Hi, James! When it comes to assessing bednets vs therapy or more generally, saving a life vs happiness improvements for people, the meat eater problem looms large for me. This immediately complicates the trade-off, but I donât think dismissing it is justifiable on most moral theories given our current understanding that farm animals are likely conscious, feel pain, and thus deserve moral consideration. Once we include this second-order consideration, itâs hard to know the magnitude of the impact given animal consumption, income, economic growth, wild animal, etc. effects. Youâve done a lot of work evaluating mental health vs life-saving interventions (thanks for that!), how does including animals impact your thinking? Do you think itâs better that we should just ignore it (like GiveWell does)?
I think this goes back to Joeyâs case for a more pluralistic perspective, but I take your point that in some cases, we may be doing too much of that. Itâs just hard to know how wide a range of arguments to include when assessing this balance...
Hi Wayne, thatâs fair. I hadnât been including farmed animal welfare in the comparison because I donât think people donating to therapy organizations are doing it for animal welfare reasons.
I donât think it would be practical for givewell to include animal welfare in its evaluations. I think donors who care about both animal and human welfare would have more impact giving to separate projects optimising for each of those goals
I think donors who care about both animal and human welfare would have more impact giving to separate projects optimising for each of those goals
I think donors who care about human and animal welfare, in the sense of valuing 1 unit of welfare the same regardless of species, had better support animal welfare interventions roughly exclusively, instead of interventions optimised for human welfare as well as ones optimised for human welfare. I estimate:
Broiler welfare and cage-free campaigns are 168 and 462 times as cost-effective as GiveWellâs top charities.
The Shrimp Welfare Project is 64.3 k as cost-effective as GiveWellâs top charities.
Hi, James! When it comes to assessing bednets vs therapy or more generally, saving a life vs happiness improvements for people, the meat eater problem looms large for me. This immediately complicates the trade-off, but I donât think dismissing it is justifiable on most moral theories given our current understanding that farm animals are likely conscious, feel pain, and thus deserve moral consideration. Once we include this second-order consideration, itâs hard to know the magnitude of the impact given animal consumption, income, economic growth, wild animal, etc. effects. Youâve done a lot of work evaluating mental health vs life-saving interventions (thanks for that!), how does including animals impact your thinking? Do you think itâs better that we should just ignore it (like GiveWell does)?
I think this goes back to Joeyâs case for a more pluralistic perspective, but I take your point that in some cases, we may be doing too much of that. Itâs just hard to know how wide a range of arguments to include when assessing this balance...
Hi Wayne, thatâs fair. I hadnât been including farmed animal welfare in the comparison because I donât think people donating to therapy organizations are doing it for animal welfare reasons.
I donât think it would be practical for givewell to include animal welfare in its evaluations. I think donors who care about both animal and human welfare would have more impact giving to separate projects optimising for each of those goals
Hi James.
I think donors who care about human and animal welfare, in the sense of valuing 1 unit of welfare the same regardless of species, had better support animal welfare interventions roughly exclusively, instead of interventions optimised for human welfare as well as ones optimised for human welfare. I estimate:
Broiler welfare and cage-free campaigns are 168 and 462 times as cost-effective as GiveWellâs top charities.
The Shrimp Welfare Project is 64.3 k as cost-effective as GiveWellâs top charities.
Small thing. I think phrasing is the the âmeat eatingâ problem is better here, will continue to plug this.
Thanks for having in mind the meat-eating problem, Wayne. You may be interested in my post GiveWell may have made 1 billion dollars of harmful grants, and Ambitious Impact incubated 8 harmful organisations via increasing factory-farming?.