From the outset, I’m not sure how prevalent and unified a response there could be, because different EAs have different starting beliefs. Some of them agree that meat consumption is a serious issue and some do not, and this will necessarily change the way they look at the problem. I guess you could refine it and say that we need an “EAs-who-donate-to-poverty-alleviation” response, and maybe this is what you really mean, but if you constrain it like that then they don’t necessarily need a response because, by prioritizing donations to poverty over donations to animal causes, they’ve already demonstrated that they don’t care about animals as much, and if they did care about animals enough to be worried about this then they really ought to have been donating to animal welfare charities in the first place. For this reason, everything that I’m about to write regarding the relationship between wealth and meat consumption is 90% a mental exercise (and 10% a concern about how much to cooperate and support other people’s altruism). But more on that later.
The argument presented in Compassion by the Pound leads me to think, at the very least, that certain systems of animal agriculture might offer net-positive lives for the animals within them, albeit nowhere near what they deserve, and that outreach strategies that reduce demand for meat might not necessarily be net-positive. If we assume that the author’s welfare numbers are correct for a brief moment, it is entirely possible that reducing demand for meat would actually prevent some animals from being alive when they would’ve benefited from more enjoyment than suffering overall.
On average, it seems that animals’ lives on farms are negative. Chickens seem to exist in the greatest numbers, so their welfare dominates. Sure, there is a probability that animal lives are better than this author believes. But there is an equal probability that animal lives are even worse than this author believes. So we should just stick with the point estimate, which is negative.
Regarding shaky ethical assumptions: it seems a lot more plausible, across multiple ethical theories, that it’s wrong to create animals with dubious well-being in order to kill them. That it would be good to farm animals with uninteresting but net-pleasant lives is only something that a subset of utilitarians (and perhaps a few others) would endorse. I believe it’s plausible and quite likely right, but it does seem to require more controversial ethical assumptions.
For example, health interventions that save lives, like bed nets, may lower human fertility in the long run, resulting in lower meat consumption.
Well, they’ll reduce population growth, which will slow the rate of increase in meat consumption. But this just means that naive estimates of future increases in meat consumption are going to be slight underestimates rather than significant underestimates.
In this case, for saving lives in the developing world to be ethically bad, you would need to prove that over the next several generations, 1) people in countries with GiveWell-supported charities will be eating some high percentage of factory farmed meat, 2) factory farmed meat will produce net negative utility for animals, and that the moral weight of the harm to animals is greater than the humans saved in the first place.
I don’t think these are very contentious, or at least no more contentious than some of the countervailing ideas you are presenting.
I think we should put reasonable probability (ex. at least 10-20%) that we’ll develop widespread meat alternatives and/or have a high number of successful farm animal welfare campaigns that influence meat consumption in the developing world.
Well, the fact that EAs might find a solution isn’t necessarily what should change our evaluation, right? The probability that anyone or anything will find a solution to meat consumption in the developing world is what should move us, because that’s what really drives a reduction in expected increases in meat consumption.
So I’d guess that 10% is an astonishingly optimistic figure for thinking that EAs will even substantially reduce the meat consumption of an entire continent, but the probability that some kind of meat replacement will become very popular in Africa for any reason might come somewhere close to that. Note, however, that meat consumption is very important for improving the health of developing communities in Africa, and they will have a significant social demand for it (there are one or two sources on this which I can dig up if you want). Still, any big change in this issue will take a long time to spread, so even if something like this does happen, there is all the marginal meat consumption in the near and medium term future.
Honestly, this is what looks to me as a very contentious causal chain. That doesn’t make it wrong, but to be fair we’ll just have to add back comparable contentious causal chains which also point in favor of worrying about the meat eater problem. I think we should also consider the possibility that increased meat production in Africa will facilitate a large new industry with significant economies of scale, enabling a decrease in prices which will outprice meat alternatives and further entrench meat in African culture.
Fellow Effective Altruists might also argue that we should simply give to wherever has the highest expected utility, rather than stretch our donations across causes or organizations. In theory, I agree with this approach. However, I struggle to see how we can measure the impact of our donations against one another to the degree required to make this judgment with any degree of confidence, especially in light of uncertainties like the meat eater problem and far future concerns. For example, would you be able to say with greater than 80-90% confidence that a donation to the Against Malaria Foundation has greater expected value than to the Humane League or Future of Humanity Institute?
This is sort of the whole idea behind effective altruism anyway… Yes, it’s difficult, but if you think that animals are important enough that an additional couple weeks of suffering on farms matters in comparison to a $1,000 increase in annual income, then you should be donating to animal charities in the first place. If you compare the $3,000 it takes to save a life from malaria to the amount of advocacy and reform you can push for $3,000, it turns out that the animal-welfare opportunity cost of saving people is much greater than the animal-welfare direct cost of saving people. This comes from my own highly pessimistic, watered-down mental adjustments of the old vegan outreach ad calculations, but you can do it with other methods of animal charity and probably get similar results. So I think there is very little room in rational decision space for this concern to change where someone donates to—maybe if you care just a little bit about animals in comparison to humans, and are really unsure about the tradeoff, then the meat eater problem will tip the scales in favor of animal welfare donations.
