I have been disappointed by the support someEAs have expressed for recent activist actions at Ridglan Farms. I share othersâ outrage at the outcome of the state animal cruelty investigation, which found serious animal cruelty law violations but led to a settlement that still permits Ridglan to sell beagles through July and to continue in-house experimentation. But I personally think the tactics used in the recent open rescues, including property damage and forced entry to remove animals, violate reasonable moral bounds on what actions are permissible in response to the belief that a serious harm is occurring. My views here stem from contractualist views of democratic legitimacy and from concerns about the non-universalizability of principles that justify lawbreaking, though I think a purely act utilitarian calculus also supports them.
Regarding universalizability, in a society where many people believe that different forms of irreparable harm are occurring (e.g. viewing abortion as murder, climate change as destroying the sacredness of the natural world, immigration as ending western civilization), I worry that moral principles that allow for significant lawbreaking when one believes that irreparable harm is occurring could easily lead to great damage if broadly followed (consider for example what it would be like to live in a country where hundreds of activists were regularly smashing their way into abortion clinics, energy companies, and refugee assistance nonprofits with sledgehammers and crowbars). Regarding the legitimacy of the law, I think reasonable contractualist views can give us obligations to follow the law when the processes by which the law is determined are legitimate, and that democracies with universal suffrage qualify as such (even granting that certain groups such as animals and future generations are impossible to enfranchise).[1] Therefore, I think that if we are trying to make decisions under moral uncertainty and give meaningful credences to rule utilitarian and contractualist views, we ought to reject the kinds of lawbreaking done by the Ridglan activists.
Moreover, I think that even if one rejects this kind of moral uncertainty-based reasoning and is a pure act utilitarian, rejecting lawbreaking in the western democratic context is still a relatively robust decision procedure under epistemic uncertainty. Broadly-followed norms against lawbreaking would have prevented EAâs worst scandal (FTX) without preventing EAâs most significant successes (cage-free reforms, evidence-based health interventions in LMICs). And while there are historical examples of illegal civil disobedience clearly producing good outcomes, I donât think these generalize well to the type of lawbreaking under consideration here. The clearest such historical cases are ones where a disenfranchised group of people broke laws that directly enforced their own exclusion from political participation or basic legal personhood. These cases are self-limiting (and thus pass reasonable tests of universalizability) since the principles justifying such lawbreaking achieve their own obsolescence once participation is granted.[2] Itâs much harder to find historical cases of property-damaging civil disobedience occurring in a democracy with universal suffrage that, in hindsight, appear clearly both effective and in service of a good cause. DxEâs own history is instructive hereâtheir work over the last decade has led to many criminal convictions among its members, as well as several organizational scandals. But their record of concrete wins for animals is at best small-scale and mixed, especially compared to the successes of groups that have purely used lawful tactics like ballot initiatives and corporate campaigns.
One last point in the utilitarian calculus, this time on the more object-level cost-benefit calculation, is that I think EAs who embrace these kinds of illegal tactics may be underestimating the downside risks of endorsing criminal activity. I think there is a set of donors and volunteers that are happy to contribute to legal activism but who would be concerned about being associated with lawbreaking (at a minimum, I would consider myself to be in this group). If people in leadership roles within the EA/âEAA ecosystem endorse illegal action, any foreseen benefits may easily be swamped by the harms of driving away risk-averse donors.
None of this is to say that Ridglanâs treatment of animals is justified, or that the lack of state enforcement against Ridglan for their serious violations of animal cruelty laws is acceptable. However, these harms donât justify using tactics that are neither clearly effective nor robustly permissible across moral views.
I donât mean to say that literally all lawbreaking is unjustified in a democracy. In particular, if one thinks that a law in the US is unconstitutional, breaking it may be required to gain standing for a legal challenge. But this implies a narrow exception for doing the minimum amount of lawbreaking required to obtain standing; it doesnât imply that the tactics in question at Ridglan are permissible.
Note that this self-limiting principle only holds when applied to groups of humans denied suffrage. It doesnât extend to cases like animals, where suffrage isnât possible and thereâs no natural bound on how many such groups might be invoked to justify lawbreaking.
Great points. Thank you for writing this up. I think itâs a strong and fair critique of the strategy of actions like this, and would love to see more discussion at this high level of context and analysis.
(I expect you understand the legal arguments at play, but I do want to reemphasize for other readers that I stand behind the ultimate legality of all actions I took at the first Ridglan rescue in March, using a basic necessity defense argument: âyouâd break a window to save a dog stuck in locked car on a hot dayâ, e.g., sometimes property damage is legal to avoid a foreseeable imminent harm. We can argue whether the harms at Ridglan are foreseeable or imminent, but I believe they were and thatâs the basis for why I chose to do what I did. I wasnât there for the one last weekend in April and donât have a settled opinion about it yet.)
To respond to part of your very good post, I feel that we should be able to discuss and analyze nonviolent direct action and other forms of civil disobedience in EA spaces. I engaged in this action in part because I think EA folks donât think about this kind of thing enough and I want to raise the salience of civil disobedience, at least as at least a secondary or tertiary sort of thing that EA should have as levers. I donât think it is ever likely to be primary and I donât want it to be, but I also donât want it to be ignored and I think it largely has been around here.
A chunk of your argument boils down to whatâs good for the overall EA brand. I strongly agree that there are bright lines I would not want the community to cross (e.g. endorsing or promoting violence). I think nonviolent direct action falls on the âOKâ side of the line for me, but I agree there is probably a useful discussion to be had here, and am open to more arguments on this.
What would you say in response to a conservative abortion clinic protestor who makes the same argument youâre making? âIt was ethically necessary for me to kidnap the doctor who was about to start their shift at Planned Parenthood. Yes, itâs normally illegal to kidnap people, but those babies* were in imminent danger of being killed by the doctor, and itâs permissible to break laws to avoid a forseeable imminent harm.â (*The conservative protestor believes that fetuses have equal moral status to babies, the same way you and I believe that pigs have equal moral status to dogs.)
