I am adding here in anonymized form some feedback I received privately and my responses, since I think this may be helpful to others.
First, here is the feedback:
I was recently reminded of how important these considerations around moral uncertainty are when we had a discussion about this with X. Although all of us were interested in global health/âdevelopment, we ended up having quite different moral intuitions on saving lives vs. the value of improving them. These differences led us to choosing to work on very different projects with very different people than we would have chosen without these conversations.
I wanted to quickly share some reflections that I had on the article based on the thoughts that I have collected on this issue over the last couple of weeks (apologies for this being not super well laid out):
Before vs. after birth: in the article you seem to be making a distinction between GHD extending lives and AW reducing the number of animals suffering. In theory there are two ways to reduce the number of animals suffering, (a) by killing more of them faster and (b) by preventing them from coming into existence in the first place. Your argument seems mainly based on scenario (a). (a) also feels morally very different from (b) although they end up with the same number of sentient beings alive and suffering. I am wondering if this factor also makes up part of your preference for one over the other in addition to the arguments you are making? Translating this into the GHD space, family planning vs. letting very sick people die faster feels morally very different.
Non/âsomewhat-utilitarian perspectives: I would argue that there is quite a bit of moral uncertainty on measuring the value of life in utilitarian terms and what the unit of measurement should be. It also seems like most value systems/âreligions place quite a large value on saving a life and this seems to push against the general norm which might be an indicator that we are crossing some moral guardrails. I personally place quite a bit of value in my moral parliament on preference utilitarianism. This in turn leads me to believe that in theory people who perceive their lives as net negative could take their own life if they choose to do so (although there is quite a bit of complexity around that of course).
Letting the same argument lead us to GHD as the answer: One could argue that the unit of suffering could be made up by the following factors: [Sentience of experience x level of suffering of that experience]. The level of suffering for most animals seems a lot higher than the level of suffering for most people. Having said that, regarding sentience, the certainty is higher in humans than in most animals. Potentially, these factors could somewhat cancel themselves out? If you then want to apply the same framework (being uncertain if lives are net positive) to humans, that could lead to cause areas such as family planning and mental health.
Implications/â questions/â takeaways:
FAW implications: It seems like we are roughly working on the following categories in animal advocacy: (1) bringing less of them into existence and (2) making their lives better while they are in existence. If we have high certainty that their lives are net negative, should we look more into approaches that reduce their lifespan/âkilling large proportions of them faster?
GHD implications: If one would apply the same arguments to GHD, maybe focusing on family planning or mental health could be a good place to land? One could also argue that family planning would be the ultimate FAW intervention if it counterfactually reduces the number of people born.
And here is my response:
Thanks for sharing those reflections. Some thoughts/âresponses:
In the context of farmed animals, I think that âkilling more of them fasterâ could have quite a few negative flow-through effects. For instance, broiler chickens are bred exactly in a way that makes them grow and gain mass very quickly, which leads to a lot of welfare problems because their bodies cannot handle it. Also, I fear that just making this process more efficient will simply then lead to higher production capacity and even more animals being farmed (rebound effectâif something becomes more efficient, you donât necessarily reduce the effort spent on it (effort in this case being animal life years) but rather increase output). In theory, yes, killing animals faster could be an option. But I think it is better to pursue options that either lead to less animals being farmed or lead to better life quality. There might be some kind of intervention though that avoids the negative externalities I mentioned and Iâd be super interested to hear about such ideas.
Yes, 100% agreed on the non-utilitarian perspectives. I also wrote a post about this a while ago, that we should put some weight on âcommon sense moralityâ. I think âsaving a life is goodâ is about as common sense as it gets.
On the point about âpeople who perceive their lives as net negative could take their own lifeâ, I would refer to the sections where I outline that I am unsure whether we can accurately evaluate the value of our own lives. I think we have very basic instincts that lead us to strongly avoid the suicide option, whether that is rational or not. Itâs also very important to think about the probably extremely negative effects of someone taking their own life on their environment (family, friends, etc.). So I think there are very good reasons that there are strong social norms against this and I wouldnât want to change that.
Yes, I agree that we should also apply uncertainty to the sentience of animals. But most AW interventions simply have way stronger welfare effects (excluding the uncertainty around their sentience) that you would have to be extremely uncertain about animal sentience. I donât think that is warranted. I think Rethink Prioritiesâ work on this quite clearly favours AW interventions, even if you factor in significant uncertainty about animal sentience (see their post for the debate week here). As I wrote under âContext and epistemic statusâ this is closer to the actual reason why I prioritise AW over GHD.
I strongly agree with you about family planning. I think that these interventions often have positive impacts on the lives already lived, they address the meat eater problem, and they also hedge our bets against the uncertainty that we may be unintentionally increasing the amount of net negative lives on the planet. I love the work Family Empowerment Media is doing, for example.
I am adding here in anonymized form some feedback I received privately and my responses, since I think this may be helpful to others.
First, here is the feedback:
And here is my response: