are you saying you think āan intuition that a human year was worth about 100-1000 times more than a chicken yearā is a starting point of āunusually pro-animal viewsā? ā¦ What would you consider more typical or standard views about animals from which to update?
I did say that, and at the time I wrote that I would have predicted that in realistic situations requiring people to trade off harms/ābenefits going to humans vs chickens the median respondent would just always choose the human (but maybe thatās just our morality having a terrible sense of scale), and Peterās 300x mean would have put him somewhere around 95th percentile.
Since writing that I read Michael Dickensā comment, linking to this SSC post summarizing the disagreements [1] and Iām now less sure. Itās hard for me to tell exactly what they surveys included: for example, I think they excluded people who didnāt think animals have moral worth at all, and itās not clear to me whether they were getting people to compare lives vs life years. I donāt know if thereās anything better on this?
it doesnāt seem to buy much to frame things relative to people whoāve never thought about a given topic substantively
I agree! Iām not trying to say that uninformed peopleās off-the-cuff guesses about moral weights are very informative on what moral weights we should have. Instead, Iām saying that people start with a wide range of background assumptions and if two people started off with 5th and 95th percentile views trading off benefits/āharms to chickens vs humans I expect them to end up farther apart in their post-investigation views than two people who started at 95th.
[1] That post cites David Moss from RP as having run a better survey, and summarizes it, but doesnāt link to itāIām guessing this is because it was Moss doing something informally with SSC and the SSC post is the canonical source, but if thereās a full writeup of the survey Iād like to see it!
What do you think of this rephrasing of your original argument:
I suspect people rarely get deeply interested in the the value of foreign aid unless they come in with an unusually high initial intuitive view that being human is what matters, not being in my countryā¦ If you somehow could convince a research group, not selected for caring non-Americans, to pursue this question in isolation, Iād predict theyād end up with far less foreign aid-friendly results.
I think this argument is very bad and I suspect you do too. You can rightfully point out that in this context someone starting out at the 5th percentile before going into a foreign aid investigation and then determining foreign aid is much more valuable than the general population thinks would be, in some sense, stronger evidence than if they had instead started at the 95th percentile. However, that seems not super relevant. Whatās relevant is whether it is defensible at all to norm to a population based on their work on a topic given a question of values like this (that or if there were some disanalogy between this and animals).
Generally, I think the typical American when faced with real tradeoffs (they actually are faced with these tradeoffs implicitly as part of a package vote) donāt value the lives of the global poor equally to the lives of their fellow Americans. More importantly, I think you shouldnāt norm where your values on global poverty end up after investigation back to what the typical American thinks. I think you should weigh the empirical and philosophical evidence about how to value the lives of the global poor directly and not do too much, if any, reference class checking about other peopleās views on the topic. The same argument holds for whether and how much we should value people 100 years from now after accounting for empirical uncertainty.
Fundamentally, the question isnāt what people substantively do think (except for practical purposes), the question is what beliefs are defensible after weighing the evidence. I think itās fine to be surprised by what RPās moral weight work says on capacity for welfare, and I think there are still high uncertainty in this domain. I just donāt think either of our priors, or the general populationās priors, about the topic should be taken very seriously.
What do you think of this rephrasing of your original argument: I suspect people rarely get deeply interested in the the value of foreign aid ā¦ I think this argument is very bad and I suspect you do too.
First, I think GiveWellās research, say, is mostly consumed by people who agree people matter equally regardless of which country they live in. Which makes this scenario more similar to my āWhen using the moral weights of animals to decide between various animal-focused interventions this is not a major concern: the donors, charity evaluators, and moral weights researchers are coming from a similar perspective.ā
But say I argued that the US Department of Transportation funding ($12.5M/ālife) should be redirected to foreign aid until they had equal marginal costs per life saved. I donāt think the objection Iād get would be āAmericans have greater moral valueā but instead things like āsaving lives in other countries is the role of private charity, not the governmentā. In trying to convince people to support global health charities I donāt think Iāve ever gotten the objection ābut people in other countries donāt matterā or āthey matter far less than Americansā, while I expect vegan advocates often hear that about animals.