A better analogy of non violent direct action would be breaking in to disable the clinicâs capabilities to provide abortions (without harming anybody).
In this case, the protesters would be subject to the same penalties under the law that the Ridglan protesters are. That being said, there is a case that what is happening to the dogs is illegal (311 counts of animal cruelty documented already). Iâm wary of an appeal to authority bias hereâjust because they are not enforcing the law doesnât mean what Ridglan is doing is legal. As pointed out, the necessity defense is being tested here, and has reason for consideration.
The clearest such historical cases are ones where a disenfranchised group of people broke laws that directly enforced their own exclusion from political participation or basic legal personhood. These cases are self-limiting (and thus pass reasonable tests of universalizability) since the principles justifying such lawbreaking achieve their own obsolescence once participation is granted.
I worry this approach excludes the most vulnerable (those who cannot meaningfully participate in political life, like human babies and animals), and focuses on less fundamental rights: I think protection from torture is more urgent than legal personhood.
Why would women be justified in engaging in civil disobedience to get the vote for themselves, but not be justified in engaging in civil disobedience to rescue babies from Josef Mengele?
I agree that thereâs a sense in which the constraints Iâm talking about focus on less fundamental rights. But I think the more important sense is that they focus on preserving a viable process for living together in a society with people of greatly differing moral views. That doesnât mean we have to leave behind other vulnerable groups, just that we have to try and bring about change for them through democratic means.
Regarding the Mengele example, I think itâs disanalogous because it took place in a dictatorship, where the rule utilitarian and contractualist constraints on action look very different.[1] Iâm really probing at what constraints EAs should have when acting in the context of a democracy (including a flawed one), not what behavior would be correct in Nazi Germany.
Note that the act utilitarian calculus also changes in a dictatorship too. Following the law in a dictatorship is unlikely to be a successful decision procedure for maximizing utility under epistemic uncertainty.
What if âprotecting innocent sentient beings from tortureâ is a higher moral priority than âliving together in a society with people of greatly differing moral viewsâ?
Iâm sceptical that the distinction between flawed democracy and dictatorship is clean enough to justify civil disobedience on behalf of others only in the latter (if this is what youâre saying). Would you support rescuing American children from deliberate infection with hepatitis at Willowbrook in the 1960s?
On your first question, I think your framing isnât addressing what happens if other people think the same way. The equilibrium where everyone with strong moral convictions feels licensed to break laws doesnât seem to me like itâs better for vulnerable groups, just more chaotic. I think that to some extent youâre proposing smashing the âdefectâ button in a prisonerâs dilemma and hoping the other side doesnât do the same.
On your second, I agree that itâs not a clear line between flawed democracy and dictatorship, but in the US today this isnât really relevant.
On your third, I think the Willowbrook example is worth thinking about more carefully. As I understand the history, the binding constraint at Willowbrook wasnât legal. Many parents and guardians retained custody and could have legally removed their children. The constraint was that families without resources didnât have a better option. And in the end, legal activism was able to marshal those resources, albeit much more slowly than I would have wished.
I think that to some extent youâre proposing smashing the âdefectâ button in a prisonerâs dilemma and hoping the other side doesnât do the same.
Iâve been pondering this. I think your button-smashing characterisation is basically accurate, and it is a leap of faith that those who engage in civil disobedience make: an appeal to the conscience of society, the jury etc..
Youâre right to say that one way to think about universalisability is âif itâs okay for me to break the law to achieve what I consider to be a moral goal here, why canât everyone break the law to achieve their own moral goals?â. But another way to think about universalisability is to go âif I were the one in Ridglan /â Unit 731 /â Willowbrook, what actions would I support to end my suffering?â
I donât know whether it would be illegal for parents to break their children out of Willowbrook, but for the purposes of this question assume it was.
For what itâs worth, Iâm surprised that people who think abortion is murder arenât doing more illegal stuff to destroy clinics.
Also for what itâs worth, I think factory farming is so bad that itâs by far the greatest injustice caused by humans in history. Justifiable wars have been fought for orders of magnitude less important things.
consider for example what it would be like to live in a country where hundreds of activists were regularly smashing their way into abortion clinics, energy companies, and refugee assistance nonprofits with sledgehammers and crowbars
I think this is a good/âfine question and the answer is âtheyâll go to jail and then stopâ. I think maybe youâre conflating this question and the following:
â consider for example what it would be like to live in a country where hundreds of activists were regularly smashing their way into abortion clinics, energy companies, and refugee assistance nonprofits with sledgehammers and crowbars and also we live in a tenuous society with only vigilante or no law enforcement
Plausibly the morally correct answers are different. If your policy might cause total collapse of social order (irl, not in a nested thought experiment), maybe you shouldnât do the nonviolent disruptive protest, but if you live in the real US where you largely internalize the negative consequences and others are similarly dissuaded and you still find the ~1st order effect worthwhile, then go right ahead
Itâs like a sin tax (not a perfect term here tbc) - you want some amount of Pigouvian tax on the thing that youâre worried is not generalizable (or good if it generalizes). If you find that the action is worth it to you tax included, then godspeed. It would be fallacious to say âin addition to the correctly priced carbon tax youâd be paying on the gas, consider your impact on the environment by drivingâ
I think we disagree about whether the harms of lawbreaking are mostly internalized. The degradation of social trust in the deliberative process seems bigger to me than the consequences to the individual? As an analogy, shoplifting is an ordinary crime where individuals do face real consequences, but the diffuse harms to consumers and businesses (goods locked up, stores closing) are large and dominate the social calculus.
The Pigouvian tax comparison doesnât quite work here because paying a tax contributes to public resources that can directly address the harms of the act or improve welfare elsewhere, making the net outcome neutral. Going to jail doesnât repair damaged property or restore trust in the democratic process.
