A moral parliaments view given uncertainty can lead to a lot of GiveWell looking much better. Even a Kantian sympathetic to animals like Korsgaard would have limitations towards certain welfarist approaches. For instance, I don’t know how a Kantian would weigh wild animal welfare or even shrimp welfare (would neuron weights express a being willing something?).
This is a bit of a tangent, but Korsgaard discusses wild animals a bit in Fellow creatures. Some excerpts follow …
Korsgaard says work on animal ethics produces an “antinomy”, where the same premise seemingly yields two opposite conclusions (“creation ethics” – we should do lots to reduce animal suffering – and “abolitionism” – we should do nothing except stay away):
The natural world staunchly resists moral reorganization. As a result, we are unable to treat all animals in the way that morality demands, that is, as ends in themselves who have a claim to be treated in a way that is consistent with their good. Many people try to deal with the resulting problems by telling themselves that animals are so dimwitted that they cannot really suffer very much, or so unimportant that their suffering does not matter. The friends of animals, knowing that these things are not true, think that we have to try to reorganize the population of the natural world, so that all animals are either domestic and under our protection [“creation ethicists”], or wild animals with whom we do not interact at all [“abolitionists”].
[...] Morality teaches us how to construct a world that is, to a large extent anyway, good for all of us, governed by standards to which all of us can agree. But we cannot extend these benefits to all of the animals, in part because the system of predator and prey, and the competition for natural resources, sets them inevitably against each other.
She also brings up invertebrate suffering as another problem for either of these views:
Another problem is size. It is pretty hard to avoid harming things that are not somewhere in the same general size range as you are. But the world is teeming with organisms, most of them tiny by our standards. Some of these creatures may, for all we know, be sentient.
She says we can resolve the antinomy by distinguishing between what we ought to do and what we can do, and advocates what she calls a “preservation ethics”:
Rather than trying to create new and more morally tractable species of animals, I think we should do what we can to interact with the existing animals and the ongoing animal communities that already exist, in a way that respects the absolute value of their good.
Abolitionists, like creationists, want to change the nature of animals in a way that they think would make it easier for us to treat them well, or rather, to stop mistreating them. [...] But in one way their position is stronger than that of the creationists. I argued before that although one world cannot be better than another if they have different inhabitants, the creator of a world has a duty to make things as good as possible for whoever she creates. As I have tried to emphasize, part of the problem with creation ethics is that it invites us to take up the position of the creator with respect to wild animals, and it is not clear why we should do that, or if we would have the right to even if we could. But we are already in the position of the creator towards domestic animals, so the claim that we might have a duty to stop creating them is more plausible.
In practice, what Korsgaard recommends may not be that different from current EA wild animal welfare work, which I would guess Korsgaard would mostly endorse. But my sense is that EAs may support stronger interventions – even where humans are not involved in creating harms – in theory at least, and not pursue those right now simply because they are too uncertain/intractable, a thing that could change in the future.
Of course it’s possible that Korsgaard’s view is involves status quo bias. You could say that any interaction with animals – and even a decision not to assume the role of creator – does involve acting as creator of sorts, such that you are inevitably in that position.
This is a bit of a tangent, but Korsgaard discusses wild animals a bit in Fellow creatures. Some excerpts follow …
Korsgaard says work on animal ethics produces an “antinomy”, where the same premise seemingly yields two opposite conclusions (“creation ethics” – we should do lots to reduce animal suffering – and “abolitionism” – we should do nothing except stay away):
She also brings up invertebrate suffering as another problem for either of these views:
She says we can resolve the antinomy by distinguishing between what we ought to do and what we can do, and advocates what she calls a “preservation ethics”:
In practice, what Korsgaard recommends may not be that different from current EA wild animal welfare work, which I would guess Korsgaard would mostly endorse. But my sense is that EAs may support stronger interventions – even where humans are not involved in creating harms – in theory at least, and not pursue those right now simply because they are too uncertain/intractable, a thing that could change in the future.
Of course it’s possible that Korsgaard’s view is involves status quo bias. You could say that any interaction with animals – and even a decision not to assume the role of creator – does involve acting as creator of sorts, such that you are inevitably in that position.