I wasn’t quite sure how this followed from the historical evidence that you examine, but I thought it was a cool argument… If we care about, say, maximising the chances that factory farming ends… then we might be able to effectively trade immediacy for increased radicalism (or durability...).
I’d argue that the historical evidence I looked at provides some support for this, although it’s not very decisive. Abolitionists sometimes (e.g. in New England colonies) succeeded in passing bills that would abolish slavery after a long time, e.g. bills that didn’t free any slaves but did ban the enslavement of slaves’ future children. That said, I tentatively buy the argument mostly on theoretical grounds.
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I’d summarize your main concern in the following way—please let me know if I’ve misunderstood (edit: removed block quote format; didn’t mean to imply this was a quote):
The report looks at different kinds of case studies: ally-based movements, self-advocacy movements, and movements that accidentally benefited excluded groups. However, for people interested in assessing the prospects of today’s ally-based movements, case studies of ally-based movements are much more relevant than case studies of other kinds of movements. Democratization was not an ally-based movement, while genetic engineering governance and environmentalism appeared most focused on benefiting current generations. So those case studies say little about how successful ally-based movements tend to be.
I mostly agree with this. However, it’s not clear to me how
this critique of the methodology… directly bears on one of the main arguments you advance in this research: “inclusive values” were not that important in driving change, which suggests that further MCE is not as likely as a simple extrapolation from the trend towards expanded moral circles in the past few centuries might imply.
If you’re optimistic about today’s ally-based movements because of historical successes of ally-based movements, then I agree that the argument I make shouldn’t diminish your optimism by much. Such optimism seems like legitimate, relatively fine-grained extrapolation (especially if these historical successes happened in the face of major, economically motivated opposition).
The kind of extrapolation I’m arguing against is (as you suggest) simpler extrapolation: assuming that policy change which has greatly benefited excluded groups has generally happened in ways that are very relevant for the future of totally voiceless groups.
Your focus on ally-based movements makes me think that you weren’t practicing this simple extrapolation. Still, before this research, I think I was doing that, and it seems that such reasoning is fairly common in (and out of) this community.
Selecting case studies with the broad criteria of “global policy shifts that greatly benefited excluded groups” seems to make a lot of sense for this particular goal: figuring out how legitimate it is to simply extrapolate from such policy shifts. This also seems to make more sense given my focus on outcomes, than it would if I were focused on movements.
As a last point, one other thing we agree on seems to be that developments like democratization largely weren’t ally-based movements. We might ask: why weren’t they? The fact that they weren’t—that it usually took revolutionary threats to bring about democracy—seems to be an argument against expecting much from human empathy and ethical reasoning when lots of money is at stake. In other words, ally-based movements’ relative absence from several of these case studies tells us something important about ally-based movements: apathy and limited civil liberties have often kept them from even emerging. (On the other hand, maybe the presence of large ally-based movements for e.g. farmed animals suggests that we’re in a very different situation.)
Curious to hear your thoughts! I’d also love to hear other constructive feedback/advice for doing better historical work in the future, if you have any off the top of your head.
Seems like we agree on a lot! I don’t think I wrote my summaries and your re-phrasings seem to me to be very similar to what I intended.
I agree that looking at causes and factors influencing “beneficial outcomes” is interesting and useful, just a slightly different purpose from looking at the causes and factors influencing the successes of ally-based movements.
<<I’d also love to hear other constructive feedback/advice for doing better historical work in the future, if you have any off the top of your head.>>
Some more “practical” tips which may or may not be useful and may or may not be obvious:
a few times I’ve come across numerous people asserting that a particular change was highly influential or that that X led to Y, but the citations trace back to inference from chronological order of events and maybe one or two supporting anecdotal comments. I’m generally pretty hesitant to make strong causal claims or to repeat causal claims made by others.
typing in the name of the movement you’re looking at plus the word “history” into Google Scholar and then going through the results seems to be a decent way to start.
I think you’ll often hit pretty rapidly diminishing returns on time invested after the first 2-5 books/articles you read on a particular topic, but you’ll keep finding useful information (of strategic importance) and occasionally changing your view on something you were quite confident about earlier for quite a long time after that.
sometimes research gets a little siloed by discipline, but historians, legal scholars, sociologists, political scientists, and economists often each have something to add to the understanding of a particular movement or case study.