1. I think we disagree about whether the harms of lawbreaking are mostly internalized. The degradation of social trust in the deliberative process seems bigger to me than the consequences to the individual? As an analogy, shoplifting is an ordinary crime where individuals do face real consequences, but the diffuse harms to consumers and businesses (goods locked up, stores closing) are large and dominate the social calculus.
I donât think we should speak of âlawbreakingâ as a general case in this context; some argue that shoplifting is too lightly punished/âprosecuted (especially in eg liberal US cities), but even assuming thatâs true, the question remains as to whether the more specific category of say âproperty damage via protestâ is punished too lightly, too harshely, or about right.
My best guess is that itâs not âtoo lightlyâ from a purely normie âlaw and order and human welfare right nowâ perspective. Many people believe moral-ish things strongly and donât find property destruction immoral, but far far fewer actually destroy the property of those they think are doing something immoral. This seems like good evidence that the expected punishment (including via informal mechanisms) is not too light.
2. The Pigouvian tax comparison doesnât quite work here because paying a tax contributes to public resources that can directly address the harms of the act or improve welfare elsewhere, making the net outcome neutral. Going to jail doesnât repair damaged property or restore trust in the democratic process.
I think we are/âwere both sort failing to decouple Pigouvian taxes and restitution. My understanding about both how the term âPigouvian taxâ is used in econ and about the real world is that even without restitution, you can get to the socially optimal level of some bad with a tax alone and no transfer to victims.
I think the motivating intuition is that the tax is affecting the amount of eg âsocial disorderâ supplied, but the tax revenue is just a transfer of economic power from one party to anotherâitâs not creating real wealth that can then be given to the victims. So the same amount of real wealth exists before and after the transfer and a separate question is what to do with that wealth given the state of the world (eg you might think that the very well-off who are harmed slightly by some negative externality, say ambient noise, should not be given restitution and a tax on decibels should really flow to some other party like the very poor)
Many people believe moral-ish things strongly and donât find property destruction immoral, but far far fewer actually destroy the property of those they think are doing something immoral. This seems like good evidence that the expected punishment (including via informal mechanisms) is not too light.
I think that this is at best weak evidence. Activistsâ decisions of whether or not to commit crimes are surely influenced by norms, not just the expected intensity of punishment. The recent history of climate activism in the UK is a good example. As far as I can tell, nothing changed about UK law to cause the rapid rise of high-profile lawbreaking by Extinction Rebellion and then Just Stop Oil in the 2018-2023 timeframe. The UK government did in the end stop the activists through increased legal penalties (going from typically no prison time for nonviolent lawbreaking when motivated by ethical concerns to 4+ year prison sentences becoming common for the more serious cases). But something other than threat of prison time was keeping climate activists from using these tactics in the early-to-mid 2010s.
On (2):
I agree that a Pigouvian tax doesnât require restitution (as I indicated with including âimprove welfare elsewhereâ as something that can be done with the tax revenue). But the classical formulation (in which the optimal tax rate fully eliminates deadweight losses) does require that a dollar of consumer/âproducer surplus and a dollar of tax revenue produce the same social welfare. If a dollar of tax revenue produces less social welfare, then the deadweight loss cannot be eliminated.
To make this more concrete, I want to dig into an example based on your comment about driving in a world with a carbon tax. Consider taking a long trip by car rather than train under 3 different taxation schemes. Letâs assume you value the convenience of the car over the train at $101, the social cost of your carbon emissions is $100, and that all consumers in this world have identical marginal utilities of money.
World A: No carbon tax. You take the trip, gaining benefits you value at +$101 while causing social costs of -$100. In this world, we might say that youâve done the right thing by driving (since this maximizes utility overall), but that for fairness reasons you might be obligated to donate some money to others, since your utility-maximizing decision also acted as a transfer from others to you.
World B: Carbon tax of $100 on the trip, returned as an equal dividend to all people. You take the trip, gaining net benefits after the tax of $1. The rest of society ends up net neutral (though there might still be particular winners and losers). In this world, youâve done the right thing by driving, and have no further obligations.
World C: Carbon tax of $100 on the trip, which the government will use to buy $100 of consumer goods and dump them down an old mineshaft. You take the trip, gaining net benefits after the tax of $1. The rest of society still experiences the social costs of -$100, which the tax doesnât do anything to reduce. In this world, youâve clearly done the wrong thing by driving, since you caused a net utility loss of $99.
My claim is that doing crimes is similar to deciding to drive in World C. The âtaxâ on crime is imprisoning the criminal, which causes them to pay large costs in terms of their lost freedom and ability to work and doesnât do anything to benefit society. And in fact itâs worse than World C, since the rest of society needs to pay the additional costs of arresting, prosecuting, and jailing them. So I think the Pigouvian tax analogy does not hold here, and itâs wrong to think that the harms of crime are properly internalized.
Not addressing every point but I think in some respects I agree that crime is C but then how much benefit the criminal gets/âvalues is a case-by-case question, and we canât just assume that in the irl case at hand that the benefit is (in the analogy) $101 instead of $1000
Thereâs real deadweight loss from the mineshaft drop/âspending money on prisons, but also potentially real value to be gained from the crime itself (canonical case = speeding bc wife is going in to labor)
Remember, property damage as activism isnât like simple theftâthe property damage can cost society amount $X and benefits of activism feature can separately benefit society or be valued by the perpetrator at any other number $Y
I see what youâre getting at here. But if we agree that the externalities of crime arenât internalized, then I think weâre just back in the position of the original post. You think the act utilitarian calculus checks you, Iâm both skeptical that it does and think that there are non-act-utilitarian reasons why we ought to avoid lawbreaking.
Iâve been somewhat disappointed in reading this post. But as I know some folks I like are reading it, I feel the need to share a few thoughts as a legal scholar and theorist. Your post I think demonstrates some misunderstandings about the nature of law.
