Thanks very much for doing this work. I’m glad to see other people taking an interest in historical evidence to inform questions about global priorities and to inform strategies for moral circle expansion.
I think this is an Impressive overview to have created in a short period of time. And I like the efforts to explicitly assess causation, resisting the ever-present temptation to tell a chronological narrative and assume causal relationships where there is little evidence to suggest them.
Most of Sentience Institute’s case studies to date have focused primarily on one country, or a comparison between two countries. I found the big picture, international consideration interesting. In general, I’m updating slightly towards the importance of international pressure in causing further change and a strategy of, as you suggest, concentrating resources in particular promising locations so that representatives of those countries might sooner become international advocates. I was finding tentative evidence for similar claims in my case study of the US anti-death penalty movement, which includes some comparison to Europe (and briefer comparison to the wider international situation). If you haven’t read that, you may find that interesting.
One other thing I was quite excited about is the following comment:
Political short-termism usually works against future generations, but it can work for future generations if politicians’ and lobbyists’ concern with the short term keeps them from strongly opposing commitments to one day care about future generations… For future generations, this might look like advocating for policies, such as committees or funds for future generations, that will not be implemented for a decade or more.
I wasn’t quite sure how this followed from the historical evidence that you examine, but I thought it was a cool argument, and something I hadn’t thought about explicitly in terms of how longtermist moral circle expansion efforts might look different from neartermist work on animal advocacy or other cause areas that relate to MCE. If we care about, say, maximising the chances that factory farming ends, rather than helping animals as much as possible within the next 10 (or 100) years, then we might be able to effectively trade immediacy for increased radicalism (or durability or some other key priority).
————
Of course, with a post of this size, there are a lot of nitpicks and comments it’s tempting to offer. But I’ll avoid those and focus on what I think is my most substantial concern. Also, I’ll note that I read this post spread over several evenings, so if this is a little incoherent or inaccurate at times, I apologise!
It seems like you’re pursuing two separate goals in this research:
Identifying/assessing factors influencing the success of ally-based social movements (i.e. social movements whose intended beneficiaries are not the same as the advocates) in order to draw strategic implications for advocacy for future generations, which is an ally-based social movement,
Identifying/assessing factors that affect the interests of future generations.
Ideally, I don’t think you would mix these, e.g. in the inclusion criteria (i.e. the selection of the case studies), e.g. in creating a single model that blurs the two goals.
In line with goal (1), you have included several ally-based social movements: anti-slavery (mostly free people advocating for / deciding on the fate of slaves) and environmentalism (present-day humans advocating for / deciding on the fate of the environment). However, you also include movements that are not ally-based — oppressed peoples seeking to empower themselves through democratisation and people advocating for regulations on genetic engineering in order to protect themselves and human society more broadly. Since no justification was provided for the inclusion of democratisation, I was initially confused by this choice, but some clarity was offered by the justification for the inclusion of genetic engineering:
The governance of genetic engineering has reduced a significant threat to future generations: certain engineered pathogens could bring about human extinction, keeping future generations from existing.
Hence, I infer that goal (2) influenced the case study selection. This is supported by the justification for the inclusion of the environmentalism movement, which seems to mix (1) and (2):
environmental advocates have achieved significant successes for future generations, as well as other entities that have no direct political power: ecosystems.
I think this critique of the methodology is quite important, because it 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.
Including a focus on movements that have only accidentally benefited future generations and then noting that the changes occurred mainly because they benefited powerful groups (present humans) rather than because people intended to help future generations seems tautological. (I think this might be a pretty uncharitable interpretation of your intentions; apologies if so, but hopefully it helps to make the point.) Hence, I think it’s more valuable to evaluate movements by their own goals, or at least by their effects on their intended beneficiaries (e.g. the environment rather than future generations for the environmentalism movement, e.g. present generations for genetic engineering).
By comparison, in selecting Sentience Institute’s case studies, we have focused on ally-based movements (with a secondary important consideration being chronological proximity). Hence, our case studies have been: Antislavery, anti-abortion, anti-death penalty, and prisoners’ rights (though the latter turned out to be less “ally-based” than I was expecting). I’ve also got one on the Fair Trade movement underway. These were chosen principally for comparability with the farmed animal movement but are similarly if not equally applicable to advocacy for future generations.
