You raise a number of points; I’ll try to respond to each of them.
For people who are already donating to animal organisations which aren’t shelters then it isn’t necessarily better to give to “effective” organisations as put forward by ACE because there aren’t sufficient comparisons that can be made between organisations they are already supporting.
We do not believe this is true. We explicitly rank our top charities as being better targets for effective giving than our standout charities, and we explicitly rank our standout charities as better targets than organizations not on our Recommended Charity list.
This doesn’t mean that more effective EAA charities necessarily don’t exist. We’re currently expanding our focus to several organizations across the world to which we hadn’t previously looked. (There’s still time to submit charities for review in 2018.) There are also some charities that we were not able to evaluate last year for one reason or another. These charities may or may perform better than our current Top Charities. We encourage you to learn more about how we evaluate charities.
As an example, I continue to wonder why someone would necessarily believe it is better to give to GFI over an organisation doing pluralistic work in the animal movement? One is well supported by various foundations and is far from underconsidered or neglected, whilst others that work on more meta level questions of plurality and inclusivity tend to be marginalised, particularly through not reflecting a favoured “mainstream” ideology.
GFI rates well on all of our criteria. If you want to compare them to another group doing pluralistic work, then you’d need to directly compare our reviews of each organization. Alternatively, you are free to perform your own analysis to compare relative potential effectiveness; if performed well, such analyses could then be used in future reviews by ACE.
Keep in mind that we explicitly believe a pluralistic approach is best overall. It’s just that individual charities working on pluralistic approaches may have wildly different levels of effectiveness, and, given limited resources, we should prioritize whatever results in the most good.
Another issue is that ACE doesn’t account for moral theory in relation to rights or utilitarianism thus largely presenting a fairly unfortunate picture in the animal movement in terms of utilitarian = effective and rights = ineffective.
We are quite transparent about the philosophical foundations of our work. We explicitly maintain that the most effective approach is probably a pluralistic one, and we hope that a diverse group of animal charities will continue pursuing a wide range of interventions to help all populations of animals. However, we will continue to recommend that marginal resources support the most effective tactics.
This is not an issue of rights vs utility. Whether you believe in rights or in utility, presumably you would want to do twice as much good with limited resources if you get the chance.
(A quick aside on deontology vs consequentialism as it relates to cause prioritization: Let’s say you’re a deontologist who believes murder is wrong. You’re given a coupon that you can redeem at one of two locations. If you redeem at the first, you prevent a murder. If you redeem at the second, you prevent two murders. Can you honestly say that, even as a deontologist, you wouldn’t prefer to redeem at the second location?)
The suffering of all animals is important, whether those animals are companion animals, animals in a lab, animals used in entertainment, or farmed animals. But when you have limited resources, you should prioritize helping those animals for which you can effectively reduce suffering. This is true whether you’re talking about a rights organization or a utilitarian organization (to use your terminology).
I support the idea of evaluation by ACE but i’m sceptical that the claims that ACE tend to make sufficiently reflect the work that has taken place, or that there is enough transparency in terms of the underlying values and beliefs that ACE tend to represent. I continue to believe that some form of external meta-evaluation would be useful for ACE.
You raise a number of points; I’ll try to respond to each of them.
We do not believe this is true. We explicitly rank our top charities as being better targets for effective giving than our standout charities, and we explicitly rank our standout charities as better targets than organizations not on our Recommended Charity list.
This doesn’t mean that more effective EAA charities necessarily don’t exist. We’re currently expanding our focus to several organizations across the world to which we hadn’t previously looked. (There’s still time to submit charities for review in 2018.) There are also some charities that we were not able to evaluate last year for one reason or another. These charities may or may perform better than our current Top Charities. We encourage you to learn more about how we evaluate charities.
GFI rates well on all of our criteria. If you want to compare them to another group doing pluralistic work, then you’d need to directly compare our reviews of each organization. Alternatively, you are free to perform your own analysis to compare relative potential effectiveness; if performed well, such analyses could then be used in future reviews by ACE.
Keep in mind that we explicitly believe a pluralistic approach is best overall. It’s just that individual charities working on pluralistic approaches may have wildly different levels of effectiveness, and, given limited resources, we should prioritize whatever results in the most good.
We are quite transparent about the philosophical foundations of our work. We explicitly maintain that the most effective approach is probably a pluralistic one, and we hope that a diverse group of animal charities will continue pursuing a wide range of interventions to help all populations of animals. However, we will continue to recommend that marginal resources support the most effective tactics.
This is not an issue of rights vs utility. Whether you believe in rights or in utility, presumably you would want to do twice as much good with limited resources if you get the chance.
(A quick aside on deontology vs consequentialism as it relates to cause prioritization: Let’s say you’re a deontologist who believes murder is wrong. You’re given a coupon that you can redeem at one of two locations. If you redeem at the first, you prevent a murder. If you redeem at the second, you prevent two murders. Can you honestly say that, even as a deontologist, you wouldn’t prefer to redeem at the second location?)
The suffering of all animals is important, whether those animals are companion animals, animals in a lab, animals used in entertainment, or farmed animals. But when you have limited resources, you should prioritize helping those animals for which you can effectively reduce suffering. This is true whether you’re talking about a rights organization or a utilitarian organization (to use your terminology).
If there are specific claims that you believe do not reflect the work that we do, you are always welcome to give feedback. We also strive to be as transparent as possible in everything that we do. With regard to outside evaluation, we have explicitly asked for external reviewers and have a public list of external reviewers on our site.
I hope that these responses help to alleviate some of your concerns.