1. You seem to misunderstand contractarianism, by making it an argument for quietism, as well as the nature of law in a democracy. We donât agree to many laws as a society; most extant laws are conditions that no one ever agrees on. They are traditions. Take property law â no one ever voted to make animals property. Thatâs an inherited concept. There is a difference between a law that is democratically enacted, and a vestige of the English common law. The same goes for trespass, a common law principle. Moreover, no contractarian worth her salt is going to claim you can never break an unjust law. Going back to Aquinas, there is broad agreement that sometimes breaking an unjust law is morally appropriate, or at least defensible.
2. No one could reasonably argue this tactic is universalizable. It is strategic â it is a non-universalizable tactic meant to create significant attention and pressure for change toward universalizable norms. And more â the argument that if they do it, everyone will, can be a dangerous slippery slope. Itâs infeasible for everyone to do this: they have jobs. More important, I would very much caution against that kind of thinking. It has been used to justify atrocities in the past. Take slaveholders: they used that kind of argument to push back against slave rebellionsâit would destroy the antebellum south, socially and economically. That is not an argument worth keeping. I am not defending the Ridglan approach, but I am cautioning against these types dismissals of what they are doing.
3. Historically, you seem to again misunderstand the nature of law. Slaves were considered property, and their rebellions certainly damaged their property status. They also moved the north toward abolitionism. Elements of the civil rights movement and the labor movement in the United States engaged in tactics that damaged property and yet ultimately won reforms. Property is a conventionâit should not interfere with moral obligation and serious moral intervention.
Iâll just mention one thing about donors. Doing what is right sometimes risks making certain people unhappy. Thatâs why social movements shouldnât rely on the whims of wealthy individuals. The right donors will see the right priorities for what they are. The priority should be supporting one another within a social movement.
Thanks for engaging with the post! You made a lot of different points, so Iâll do my best to separate them out and consider them one-by-one:
(1)
Iâm not making an argument for quietism. Saying that we have an obligation to follow the law is compatible with having obligations (even extraordinarily strong ones) to use non-illegal means to combat injustice (e.g. by advocating for changes to laws).
Itâs a genuinely interesting point that many of our laws are inherited traditions, rather than the direct product of the democratic process. However, I donât think thatâs a strong argument in this specific case. The US has had true universal suffrage for more than 60 years, and in that time Congress and state legislative bodies have passed many laws related to the treatment of animals and the criminality of trespassing. Under any reasonable interpretation of democratic legitimacy, a democratically-elected legislative body specifically dealing with an issue and choosing to pass laws that accept the underlying common law principles and add specific penalties, related rules etc., should confer it.
I donât disagree that a reasonable contractualist would think that there are cases where it would be justified to break an unjust law. The core question is whether the required conditions hold in this case. Democratic legitimacy is one important part of that, since reasonable contractualists generally would give some weight to whether laws resulted from a just process. A point I didnât make in the OP, but I think is relevant here, is that even if you disagree about the democratic legitimacy argument, I think the specific nature of the lawbreaking here falls outside many notions of justifiable civil disobedience. Thatâs because the Ridglan rescues involved breaking a law to achieve a non-symbolic end (rescuing the dogs), not merely symbolically challenging a law by breaking it.
(2)
I think youâre moving between a couple different notions of universalizability here. Itâs true literally everyone breaking and entering in service of moral aims is a far-fetched idea. But itâs still coherent to ask whether a tactic would have positive or negative effects if commonly used across social movements. Democratic societies can and have experienced periods of widespread civil unrest.
I agree that a similar argument could have been deployed against rebellion by enslaved people, but I think the analogy is weak because of the specifics. Slave rebellions occurred in a society where the affected population was excluded from political participation, and the principles justifying them were self-limiting in the way I described in the OP. The current case is different: the affected parties (animals) canât be enfranchised, but the human population that cares about animal welfare has full political participation, and the legal channels for advancing animal welfare are open and have produced incremental gains over recent decades (most notably the transition of nearly half of the US egg supply to cage free). The bar for lawbreaking is plausibly higher when those channels are more responsive than when theyâre closed.
(3)
I think youâre being too quick to dismiss property as being something that can drive moral obligation. There are clearly many cases where we are obligated to not destroy or interfere with othersâ property, as is obvious in cases where vulnerable groupsâ property rights are infringed. The way Iâd think about this is that obligations to protect property are stronger the more just a societyâs system of property rights is. In a more just society, property destruction not only weakens otherwise-good norms, but is also more likely to be the result of a miscalculation: if the base rate of unjust property ownership is lower, then any given case of someone believing property destruction is justified is more likely to be wrong. So both the rule-following considerations and the act-utility considerations point toward higher property protection in more just societies.
(4)
I disagree that the priority should be supporting one another within a social movement; the priority should be trying to do the most good. Donor considerations reasonably impact that calculation, both because money is a necessary ingredient for advocacy and because donor preferences may reflect genuine moral views that are worth considering. But I do also agree that it can be worth trying to convince donors of an approach rather than just deferring to their preexisting preferences.
State laws are path dependent, and rely very often on common law principles and concepts uncritically applied. That does not equate to democratic legitimacy for every codified version of property and criminal law.
I think we have fundamentally incompatible views on the appropriate frame to apply to balancing questionsâI am not at all a utilitarian, and I donât think you should be either. But Iâll set that aside.
You again seem to conflate lawbreaking with immorality. Please donât do that. Rosa Parks broke the law. So did the Ridglan rescuers. That doesnât make what they did wrong. Thatâs a separate question. The symbolic/ânon-symbolic distinction is not one I find compelling.
You seem to see humans and animals as categorically different from a legal perspective. Humans care for animal welfare but animals have no voice. I fundamentally disagree â animals should have rights, including a right to a voice. That means they should have institutions that represent their interests. So there is no fundamental difference between the slave revolts and what people are trying to do here for animals in terms of voice, as their representatives. I suggest Zoopolis on this point.
