discount more consequences which depend more on humans’ decisions, but I do not understand what this means. In my mind, one should simply weight consequences according to their probabilities.
I want to preface that I don’t have a strong opinion here, just some curiosity and a question.
If we are focusing on second order effects wouldn’t it make sense to bring up something like moral circle expansion and its relation to ethical and sustainable living over time as well?
From a long-term perspective, I see one of the major effects of global health being better decision making through moral circle expansion.
My question to you is then what time period you’re optimising for? Does this matter for the argument?
Thanks for the comment, Jonas.
I think focussing on impartial welfare by accounting for effects on farmed animals is better for moral circle expansion than completely ignoring effects on animals, which is currently the stardard in assessing interventions helping humans.
In principle, I care about effects across all space and time. In practice, I think the effects after 100 years are negligible. I guess the ratio between harms to farmed animals and benefits to humans globally, and in China, India and Nigeria will initially increase as the consumption per capita of animal-based food increases, but then decrease as the consumption per capita of animal-based food stagnates or decreases, and the conditions of animals improve.