In trying to convince people to support global health charities I donāt think Iāve ever gotten the objection ābut people in other countries donāt matterā or āthey matter far less than Americansā, while I expect vegan advocates often hear that about animals.
I have gotten the latter one explicitly and the former implicitly, so Iām afraid you should get out more often :).
More generally, that foreigners and/āor immigrants donāt matter, or matter little compared to native born locals, is fundamental to political parties around the world. Itās a banal take in international politics. Sure, some opposition to global health charities is an implied or explicit empirical claim about the role of government. But fundamentally, not all of it as a lot of people donāt value the lives of the out-group and people not in your country are in the out-group (or at least not in the in-group) for much of the worldās population.
First, I think GiveWellās research, say, is mostly consumed by people who agree people matter equally regardless of which country they live in.
GiveWell donors are not representative of all humans. I think a large fraction of humanity would select the āweāre all equalā option on a survey but clearly donāt actually believe it or act on it (which brings us back to revealed preferences in trades like those humans make about animal lives).
But even if none of that is true, were someone to make this argument about the value of the global poor, the best moral (I make no claims about whatās empirically persuasive) response is āmake a coherent and defensible argument against the equal moral worth of humans including the global poorā, and not something like āmost humans actually agree that the global poor have equal value so donāt stray too far from equality in your assessment.ā If you do the latter, you are making a contingent claim based on a given population at a given time. To put it mildly, for most of human history I do not believe we even would have gotten people to half-heartedly select the āmoral equality for all humansā option on a survey. For me at least, we arenāt bound in our philosophical assessment of value by popular belief here or for animal welfare.
I have gotten the latter one explicitly and the former implicitly, so Iām afraid you should get out more often :).
Yikes; ugh. Probably a lot of this is me talking to so many college students in the Northeast.
āmake a coherent and defensible argument against the equal moral worth of humans including the global poorā
I think maybe Iām not being clear enough about what Iām trying to do with my post? As I wrote to Wayne below, what Iām hoping happens is:
Some people who donāt think animals matter very much respond to RPās weights with āthat seems really far from where Iād put them, but if those are really right then a lot of us are making very poor prioritization decisionsā.
Those people put in a bunch of effort to generate their own weights.
Probably those weights end up in a very different place, and then thereās a lot of discussion, figuring out why, and identifying the core disagreements.
I did say that, and at the time I wrote that I would have predicted that in realistic situations requiring people to trade off harms/ābenefits going to humans vs chickens the median respondent would just always choose the human (but maybe thatās just our morality having a terrible sense of scale), and Peterās 300x mean would have put him somewhere around 95th percentile.
Since writing that I read Michael Dickensā comment, linking to this SSC post summarizing the disagreements [1] and Iām now less sure. Itās hard for me to tell exactly what they surveys included: for example, I think they excluded people who didnāt think animals have moral worth at all, and itās not clear to me whether they were getting people to compare lives vs life years. I donāt know if thereās anything better on this?
I agree! Iām not trying to say that uninformed peopleās off-the-cuff guesses about moral weights are very informative on what moral weights we should have. Instead, Iām saying that people start with a wide range of background assumptions and if two people started off with 5th and 95th percentile views trading off benefits/āharms to chickens vs humans I expect them to end up farther apart in their post-investigation views than two people who started at 95th.
[1] That post cites David Moss from RP as having run a better survey, and summarizes it, but doesnāt link to itāIām guessing this is because it was Moss doing something informally with SSC and the SSC post is the canonical source, but if thereās a full writeup of the survey Iād like to see it!