Your articulation of the EA bias toward donors is particularly problematic. Successful social movements historically have not relied on extremely wealthy individuals for funding. Your concern to persuade donors is troubling. You should be worried about persuading people, not persuading donors. Lots of people are going to be needed to change social perspectives and institutions around animals. A social narrative that focuses on âearning to giveâ or major donors is likely to be unmoored from a durable movement.
Since you still state that in some instances, some careful lawbreaking can be justified in the pursuit of a just outcome, perhaps you could spend more of the post detailing why you thought lawbreaking was a bad call in this specific instance? This is not clear to me from reading your note.
I have been disappointed by the support some EAs have expressed for recent activist actions at Ridglan Farms. I share othersâ outrage at the outcome of the state animal cruelty investigation, which found serious animal cruelty law violations but led to a settlement that still permits Ridglan to sell beagles through July and to continue in-house experimentation. But I personally think the tactics used in the recent open rescues, including property damage and forced entry to remove animals, violate reasonable moral bounds on what actions are permissible in response to the belief that a serious harm is occurring. My views here stem from contractualist views of democratic legitimacy and from concerns about the non-universalizability of principles that justify lawbreaking, though I think a purely act utilitarian calculus also supports them.
Regarding universalizability, in a society where many people believe that different forms of irreparable harm are occurring (e.g. viewing abortion as murder, climate change as destroying the sacredness of the natural world, immigration as ending western civilization), I worry that moral principles that allow for significant lawbreaking when one believes that irreparable harm is occurring could easily lead to great damage if broadly followed (consider for example what it would be like to live in a country where hundreds of activists were regularly smashing their way into abortion clinics, energy companies, and refugee assistance nonprofits with sledgehammers and crowbars). Regarding the legitimacy of the law, I think reasonable contractualist views can give us obligations to follow the law when the processes by which the law is determined are legitimate, and that democracies with universal suffrage qualify as such (even granting that certain groups such as animals and future generations are impossible to enfranchise).[1] Therefore, I think that if we are trying to make decisions under moral uncertainty and give meaningful credences to rule utilitarian and contractualist views, we ought to reject the kinds of lawbreaking done by the Ridglan activists.
Moreover, I think that even if one rejects this kind of moral uncertainty-based reasoning and is a pure act utilitarian, rejecting lawbreaking in the western democratic context is still a relatively robust decision procedure under epistemic uncertainty. Broadly-followed norms against lawbreaking would have prevented EAâs worst scandal (FTX) without preventing EAâs most significant successes (cage-free reforms, evidence-based health interventions in LMICs). And while there are historical examples of illegal civil disobedience clearly producing good outcomes, I donât think these generalize well to the type of lawbreaking under consideration here. The clearest such historical cases are ones where a disenfranchised group of people broke laws that directly enforced their own exclusion from political participation or basic legal personhood. These cases are self-limiting (and thus pass reasonable tests of universalizability) since the principles justifying such lawbreaking achieve their own obsolescence once participation is granted.[2] Itâs much harder to find historical cases of property-damaging civil disobedience occurring in a democracy with universal suffrage that, in hindsight, appear clearly both effective and in service of a good cause. DxEâs own history is instructive hereâtheir work over the last decade has led to many criminal convictions among its members, as well as several organizational scandals. But their record of concrete wins for animals is at best small-scale and mixed, especially compared to the successes of groups that have purely used lawful tactics like ballot initiatives and corporate campaigns.
One last point in the utilitarian calculus, this time on the more object-level cost-benefit calculation, is that I think EAs who embrace these kinds of illegal tactics may be underestimating the downside risks of endorsing criminal activity. I think there is a set of donors and volunteers that are happy to contribute to legal activism but who would be concerned about being associated with lawbreaking (at a minimum, I would consider myself to be in this group). If people in leadership roles within the EA/âEAA ecosystem endorse illegal action, any foreseen benefits may easily be swamped by the harms of driving away risk-averse donors.
None of this is to say that Ridglanâs treatment of animals is justified, or that the lack of state enforcement against Ridglan for their serious violations of animal cruelty laws is acceptable. However, these harms donât justify using tactics that are neither clearly effective nor robustly permissible across moral views.
I donât mean to say that literally all lawbreaking is unjustified in a democracy. In particular, if one thinks that a law in the US is unconstitutional, breaking it may be required to gain standing for a legal challenge. But this implies a narrow exception for doing the minimum amount of lawbreaking required to obtain standing; it doesnât imply that the tactics in question at Ridglan are permissible.
Note that this self-limiting principle only holds when applied to groups of humans denied suffrage. It doesnât extend to cases like animals, where suffrage isnât possible and thereâs no natural bound on how many such groups might be invoked to justify lawbreaking.
Great points. Thank you for writing this up. I think itâs a strong and fair critique of the strategy of actions like this, and would love to see more discussion at this high level of context and analysis.
(I expect you understand the legal arguments at play, but I do want to reemphasize for other readers that I stand behind the ultimate legality of all actions I took at the first Ridglan rescue in March, using a basic necessity defense argument: âyouâd break a window to save a dog stuck in locked car on a hot dayâ, e.g., sometimes property damage is legal to avoid a foreseeable imminent harm. We can argue whether the harms at Ridglan are foreseeable or imminent, but I believe they were and thatâs the basis for why I chose to do what I did. I wasnât there for the one last weekend in April and donât have a settled opinion about it yet.)
To respond to part of your very good post, I feel that we should be able to discuss and analyze nonviolent direct action and other forms of civil disobedience in EA spaces. I engaged in this action in part because I think EA folks donât think about this kind of thing enough and I want to raise the salience of civil disobedience, at least as at least a secondary or tertiary sort of thing that EA should have as levers. I donât think it is ever likely to be primary and I donât want it to be, but I also donât want it to be ignored and I think it largely has been around here.