The good thing about bringing up this issue, which is the reason I would like to thank you for this post, is that it seems to help people sort out their beliefs and come closer to the realization that if they care about this then they should have been donating to animal welfare all along.
What I don’t want, of course, is for EAs to feel inclined to care less about the meat eater problem and animal charities simply because they’ve already been donating to poverty alleviation. This would be an understandable and predictable form of cognitive bias. So, check yourselves for bias, everyone!
One clarification: Norwood’s view, as indicated in the table above, is that broiler chickens (raised for meat) have a welfare score of +3 which means they have lives worth living. Norwood does believe that the breeders (parents) of broilers have a welfare score of −4 (better off dead), but the ratio of breeders to broilers is 1 to 144 so his conclusion is that eating chicken increases animal welfare.
That differs from egg laying hens. Norwood gives caged hens, which currently represent the vast majority of the egg laying hens in the US, a welfare score of −8.
FWIW, I tend to disagree with Norwood’s views about broiler chickens and believe they are probably better off dead.
Okay, interesting. I was thinking more about Brian Tomasik’s numbers on quantifying suffering. Yeah, if it is the case that chickens tend to enjoy lives then the sign of meat consumption in Africa could very well flip, as the majority of the marginal animal-days of farming are taken by chickens.
I agree we won’t ever have a single response, but that’s not my intention. I just think this is an important enough problem that far more EAs should be taking it seriously and considering it as they donate/work (the EA response).
On chickens—yes, most chicken lives currently are probably very net-negative. However, the authors’ numbers say cage-free and market (non-breeder) chickens raised for meat live net-positive lives. If you disagree with the authors’ numbers, that’s a totally fair argument and I’d love to hear it. However, given the huge movement towards cage-free just in the past year and the numbers above, we may have many chickens living net-positive lives in the immediate future. This seems important to me as we discuss predictions about the next 50-100 years.
Re: shaky ethical assumptions: I agree that this is controversial and a view not held by many people. I’d love to hear arguments about why this ethical view is not correct!
Thanks for your link, I meant to put it in my post but forgot.
I was using a broader “we” as in “humanity will develop meat alternatives,” not that any particular Effective Altruist will do it. I don’t much care who does it.
However it’s worth keeping in mind that this is intensive agriculture in Africa. I’m not personally informed on what their factory farms are like, and we really don’t know how it could turn out in the long run. They might not be happy to adopt the same regulations that there are in the developed world (or they could be better, I suppose).
Unfortunately, I don’t have any relevant papers off the top of my head regarding ethics, but the repugnant conclusion, natalism and antinatalism, and animal rights would be good general areas to read into.
From the outset, I’m not sure how prevalent and unified a response there could be, because different EAs have different starting beliefs. Some of them agree that meat consumption is a serious issue and some do not, and this will necessarily change the way they look at the problem. I guess you could refine it and say that we need an “EAs-who-donate-to-poverty-alleviation” response, and maybe this is what you really mean, but if you constrain it like that then they don’t necessarily need a response because, by prioritizing donations to poverty over donations to animal causes, they’ve already demonstrated that they don’t care about animals as much, and if they did care about animals enough to be worried about this then they really ought to have been donating to animal welfare charities in the first place. For this reason, everything that I’m about to write regarding the relationship between wealth and meat consumption is 90% a mental exercise (and 10% a concern about how much to cooperate and support other people’s altruism). But more on that later.
On average, it seems that animals’ lives on farms are negative. Chickens seem to exist in the greatest numbers, so their welfare dominates. Sure, there is a probability that animal lives are better than this author believes. But there is an equal probability that animal lives are even worse than this author believes. So we should just stick with the point estimate, which is negative.
Regarding shaky ethical assumptions: it seems a lot more plausible, across multiple ethical theories, that it’s wrong to create animals with dubious well-being in order to kill them. That it would be good to farm animals with uninteresting but net-pleasant lives is only something that a subset of utilitarians (and perhaps a few others) would endorse. I believe it’s plausible and quite likely right, but it does seem to require more controversial ethical assumptions.
Well, they’ll reduce population growth, which will slow the rate of increase in meat consumption. But this just means that naive estimates of future increases in meat consumption are going to be slight underestimates rather than significant underestimates.
I don’t think these are very contentious, or at least no more contentious than some of the countervailing ideas you are presenting.
In my quick analysis of the issue (http://effective-altruism.com/ea/rl/quantifying_the_impact_of_economic_growth_on_meat/) I had a source saying that much (probably most) of new animal agriculture in the developing world is intensive (http://www.worldwatch.org/node/1826). I estimated 17 days of animal suffering, including 14 days of poultry suffering, for an increase of $1,000 in average per-capita GDP.
