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So I’ve not written extensively on this (and in some cases not at all), but I’m a virtue ethicist and I care about animal welfare and x-risks (or just future-folks more generally) as an expression of compassion. That is, satisfying the virtue of compassion that I aspire to (now drawn from Buddhist notions of compassion, but originally from a more folky notion of it that I learned to adopt as a virtue from my upbringing in secular Protestant America) encourages me to give consideration to the welfare of animals and future folks, and this results in my choice to eat almost-only plants and to work on addressing AI-related x-risks.

This is not exactly something you can cite nor a full-fledge argument, but figured you might find it worthwhile to hear more from someone in EA who has one of these non-consequentialist moral views. I expect there are a number of crypto-Kantians around (crypto only in the sense though that they just don’t bring it up much because it’s not part of normal EA conversation to reason via deontology) and a decent number of contractualist given that position’s affinity with libertarian ethics and the number of libertarian EAs drawn from the rationalist community.

Non-consequentialist considerations aren’t really part of animal welfare. They aren’t taken seriously as part of the Animal Welfare Program at the Open Philanthropy Project and neither are they factored into the work that ACE does in relation to “top” or “standout” charities. It’s difficult to wonder about how rights advocates would think about prioritisation when they wouldn’t agree with how effective altruism has constructed “effective animal advocacy”. To consider how non-consequentialists would think about different causes we would first need to think about how they would conceptualise those areas and what they would do. However, to do so would mean undertaking a review of the foundational work of “effective animal advocacy” in order to reflect on those considerations. Up to now there has been little institutional appetite to prioritise consideration of rights views, perhaps because they are considered too difficult and controversial to deal with, and it would certainly challenge the conventional EAA epistemology.

The greater the priority EA has placed on animal welfare as it stands, the more marginalised rights views have become, so it would be somewhat absurd for rights advocates to argue for prioritisation of animal welfare, indeed if those views are going to be further marginalised by the comparative weight of Open Philanthropy resources (for instance) then deprioritisation ought to be emphasised. Though given how little value rights views have in EAA, it would be a largely meaningless act.