A chunk of your argument boils down to whatâs good for the overall EA brand. I strongly agree that there are bright lines I would not want the community to cross (e.g. endorsing or promoting violence). I think nonviolent direct action falls on the âOKâ side of the line for me, but I agree there is probably a useful discussion to be had here, and am open to more arguments on this.
What would you say in response to a conservative abortion clinic protestor who makes the same argument youâre making? âIt was ethically necessary for me to kidnap the doctor who was about to start their shift at Planned Parenthood. Yes, itâs normally illegal to kidnap people, but those babies* were in imminent danger of being killed by the doctor, and itâs permissible to break laws to avoid a forseeable imminent harm.â (*The conservative protestor believes that fetuses have equal moral status to babies, the same way you and I believe that pigs have equal moral status to dogs.)
Kidnapping somebody would be a violent action.
A better analogy of non violent direct action would be breaking in to disable the clinicâs capabilities to provide abortions (without harming anybody).
In this case, the protesters would be subject to the same penalties under the law that the Ridglan protesters are. That being said, there is a case that what is happening to the dogs is illegal (311 counts of animal cruelty documented already). Iâm wary of an appeal to authority bias hereâjust because they are not enforcing the law doesnât mean what Ridglan is doing is legal. As pointed out, the necessity defense is being tested here, and has reason for consideration.
I worry this approach excludes the most vulnerable (those who cannot meaningfully participate in political life, like human babies and animals), and focuses on less fundamental rights: I think protection from torture is more urgent than legal personhood.
Why would women be justified in engaging in civil disobedience to get the vote for themselves, but not be justified in engaging in civil disobedience to rescue babies from Josef Mengele?
I agree that thereâs a sense in which the constraints Iâm talking about focus on less fundamental rights. But I think the more important sense is that they focus on preserving a viable process for living together in a society with people of greatly differing moral views. That doesnât mean we have to leave behind other vulnerable groups, just that we have to try and bring about change for them through democratic means.
Regarding the Mengele example, I think itâs disanalogous because it took place in a dictatorship, where the rule utilitarian and contractualist constraints on action look very different.[1] Iâm really probing at what constraints EAs should have when acting in the context of a democracy (including a flawed one), not what behavior would be correct in Nazi Germany.
Note that the act utilitarian calculus also changes in a dictatorship too. Following the law in a dictatorship is unlikely to be a successful decision procedure for maximizing utility under epistemic uncertainty.
What if âprotecting innocent sentient beings from tortureâ is a higher moral priority than âliving together in a society with people of greatly differing moral viewsâ?
Iâm sceptical that the distinction between flawed democracy and dictatorship is clean enough to justify civil disobedience on behalf of others only in the latter (if this is what youâre saying). Would you support rescuing American children from deliberate infection with hepatitis at Willowbrook in the 1960s?
Taking each of these points in turn:
On your first question, I think your framing isnât addressing what happens if other people think the same way. The equilibrium where everyone with strong moral convictions feels licensed to break laws doesnât seem to me like itâs better for vulnerable groups, just more chaotic. I think that to some extent youâre proposing smashing the âdefectâ button in a prisonerâs dilemma and hoping the other side doesnât do the same.
On your second, I agree that itâs not a clear line between flawed democracy and dictatorship, but in the US today this isnât really relevant.
On your third, I think the Willowbrook example is worth thinking about more carefully. As I understand the history, the binding constraint at Willowbrook wasnât legal. Many parents and guardians retained custody and could have legally removed their children. The constraint was that families without resources didnât have a better option. And in the end, legal activism was able to marshal those resources, albeit much more slowly than I would have wished.
Iâve been pondering this. I think your button-smashing characterisation is basically accurate, and it is a leap of faith that those who engage in civil disobedience make: an appeal to the conscience of society, the jury etc..
Youâre right to say that one way to think about universalisability is âif itâs okay for me to break the law to achieve what I consider to be a moral goal here, why canât everyone break the law to achieve their own moral goals?â. But another way to think about universalisability is to go âif I were the one in Ridglan /â Unit 731 /â Willowbrook, what actions would I support to end my suffering?â
I donât know whether it would be illegal for parents to break their children out of Willowbrook, but for the purposes of this question assume it was.
For what itâs worth, Iâm surprised that people who think abortion is murder arenât doing more illegal stuff to destroy clinics.
Also for what itâs worth, I think factory farming is so bad that itâs by far the greatest injustice caused by humans in history. Justifiable wars have been fought for orders of magnitude less important things.
I think this is a good/âfine question and the answer is âtheyâll go to jail and then stopâ. I think maybe youâre conflating this question and the following:
Plausibly the morally correct answers are different. If your policy might cause total collapse of social order (irl, not in a nested thought experiment), maybe you shouldnât do the nonviolent disruptive protest, but if you live in the real US where you largely internalize the negative consequences and others are similarly dissuaded and you still find the ~1st order effect worthwhile, then go right ahead
Itâs like a sin tax (not a perfect term here tbc) - you want some amount of Pigouvian tax on the thing that youâre worried is not generalizable (or good if it generalizes). If you find that the action is worth it to you tax included, then godspeed. It would be fallacious to say âin addition to the correctly priced carbon tax youâd be paying on the gas, consider your impact on the environment by drivingâ
Two thoughts:
I think we disagree about whether the harms of lawbreaking are mostly internalized. The degradation of social trust in the deliberative process seems bigger to me than the consequences to the individual? As an analogy, shoplifting is an ordinary crime where individuals do face real consequences, but the diffuse harms to consumers and businesses (goods locked up, stores closing) are large and dominate the social calculus.
The Pigouvian tax comparison doesnât quite work here because paying a tax contributes to public resources that can directly address the harms of the act or improve welfare elsewhere, making the net outcome neutral. Going to jail doesnât repair damaged property or restore trust in the democratic process.
