Disclosure: I work at an animal advocacy organisation funded by ACE and EA Funds.
I finished reading this book. It’s almost entirely on animal advocacy. I think the book would benefit quite a lot if the authors focused on narrow and specific claims and provided all the evidence to make really strong cases for these claims. Instead many authors mention many issues without getting really deeper than pre-existing debates on the topic. I can’t say I have seen much new material, but I already work on animal advocacy so I keep reading about this topic all the time. Maybe it’s good to collect existing criticisms into a book format.
I think the strongest criticism in the book that gets repeated quite a lot is the problem of measurability bias in animal advocacy. I keep thinking about this too and I hope we find better ways to prioritise interventions in animal advocacy. Here’s Macaskill talking about measurability bias sometime ago:
“here’s one thing that I feel gets neglected: The value of concrete, short-run wins and symbolic actions. I think a lot about Henry Spira, the animal rights activist that Peter Singer wrote about in Ethics into Action. He led the first successful campaign to limit the use of animals in medical testing, and he was able to have that first win by focusing on science experiments at New York’s American Museum of Natural History, which involved mutilating cats in order to test their sexual performance after the amputation. From a narrow EA perspective, the campaign didn’t make any sense: the benefit was something like a dozen cats. But, at least as Singer describes it, it was the first real win in the animal liberation movement, and thereby created a massive amount of momentum for the movement.
I worry that in current EA culture people feel like every activity has to be justified on the basis of marginal cost-effectiveness, and that that the fact that an action would constitute some definite and symbolic, even if very small, step towards progress — and be the sort of thing that could provide fuel for a further movement — isn’t ‘allowable’ as a reason for engaging in an activity. Whereas in activism in general these sorts of knock-on effects would often be regarded as the whole point of particular campaigns, and that actually seems to me (now) like a pretty reasonable position (even if particular instances of that position might often be misguided).”
Yet I think the authors in this book jump too quickly from “You can’t measure all the impacts” to “Support my favourite thing”.
I think animal advocates have been trying these symbolic gestures for years and it’s not clear how much they’re now helping farmed animals, and it doesn’t seem like much (but counterfactuals are tricky). There’s still a lot of this kind of work going on, because non-EA advocates are willing to support it.
Furthermore, EAA has been supporting some of these, like the Nonhuman Rights Project and Sentience Politics, just not betting huge on them. NhRP was previously an ACE standout charity for several years, although now I think they basically only get Movement Grants from ACE, which are smaller. There’s work to try to get octopus farming banned before it grows. I think we still support bans on fur farming, foie gras, etc. when good opportunities arise. And corporate welfare campaigns also have symbolic value and build momentum, and the fact that they’re so often successful and even often against pretty big targets probably helps with the momentum.
And we have taken big bets on plant-based substitutes and cultured meat for years, with little apparent impact for animals so far.
Disclosure: I work at an animal advocacy organisation funded by ACE and EA Funds.
I finished reading this book. It’s almost entirely on animal advocacy. I think the book would benefit quite a lot if the authors focused on narrow and specific claims and provided all the evidence to make really strong cases for these claims. Instead many authors mention many issues without getting really deeper than pre-existing debates on the topic. I can’t say I have seen much new material, but I already work on animal advocacy so I keep reading about this topic all the time. Maybe it’s good to collect existing criticisms into a book format.
I think the strongest criticism in the book that gets repeated quite a lot is the problem of measurability bias in animal advocacy. I keep thinking about this too and I hope we find better ways to prioritise interventions in animal advocacy. Here’s Macaskill talking about measurability bias sometime ago:
“here’s one thing that I feel gets neglected: The value of concrete, short-run wins and symbolic actions. I think a lot about Henry Spira, the animal rights activist that Peter Singer wrote about in Ethics into Action. He led the first successful campaign to limit the use of animals in medical testing, and he was able to have that first win by focusing on science experiments at New York’s American Museum of Natural History, which involved mutilating cats in order to test their sexual performance after the amputation. From a narrow EA perspective, the campaign didn’t make any sense: the benefit was something like a dozen cats. But, at least as Singer describes it, it was the first real win in the animal liberation movement, and thereby created a massive amount of momentum for the movement.
I worry that in current EA culture people feel like every activity has to be justified on the basis of marginal cost-effectiveness, and that that the fact that an action would constitute some definite and symbolic, even if very small, step towards progress — and be the sort of thing that could provide fuel for a further movement — isn’t ‘allowable’ as a reason for engaging in an activity. Whereas in activism in general these sorts of knock-on effects would often be regarded as the whole point of particular campaigns, and that actually seems to me (now) like a pretty reasonable position (even if particular instances of that position might often be misguided).”
Yet I think the authors in this book jump too quickly from “You can’t measure all the impacts” to “Support my favourite thing”.
I think animal advocates have been trying these symbolic gestures for years and it’s not clear how much they’re now helping farmed animals, and it doesn’t seem like much (but counterfactuals are tricky). There’s still a lot of this kind of work going on, because non-EA advocates are willing to support it.
Furthermore, EAA has been supporting some of these, like the Nonhuman Rights Project and Sentience Politics, just not betting huge on them. NhRP was previously an ACE standout charity for several years, although now I think they basically only get Movement Grants from ACE, which are smaller. There’s work to try to get octopus farming banned before it grows. I think we still support bans on fur farming, foie gras, etc. when good opportunities arise. And corporate welfare campaigns also have symbolic value and build momentum, and the fact that they’re so often successful and even often against pretty big targets probably helps with the momentum.
And we have taken big bets on plant-based substitutes and cultured meat for years, with little apparent impact for animals so far.