This seems quite low, at least from a perspective of revelead preferences. If one indeed rejects unitarism, I suspect that the actual willingness to pay is something like 1000x − 10,000x to prevent the death of an animal vs. a human.
Also, if we defer to people’s revealed preferences, we should dramatically discount the lives and welfare of foreigners. I’d guess that Open Philanthropy, being American-funded, would need to reallocate much or most of its global health and development grantmaking to American-focused work, or to global catastrophic risks.
But isn’t the relevant harm here animal suffering rather than animal death? It would seem pretty awful to prefer that an animal suffer torturous agony rather than a human suffer a mild (1000x less bad) papercut.
I think comparisons to paper cuts and other minor harms don’t work very well with people’s intuitions: a lot of people feel like (and sometimes explicitly endorse that) no number of paper cuts can outweigh torturous agony. See this old LW post and the disagreements around it.
Instead, my experience is people’s intuitions work better when thinking in probabilities or quantities: what chance of suffering for a human would balance against that for a chicken? Or how many chickens suffering in that way would be equivalent to one human?
Revealed preference is a good way to get a handle on what people value, but its normative foundation is strongest when the tradeoff is internal to people. Eg when we value lives vs income, we would want to use people’s revealed preference for how they trade those off because those people are the most affected by our decisions and we want to incorporate their preferences. That normative foundation doesn’t really apply to animal welfare where the trade-offs are between people and animals. You may as well use animals revealed preferences for saving humans (ie not at all) and conclude that humans have no worth; it would be nonsensical.
I think that’s basically right, but also rejecting unitarianism and discounting other animals through this seems to me like saying the interests of some humans matter less in themselves (ignoring instrumental reasons) just because of their race, gender or intelligence, which is very objectionable.
People discount other animals because they’re speciesist in this way, although also for instrumental reasons.
This seems quite low, at least from a perspective of revelead preferences. If one indeed rejects unitarism, I suspect that the actual willingness to pay is something like 1000x − 10,000x to prevent the death of an animal vs. a human.
Also, if we defer to people’s revealed preferences, we should dramatically discount the lives and welfare of foreigners. I’d guess that Open Philanthropy, being American-funded, would need to reallocate much or most of its global health and development grantmaking to American-focused work, or to global catastrophic risks.
EDIT: For those interested, there’s some literature on valuing foreign lives, e.g. https://scholar.google.ca/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=“valuing+foreign+lives”+OR+”foreign+life+valuation”
But isn’t the relevant harm here animal suffering rather than animal death? It would seem pretty awful to prefer that an animal suffer torturous agony rather than a human suffer a mild (1000x less bad) papercut.
I think comparisons to paper cuts and other minor harms don’t work very well with people’s intuitions: a lot of people feel like (and sometimes explicitly endorse that) no number of paper cuts can outweigh torturous agony. See this old LW post and the disagreements around it.
Instead, my experience is people’s intuitions work better when thinking in probabilities or quantities: what chance of suffering for a human would balance against that for a chicken? Or how many chickens suffering in that way would be equivalent to one human?
Fair point, thanks!
Revealed preference is a good way to get a handle on what people value, but its normative foundation is strongest when the tradeoff is internal to people. Eg when we value lives vs income, we would want to use people’s revealed preference for how they trade those off because those people are the most affected by our decisions and we want to incorporate their preferences. That normative foundation doesn’t really apply to animal welfare where the trade-offs are between people and animals. You may as well use animals revealed preferences for saving humans (ie not at all) and conclude that humans have no worth; it would be nonsensical.
I think that’s basically right, but also rejecting unitarianism and discounting other animals through this seems to me like saying the interests of some humans matter less in themselves (ignoring instrumental reasons) just because of their race, gender or intelligence, which is very objectionable.
People discount other animals because they’re speciesist in this way, although also for instrumental reasons.