Ok yeah I was using terms too loosely. But still:
I donât think we should speak of âlawbreakingâ as a general case in this context; some argue that shoplifting is too lightly punished/âprosecuted (especially in eg liberal US cities), but even assuming thatâs true, the question remains as to whether the more specific category of say âproperty damage via protestâ is punished too lightly, too harshely, or about right.
My best guess is that itâs not âtoo lightlyâ from a purely normie âlaw and order and human welfare right nowâ perspective. Many people believe moral-ish things strongly and donât find property destruction immoral, but far far fewer actually destroy the property of those they think are doing something immoral. This seems like good evidence that the expected punishment (including via informal mechanisms) is not too light.
I think we are/âwere both sort failing to decouple Pigouvian taxes and restitution. My understanding about both how the term âPigouvian taxâ is used in econ and about the real world is that even without restitution, you can get to the socially optimal level of some bad with a tax alone and no transfer to victims.
I think the motivating intuition is that the tax is affecting the amount of eg âsocial disorderâ supplied, but the tax revenue is just a transfer of economic power from one party to anotherâitâs not creating real wealth that can then be given to the victims. So the same amount of real wealth exists before and after the transfer and a separate question is what to do with that wealth given the state of the world (eg you might think that the very well-off who are harmed slightly by some negative externality, say ambient noise, should not be given restitution and a tax on decibels should really flow to some other party like the very poor)
On (1): You say:
I think that this is at best weak evidence. Activistsâ decisions of whether or not to commit crimes are surely influenced by norms, not just the expected intensity of punishment. The recent history of climate activism in the UK is a good example. As far as I can tell, nothing changed about UK law to cause the rapid rise of high-profile lawbreaking by Extinction Rebellion and then Just Stop Oil in the 2018-2023 timeframe. The UK government did in the end stop the activists through increased legal penalties (going from typically no prison time for nonviolent lawbreaking when motivated by ethical concerns to 4+ year prison sentences becoming common for the more serious cases). But something other than threat of prison time was keeping climate activists from using these tactics in the early-to-mid 2010s.
On (2):
I agree that a Pigouvian tax doesnât require restitution (as I indicated with including âimprove welfare elsewhereâ as something that can be done with the tax revenue). But the classical formulation (in which the optimal tax rate fully eliminates deadweight losses) does require that a dollar of consumer/âproducer surplus and a dollar of tax revenue produce the same social welfare. If a dollar of tax revenue produces less social welfare, then the deadweight loss cannot be eliminated.
To make this more concrete, I want to dig into an example based on your comment about driving in a world with a carbon tax. Consider taking a long trip by car rather than train under 3 different taxation schemes. Letâs assume you value the convenience of the car over the train at $101, the social cost of your carbon emissions is $100, and that all consumers in this world have identical marginal utilities of money.
World A: No carbon tax. You take the trip, gaining benefits you value at +$101 while causing social costs of -$100. In this world, we might say that youâve done the right thing by driving (since this maximizes utility overall), but that for fairness reasons you might be obligated to donate some money to others, since your utility-maximizing decision also acted as a transfer from others to you.
World B: Carbon tax of $100 on the trip, returned as an equal dividend to all people. You take the trip, gaining net benefits after the tax of $1. The rest of society ends up net neutral (though there might still be particular winners and losers). In this world, youâve done the right thing by driving, and have no further obligations.
World C: Carbon tax of $100 on the trip, which the government will use to buy $100 of consumer goods and dump them down an old mineshaft. You take the trip, gaining net benefits after the tax of $1. The rest of society still experiences the social costs of -$100, which the tax doesnât do anything to reduce. In this world, youâve clearly done the wrong thing by driving, since you caused a net utility loss of $99.
My claim is that doing crimes is similar to deciding to drive in World C. The âtaxâ on crime is imprisoning the criminal, which causes them to pay large costs in terms of their lost freedom and ability to work and doesnât do anything to benefit society. And in fact itâs worse than World C, since the rest of society needs to pay the additional costs of arresting, prosecuting, and jailing them. So I think the Pigouvian tax analogy does not hold here, and itâs wrong to think that the harms of crime are properly internalized.
Not addressing every point but I think in some respects I agree that crime is C but then how much benefit the criminal gets/âvalues is a case-by-case question, and we canât just assume that in the irl case at hand that the benefit is (in the analogy) $101 instead of $1000
Thereâs real deadweight loss from the mineshaft drop/âspending money on prisons, but also potentially real value to be gained from the crime itself (canonical case = speeding bc wife is going in to labor)
Remember, property damage as activism isnât like simple theftâthe property damage can cost society amount $X and benefits of activism feature can separately benefit society or be valued by the perpetrator at any other number $Y
I see what youâre getting at here. But if we agree that the externalities of crime arenât internalized, then I think weâre just back in the position of the original post. You think the act utilitarian calculus checks you, Iâm both skeptical that it does and think that there are non-act-utilitarian reasons why we ought to avoid lawbreaking.
Iâve been somewhat disappointed in reading this post. But as I know some folks I like are reading it, I feel the need to share a few thoughts as a legal scholar and theorist. Your post I think demonstrates some misunderstandings about the nature of law.
1. You seem to misunderstand contractarianism, by making it an argument for quietism, as well as the nature of law in a democracy. We donât agree to many laws as a society; most extant laws are conditions that no one ever agrees on. They are traditions. Take property law â no one ever voted to make animals property. Thatâs an inherited concept. There is a difference between a law that is democratically enacted, and a vestige of the English common law. The same goes for trespass, a common law principle. Moreover, no contractarian worth her salt is going to claim you can never break an unjust law. Going back to Aquinas, there is broad agreement that sometimes breaking an unjust law is morally appropriate, or at least defensible.