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.
————
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.
Thanks very much for doing this work. I’m glad to see other people taking an interest in historical evidence to inform questions about global priorities and to inform strategies for moral circle expansion.
I think this is an Impressive overview to have created in a short period of time. And I like the efforts to explicitly assess causation, resisting the ever-present temptation to tell a chronological narrative and assume causal relationships where there is little evidence to suggest them.
Most of Sentience Institute’s case studies to date have focused primarily on one country, or a comparison between two countries. I found the big picture, international consideration interesting. In general, I’m updating slightly towards the importance of international pressure in causing further change and a strategy of, as you suggest, concentrating resources in particular promising locations so that representatives of those countries might sooner become international advocates. I was finding tentative evidence for similar claims in my case study of the US anti-death penalty movement, which includes some comparison to Europe (and briefer comparison to the wider international situation). If you haven’t read that, you may find that interesting.
One other thing I was quite excited about is the following comment:
I wasn’t quite sure how this followed from the historical evidence that you examine, but I thought it was a cool argument, and something I hadn’t thought about explicitly in terms of how longtermist moral circle expansion efforts might look different from neartermist work on animal advocacy or other cause areas that relate to MCE. If we care about, say, maximising the chances that factory farming ends, rather than helping animals as much as possible within the next 10 (or 100) years, then we might be able to effectively trade immediacy for increased radicalism (or durability or some other key priority).
————
Of course, with a post of this size, there are a lot of nitpicks and comments it’s tempting to offer. But I’ll avoid those and focus on what I think is my most substantial concern. Also, I’ll note that I read this post spread over several evenings, so if this is a little incoherent or inaccurate at times, I apologise!
It seems like you’re pursuing two separate goals in this research:
Identifying/assessing factors influencing the success of ally-based social movements (i.e. social movements whose intended beneficiaries are not the same as the advocates) in order to draw strategic implications for advocacy for future generations, which is an ally-based social movement,
Identifying/assessing factors that affect the interests of future generations.
Ideally, I don’t think you would mix these, e.g. in the inclusion criteria (i.e. the selection of the case studies), e.g. in creating a single model that blurs the two goals.
In line with goal (1), you have included several ally-based social movements: anti-slavery (mostly free people advocating for / deciding on the fate of slaves) and environmentalism (present-day humans advocating for / deciding on the fate of the environment). However, you also include movements that are not ally-based — oppressed peoples seeking to empower themselves through democratisation and people advocating for regulations on genetic engineering in order to protect themselves and human society more broadly. Since no justification was provided for the inclusion of democratisation, I was initially confused by this choice, but some clarity was offered by the justification for the inclusion of genetic engineering:
Hence, I infer that goal (2) influenced the case study selection. This is supported by the justification for the inclusion of the environmentalism movement, which seems to mix (1) and (2):
I think this critique of the methodology is quite important, because it 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.
Including a focus on movements that have only accidentally benefited future generations and then noting that the changes occurred mainly because they benefited powerful groups (present humans) rather than because people intended to help future generations seems tautological. (I think this might be a pretty uncharitable interpretation of your intentions; apologies if so, but hopefully it helps to make the point.) Hence, I think it’s more valuable to evaluate movements by their own goals, or at least by their effects on their intended beneficiaries (e.g. the environment rather than future generations for the environmentalism movement, e.g. present generations for genetic engineering).
By comparison, in selecting Sentience Institute’s case studies, we have focused on ally-based movements (with a secondary important consideration being chronological proximity). Hence, our case studies have been: Antislavery, anti-abortion, anti-death penalty, and prisoners’ rights (though the latter turned out to be less “ally-based” than I was expecting). I’ve also got one on the Fair Trade movement underway. These were chosen principally for comparability with the farmed animal movement but are similarly if not equally applicable to advocacy for future generations.
Although I see this concern as weakening the case that you put forward, I do think weak evidence is useful, and I’ve still updated my views a little away from the tractability of changing the course of history and likelihood of further MCE.
Thanks again for this very cool research!
[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.