I think that revealed preference can be misleading in this context, for reasons I outline here.
It’s not clear that people’s revealed preferences are what we should be concerned about compared to, for example, what value people would reflectively endorse assigning to animals in the abstract. People’s revealed preference for continuing to eat meat, may be influenced by akrasia, or other cognitive distortions which aren’t relevant to assessing how much they actually endorse animals being valued.[1] We may care about the latter, not the former, when assessing how much we should value animals (i.e. by taking into account folk moral weights) or how much the public are likely to support/oppose us allocating more aid to animals.
But on the specific question of how the public would react to us allocating more resources to animals: this seems like a directly tractable empirical question. i.e. it would be relatively straightforward through surveys/experiments to assess whether people would be more/less hostile towards if we spent a greater share on animals, or if we spent much more on the long run future vs supporting a more diverse portfolio, or more/less on climate change etc.
I think that revealed preference can be misleading in this context, for reasons I outline here.
It’s not clear that people’s revealed preferences are what we should be concerned about compared to, for example, what value people would reflectively endorse assigning to animals in the abstract. People’s revealed preference for continuing to eat meat, may be influenced by akrasia, or other cognitive distortions which aren’t relevant to assessing how much they actually endorse animals being valued.[1] We may care about the latter, not the former, when assessing how much we should value animals (i.e. by taking into account folk moral weights) or how much the public are likely to support/oppose us allocating more aid to animals.
But on the specific question of how the public would react to us allocating more resources to animals: this seems like a directly tractable empirical question. i.e. it would be relatively straightforward through surveys/experiments to assess whether people would be more/less hostile towards if we spent a greater share on animals, or if we spent much more on the long run future vs supporting a more diverse portfolio, or more/less on climate change etc.
Though of course we also need to account for potential biases in the opposite direction as well.