Well, the fact that EAs might find a solution isn’t necessarily what should change our evaluation, right? The probability that anyone or anything will find a solution to meat consumption in the developing world is what should move us, because that’s what really drives a reduction in expected increases in meat consumption.
So I’d guess that 10% is an astonishingly optimistic figure for thinking that EAs will even substantially reduce the meat consumption of an entire continent, but the probability that some kind of meat replacement will become very popular in Africa for any reason might come somewhere close to that. Note, however, that meat consumption is very important for improving the health of developing communities in Africa, and they will have a significant social demand for it (there are one or two sources on this which I can dig up if you want). Still, any big change in this issue will take a long time to spread, so even if something like this does happen, there is all the marginal meat consumption in the near and medium term future.
Honestly, this is what looks to me as a very contentious causal chain. That doesn’t make it wrong, but to be fair we’ll just have to add back comparable contentious causal chains which also point in favor of worrying about the meat eater problem. I think we should also consider the possibility that increased meat production in Africa will facilitate a large new industry with significant economies of scale, enabling a decrease in prices which will outprice meat alternatives and further entrench meat in African culture.
This is sort of the whole idea behind effective altruism anyway… Yes, it’s difficult, but if you think that animals are important enough that an additional couple weeks of suffering on farms matters in comparison to a $1,000 increase in annual income, then you should be donating to animal charities in the first place. If you compare the $3,000 it takes to save a life from malaria to the amount of advocacy and reform you can push for $3,000, it turns out that the animal-welfare opportunity cost of saving people is much greater than the animal-welfare direct cost of saving people. This comes from my own highly pessimistic, watered-down mental adjustments of the old vegan outreach ad calculations, but you can do it with other methods of animal charity and probably get similar results. So I think there is very little room in rational decision space for this concern to change where someone donates to—maybe if you care just a little bit about animals in comparison to humans, and are really unsure about the tradeoff, then the meat eater problem will tip the scales in favor of animal welfare donations.
Carl Shulman also objected to this argument along similar lines: http://effective-altruism.com/ea/rl/quantifying_the_impact_of_economic_growth_on_meat/60t
The good thing about bringing up this issue, which is the reason I would like to thank you for this post, is that it seems to help people sort out their beliefs and come closer to the realization that if they care about this then they should have been donating to animal welfare all along.
What I don’t want, of course, is for EAs to feel inclined to care less about the meat eater problem and animal charities simply because they’ve already been donating to poverty alleviation. This would be an understandable and predictable form of cognitive bias. So, check yourselves for bias, everyone!
One clarification: Norwood’s view, as indicated in the table above, is that broiler chickens (raised for meat) have a welfare score of +3 which means they have lives worth living. Norwood does believe that the breeders (parents) of broilers have a welfare score of −4 (better off dead), but the ratio of breeders to broilers is 1 to 144 so his conclusion is that eating chicken increases animal welfare.
That differs from egg laying hens. Norwood gives caged hens, which currently represent the vast majority of the egg laying hens in the US, a welfare score of −8.
FWIW, I tend to disagree with Norwood’s views about broiler chickens and believe they are probably better off dead.
Okay, interesting. I was thinking more about Brian Tomasik’s numbers on quantifying suffering. Yeah, if it is the case that chickens tend to enjoy lives then the sign of meat consumption in Africa could very well flip, as the majority of the marginal animal-days of farming are taken by chickens.
Thanks, Kbog! Responding to a few claims:
I agree we won’t ever have a single response, but that’s not my intention. I just think this is an important enough problem that far more EAs should be taking it seriously and considering it as they donate/work (the EA response).
On chickens—yes, most chicken lives currently are probably very net-negative. However, the authors’ numbers say cage-free and market (non-breeder) chickens raised for meat live net-positive lives. If you disagree with the authors’ numbers, that’s a totally fair argument and I’d love to hear it. However, given the huge movement towards cage-free just in the past year and the numbers above, we may have many chickens living net-positive lives in the immediate future. This seems important to me as we discuss predictions about the next 50-100 years.
Re: shaky ethical assumptions: I agree that this is controversial and a view not held by many people. I’d love to hear arguments about why this ethical view is not correct!
Thanks for your link, I meant to put it in my post but forgot.
I was using a broader “we” as in “humanity will develop meat alternatives,” not that any particular Effective Altruist will do it. I don’t much care who does it.
Okay, I understand.
However it’s worth keeping in mind that this is intensive agriculture in Africa. I’m not personally informed on what their factory farms are like, and we really don’t know how it could turn out in the long run. They might not be happy to adopt the same regulations that there are in the developed world (or they could be better, I suppose).
Unfortunately, I don’t have any relevant papers off the top of my head regarding ethics, but the repugnant conclusion, natalism and antinatalism, and animal rights would be good general areas to read into.