Davidās post is here: Perceived Moral Value of Animals and Cortical Neuron Count
What do you think of this rephrasing of your original argument:
I think this argument is very bad and I suspect you do too. You can rightfully point out that in this context someone starting out at the 5th percentile before going into a foreign aid investigation and then determining foreign aid is much more valuable than the general population thinks would be, in some sense, stronger evidence than if they had instead started at the 95th percentile. However, that seems not super relevant. Whatās relevant is whether it is defensible at all to norm to a population based on their work on a topic given a question of values like this (that or if there were some disanalogy between this and animals).
Generally, I think the typical American when faced with real tradeoffs (they actually are faced with these tradeoffs implicitly as part of a package vote) donāt value the lives of the global poor equally to the lives of their fellow Americans. More importantly, I think you shouldnāt norm where your values on global poverty end up after investigation back to what the typical American thinks. I think you should weigh the empirical and philosophical evidence about how to value the lives of the global poor directly and not do too much, if any, reference class checking about other peopleās views on the topic. The same argument holds for whether and how much we should value people 100 years from now after accounting for empirical uncertainty.
Fundamentally, the question isnāt what people substantively do think (except for practical purposes), the question is what beliefs are defensible after weighing the evidence. I think itās fine to be surprised by what RPās moral weight work says on capacity for welfare, and I think there are still high uncertainty in this domain. I just donāt think either of our priors, or the general populationās priors, about the topic should be taken very seriously.
Awesome, thanks! Good post!
First, I think GiveWellās research, say, is mostly consumed by people who agree people matter equally regardless of which country they live in. Which makes this scenario more similar to my āWhen using the moral weights of animals to decide between various animal-focused interventions this is not a major concern: the donors, charity evaluators, and moral weights researchers are coming from a similar perspective.ā
But say I argued that the US Department of Transportation funding ($12.5M/ālife) should be redirected to foreign aid until they had equal marginal costs per life saved. I donāt think the objection Iād get would be āAmericans have greater moral valueā but instead things like āsaving lives in other countries is the role of private charity, not the governmentā. In trying to convince people to support global health charities I donāt think Iāve ever gotten the objection ābut people in other countries donāt matterā or āthey matter far less than Americansā, while I expect vegan advocates often hear that about animals.
I have gotten the latter one explicitly and the former implicitly, so Iām afraid you should get out more often :).
More generally, that foreigners and/āor immigrants donāt matter, or matter little compared to native born locals, is fundamental to political parties around the world. Itās a banal take in international politics. Sure, some opposition to global health charities is an implied or explicit empirical claim about the role of government. But fundamentally, not all of it as a lot of people donāt value the lives of the out-group and people not in your country are in the out-group (or at least not in the in-group) for much of the worldās population.
GiveWell donors are not representative of all humans. I think a large fraction of humanity would select the āweāre all equalā option on a survey but clearly donāt actually believe it or act on it (which brings us back to revealed preferences in trades like those humans make about animal lives).
But even if none of that is true, were someone to make this argument about the value of the global poor, the best moral (I make no claims about whatās empirically persuasive) response is āmake a coherent and defensible argument against the equal moral worth of humans including the global poorā, and not something like āmost humans actually agree that the global poor have equal value so donāt stray too far from equality in your assessment.ā If you do the latter, you are making a contingent claim based on a given population at a given time. To put it mildly, for most of human history I do not believe we even would have gotten people to half-heartedly select the āmoral equality for all humansā option on a survey. For me at least, we arenāt bound in our philosophical assessment of value by popular belief here or for animal welfare.
Yikes; ugh. Probably a lot of this is me talking to so many college students in the Northeast.
I think maybe Iām not being clear enough about what Iām trying to do with my post? As I wrote to Wayne below, what Iām hoping happens is:
Some people who donāt think animals matter very much respond to RPās weights with āthat seems really far from where Iād put them, but if those are really right then a lot of us are making very poor prioritization decisionsā.
Those people put in a bunch of effort to generate their own weights.
Probably those weights end up in a very different place, and then thereās a lot of discussion, figuring out why, and identifying the core disagreements.