2. No one could reasonably argue this tactic is universalizable. It is strategic â it is a non-universalizable tactic meant to create significant attention and pressure for change toward universalizable norms. And more â the argument that if they do it, everyone will, can be a dangerous slippery slope. Itâs infeasible for everyone to do this: they have jobs. More important, I would very much caution against that kind of thinking. It has been used to justify atrocities in the past. Take slaveholders: they used that kind of argument to push back against slave rebellionsâit would destroy the antebellum south, socially and economically. That is not an argument worth keeping. I am not defending the Ridglan approach, but I am cautioning against these types dismissals of what they are doing.
3. Historically, you seem to again misunderstand the nature of law. Slaves were considered property, and their rebellions certainly damaged their property status. They also moved the north toward abolitionism. Elements of the civil rights movement and the labor movement in the United States engaged in tactics that damaged property and yet ultimately won reforms. Property is a conventionâit should not interfere with moral obligation and serious moral intervention.
Iâll just mention one thing about donors. Doing what is right sometimes risks making certain people unhappy. Thatâs why social movements shouldnât rely on the whims of wealthy individuals. The right donors will see the right priorities for what they are. The priority should be supporting one another within a social movement.
Thanks for engaging with the post! You made a lot of different points, so Iâll do my best to separate them out and consider them one-by-one:
(1)
Iâm not making an argument for quietism. Saying that we have an obligation to follow the law is compatible with having obligations (even extraordinarily strong ones) to use non-illegal means to combat injustice (e.g. by advocating for changes to laws).
Itâs a genuinely interesting point that many of our laws are inherited traditions, rather than the direct product of the democratic process. However, I donât think thatâs a strong argument in this specific case. The US has had true universal suffrage for more than 60 years, and in that time Congress and state legislative bodies have passed many laws related to the treatment of animals and the criminality of trespassing. Under any reasonable interpretation of democratic legitimacy, a democratically-elected legislative body specifically dealing with an issue and choosing to pass laws that accept the underlying common law principles and add specific penalties, related rules etc., should confer it.
I donât disagree that a reasonable contractualist would think that there are cases where it would be justified to break an unjust law. The core question is whether the required conditions hold in this case. Democratic legitimacy is one important part of that, since reasonable contractualists generally would give some weight to whether laws resulted from a just process. A point I didnât make in the OP, but I think is relevant here, is that even if you disagree about the democratic legitimacy argument, I think the specific nature of the lawbreaking here falls outside many notions of justifiable civil disobedience. Thatâs because the Ridglan rescues involved breaking a law to achieve a non-symbolic end (rescuing the dogs), not merely symbolically challenging a law by breaking it.
(2)
I think youâre moving between a couple different notions of universalizability here. Itâs true literally everyone breaking and entering in service of moral aims is a far-fetched idea. But itâs still coherent to ask whether a tactic would have positive or negative effects if commonly used across social movements. Democratic societies can and have experienced periods of widespread civil unrest.
I agree that a similar argument could have been deployed against rebellion by enslaved people, but I think the analogy is weak because of the specifics. Slave rebellions occurred in a society where the affected population was excluded from political participation, and the principles justifying them were self-limiting in the way I described in the OP. The current case is different: the affected parties (animals) canât be enfranchised, but the human population that cares about animal welfare has full political participation, and the legal channels for advancing animal welfare are open and have produced incremental gains over recent decades (most notably the transition of nearly half of the US egg supply to cage free). The bar for lawbreaking is plausibly higher when those channels are more responsive than when theyâre closed.
(3)
I think youâre being too quick to dismiss property as being something that can drive moral obligation. There are clearly many cases where we are obligated to not destroy or interfere with othersâ property, as is obvious in cases where vulnerable groupsâ property rights are infringed. The way Iâd think about this is that obligations to protect property are stronger the more just a societyâs system of property rights is. In a more just society, property destruction not only weakens otherwise-good norms, but is also more likely to be the result of a miscalculation: if the base rate of unjust property ownership is lower, then any given case of someone believing property destruction is justified is more likely to be wrong. So both the rule-following considerations and the act-utility considerations point toward higher property protection in more just societies.
(4)
I disagree that the priority should be supporting one another within a social movement; the priority should be trying to do the most good. Donor considerations reasonably impact that calculation, both because money is a necessary ingredient for advocacy and because donor preferences may reflect genuine moral views that are worth considering. But I do also agree that it can be worth trying to convince donors of an approach rather than just deferring to their preexisting preferences.
State laws are path dependent, and rely very often on common law principles and concepts uncritically applied. That does not equate to democratic legitimacy for every codified version of property and criminal law.
I think we have fundamentally incompatible views on the appropriate frame to apply to balancing questionsâI am not at all a utilitarian, and I donât think you should be either. But Iâll set that aside.
You again seem to conflate lawbreaking with immorality. Please donât do that. Rosa Parks broke the law. So did the Ridglan rescuers. That doesnât make what they did wrong. Thatâs a separate question. The symbolic/ânon-symbolic distinction is not one I find compelling.
You seem to see humans and animals as categorically different from a legal perspective. Humans care for animal welfare but animals have no voice. I fundamentally disagree â animals should have rights, including a right to a voice. That means they should have institutions that represent their interests. So there is no fundamental difference between the slave revolts and what people are trying to do here for animals in terms of voice, as their representatives. I suggest Zoopolis on this point.
Your articulation of the EA bias toward donors is particularly problematic. Successful social movements historically have not relied on extremely wealthy individuals for funding. Your concern to persuade donors is troubling. You should be worried about persuading people, not persuading donors. Lots of people are going to be needed to change social perspectives and institutions around animals. A social narrative that focuses on âearning to giveâ or major donors is likely to be unmoored from a durable movement.
Thank you for the quick post.
Since you still state that in some instances, some careful lawbreaking can be justified in the pursuit of a just outcome, perhaps you could spend more of the post detailing why you thought lawbreaking was a bad call in this specific instance? This is not clear to me from reading your note.