[edited for relative brevity]
Thanks a lot for your thoughtful critique!
I’d argue that the historical evidence I looked at provides some support for this, although it’s not very decisive. Abolitionists sometimes (e.g. in New England colonies) succeeded in passing bills that would abolish slavery after a long time, e.g. bills that didn’t free any slaves but did ban the enslavement of slaves’ future children. That said, I tentatively buy the argument mostly on theoretical grounds.
————
I’d summarize your main concern in the following way—please let me know if I’ve misunderstood (edit: removed block quote format; didn’t mean to imply this was a quote):
The report looks at different kinds of case studies: ally-based movements, self-advocacy movements, and movements that accidentally benefited excluded groups. However, for people interested in assessing the prospects of today’s ally-based movements, case studies of ally-based movements are much more relevant than case studies of other kinds of movements. Democratization was not an ally-based movement, while genetic engineering governance and environmentalism appeared most focused on benefiting current generations. So those case studies say little about how successful ally-based movements tend to be.
I mostly agree with this. However, it’s not clear to me how
If you’re optimistic about today’s ally-based movements because of historical successes of ally-based movements, then I agree that the argument I make shouldn’t diminish your optimism by much. Such optimism seems like legitimate, relatively fine-grained extrapolation (especially if these historical successes happened in the face of major, economically motivated opposition).
The kind of extrapolation I’m arguing against is (as you suggest) simpler extrapolation: assuming that policy change which has greatly benefited excluded groups has generally happened in ways that are very relevant for the future of totally voiceless groups.
Your focus on ally-based movements makes me think that you weren’t practicing this simple extrapolation. Still, before this research, I think I was doing that, and it seems that such reasoning is fairly common in (and out of) this community.
Selecting case studies with the broad criteria of “global policy shifts that greatly benefited excluded groups” seems to make a lot of sense for this particular goal: figuring out how legitimate it is to simply extrapolate from such policy shifts. This also seems to make more sense given my focus on outcomes, than it would if I were focused on movements.
As a last point, one other thing we agree on seems to be that developments like democratization largely weren’t ally-based movements. We might ask: why weren’t they? The fact that they weren’t—that it usually took revolutionary threats to bring about democracy—seems to be an argument against expecting much from human empathy and ethical reasoning when lots of money is at stake. In other words, ally-based movements’ relative absence from several of these case studies tells us something important about ally-based movements: apathy and limited civil liberties have often kept them from even emerging. (On the other hand, maybe the presence of large ally-based movements for e.g. farmed animals suggests that we’re in a very different situation.)
Curious to hear your thoughts! I’d also love to hear other constructive feedback/advice for doing better historical work in the future, if you have any off the top of your head.
Seems like we agree on a lot! I don’t think I wrote my summaries and your re-phrasings seem to me to be very similar to what I intended.
I agree that looking at causes and factors influencing “beneficial outcomes” is interesting and useful, just a slightly different purpose from looking at the causes and factors influencing the successes of ally-based movements.
<<I’d also love to hear other constructive feedback/advice for doing better historical work in the future, if you have any off the top of your head.>>
I’m no expert and am hoping to start doing some more synthesis / comparison of our case studies so far soon, which is where some of these methodological considerations will come into play. Ive written about some of the methodological considerations here in some depth. https://www.sentienceinstitute.org/blog/what-can-the-farmed-animal-movement-learn-from-history
Some more “practical” tips which may or may not be useful and may or may not be obvious:
a few times I’ve come across numerous people asserting that a particular change was highly influential or that that X led to Y, but the citations trace back to inference from chronological order of events and maybe one or two supporting anecdotal comments. I’m generally pretty hesitant to make strong causal claims or to repeat causal claims made by others.
typing in the name of the movement you’re looking at plus the word “history” into Google Scholar and then going through the results seems to be a decent way to start.
I think you’ll often hit pretty rapidly diminishing returns on time invested after the first 2-5 books/articles you read on a particular topic, but you’ll keep finding useful information (of strategic importance) and occasionally changing your view on something you were quite confident about earlier for quite a long time after that.
sometimes research gets a little siloed by discipline, but historians, legal scholars, sociologists, political scientists, and economists often each have something to add to the understanding of a particular movement or case study.