Half the World Is Trying to Promote Democracy; Shouldn’t EAs Help Animals?
Dear Beloved Fellow EAs,
Inspired to post this because it’s draft amnesty week.
I’m sure others here have thought about this more than me, so maybe I’m missing a lot. But I just keep thinking:
When I turn on the news, it feels like half the world is trying to promote Democracy. I’m an American. So maybe what I really mean is: It feels like half of American society is trying to promote Democracy or save America from authoritarianism. When I go outside and walk just a few blocks from where I live, I repeatedly see large numbers of people protesting to save America’s democracy. When I talk to my family, the issue of promoting American democracy is top of mind for all of them. I know a lot of my smart, hard-working, law school and college classmates are also very focused on protecting democracy.
But hardly any people seem to be focused on helping animals. And there are so many animals suffering egregiously all the time. There were before half of America started worrying about Democracy and, at this rate, there will be even more animals suffering after half of America stops worrying about Democracy.
Democracy mostly benefits only humans. Very few people focus on the wellbeing of animals even though there are way more animals on Earth than humans, and there’s no clear reason to expect that to change in the future. Out of the very few people who focus on the welfare of animals, a huge portion are EAs.
So it worries me when I hear EAs talking about shifting to make Democracy promotion their new #1 focus. It feels like joining one of the least neglected causes I can imagine. And I worry about whether animals will still have anyone left looking out for them.
Note: I realize I am probably missing a lot so I’m excited for people to reassure me and tell me what I’m missing and why I shouldn’t worry about this.
Thank you for caring about making the world better.
Love,
Alene
What someones #1 focus should be is a really complicated question that involves values, interests, etc. For the movements part, there is no official list.
That being said It’s reasonable to argue against democracy preservation as a good use of EA (or specfic peoples) time, but neglectedness alone would only be a part of that story.
Hi Alene,
Thanks for writing this post on the forum!
One thing EA is really good at is optimising other people’s resources that were otherwise being spent inefficiently, because EA has a lot of knowledge about doing things effectively. So if EA is “getting into” something, it might not be because EA is directing lots of its own resources to something. It might be that the resources were already there and EA is just helping optimise their allocation.
I think that this is some of what is happening with democracy. A lot of people care a lot about democracy, and they want to give money to help democracy. EA (via Power for Democracies https://www.powerfordemocracies.org/ ) is helping make sure that that money is doing more good by providing recommendations about where it should go to do as much good as possible for democracy. It may be that the EAs you are talking to are getting excited about the fact that democracy promotion is finally getting more effective.
This is also what EA has done with climate. Climate is not a big focus area of EA because it is not neglected, however Giving Green ( https://www.givinggreen.earth/ ) has been massively successful as an EA organisation and directed $56 million in funding so far. I think most of that funding wasn’t from EAs, it was from people who mostly care about the climate.
I believe that EA’s work to help animals is significantly increasing at the moment. Some of this is related to EA itself growing, but animal welfare effective giving is growing faster than effective giving generally. The EA animal welfare fund raised 2x as much money in 2025 as it did in 2024. For more information, have a look at this post: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/z8Lr5euvnEsdBcdFg/animal-welfare-fund-payout-recommendations-from-july-to
All the best,
Kes
Dear Kes,
This is a super helpful and illuminating reply! Thank you! I love the idea of EA helping all cause areas to more effectively accomplish their goals.
There are lots of things I care about that fall outside of EA. And, for those things I care about, I often think most of the work being done to achieve that thing seems inefficient. So I love the idea of EAs helping make goals get accomplished. That’s super smart.
It just scares me when I hear people encourage EAs to donate to democracy promotion above other, more traditionally EA, causes.
Thank you for your time and explanation!
Sincerely,
Alene
From my perspective, as someone who cares a lot about both animal rights and safeguarding democracy, democracy is a necessary foundation for being able to advocate for animals as effectively as possible. Democracy guarantees us the right to freely campaign for our political preferences, including animal rights. If democracy erodes and rights like freedom of speech and freedom of assembly become restricted, that will also negatively affect the animal rights movement.
This is especially true because there are strong ties between agriculture and political power. That already creates problems for animal rights activism today, and it would become dramatically worse under an autocracy. I recently spoke with an animal rights activist from Uganda who told me that they have to be extremely careful with their demands there in order not to attract the attention of the state’s repressive apparatus. Openly criticizing factory farming the way we do in democratic countries is not possible there.
Ultimately, animals benefit from democracy too. My hope is that, in the long run, democracy worldwide will stabilize again, and once that happens, I plan to return to focusing more on animals.
Democracy promotion is a common interest of many causes. It’s highly unlikely we can do anything about (potentially, will ever be able to do anything about again) global poverty, factory farming, or existential risk, if all world powers become repressive autocracies squashing any sign of moral cosmopolitanism and freethought.
I don’t think this quite works as a response to Alene’s point. Many things are necessary/valuable preconditions for doing good. We need food, water, functioning infrastructure, preserving democracy, the internet, etc. The fact that something is a precondition for other work doesn’t by itself make it a high-priority EA cause area.
If I apply the ITN framework to ‘preserving democracy’, I get something like:
Importance: Not losing democracy is very important. But losing it was arguably similarly catastrophic e.g. 10 years ago. The question is how much the probability has actually increased. Even though the probability seems larger right now, I expect it to still be relatively small – but I’m uncertain.
Neglectedness: Very low. I agree with Alene’s core point that it’s one of the least neglected causes right now.
Tractability: I’d argue somewhat low, though I’m highly uncertain. There’s little reason to believe there’s lots of low-hanging fruit that hasn’t been picked over decades and centuries of interest in making democracies stable.
It’s also worth noting that much of the current concern is specifically about US democracy, which matters a lot (largest economy, major influence on the rest of the world, where AI is mostly going to be built), and tractability is currently plausibly higher but that’s a narrower cause than ‘preserving democracy’ (e.g. global democratic backsliding) full stop.