I have been disappointed by the support someEAs have expressed for recent activist actions at Ridglan Farms. I share others’ 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 EA’s worst scandal (FTX) without preventing EA’s 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 don’t 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] It’s 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. DxE’s own history is instructive here—their 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/EAA 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 Ridglan’s 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 don’t justify using tactics that are neither clearly effective nor robustly permissible across moral views.
I don’t 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 doesn’t 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 doesn’t extend to cases like animals, where suffrage isn’t possible and there’s no natural bound on how many such groups might be invoked to justify lawbreaking.
Great points. Thank you for writing this up. I think it’s 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: “you’d break a window to save a dog stuck in locked car on a hot day”, 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 that’s the basis for why I chose to do what I did. I wasn’t there for the one last weekend in April and don’t 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 don’t 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 don’t think it is ever likely to be primary and I don’t want it to be, but I also don’t want it to be ignored and I think it largely has been around here.
A chunk of your argument boils down to what’s 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 “OK” 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 you’re making? “It was ethically necessary for me to kidnap the doctor who was about to start their shift at Planned Parenthood. Yes, it’s normally illegal to kidnap people, but those babies* were in imminent danger of being killed by the doctor, and it’s permissible to break laws to avoid a forseeable imminent harm.” (*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.)
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 there’s a sense in which the constraints I’m 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 doesn’t 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 it’s disanalogous because it took place in a dictatorship, where the rule utilitarian and contractualist constraints on action look very different.[1] I’m 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 “protecting innocent sentient beings from torture” is a higher moral priority than “living together in a society with people of greatly differing moral views”?
I’m 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 you’re 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 isn’t addressing what happens if other people think the same way. The equilibrium where everyone with strong moral convictions feels licensed to break laws doesn’t seem to me like it’s better for vulnerable groups, just more chaotic. I think that to some extent you’re proposing smashing the “defect” button in a prisoner’s dilemma and hoping the other side doesn’t do the same.
On your second, I agree that it’s not a clear line between flawed democracy and dictatorship, but in the US today this isn’t 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 wasn’t legal. Many parents and guardians retained custody and could have legally removed their children. The constraint was that families without resources didn’t 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 you’re proposing smashing the “defect” button in a prisoner’s dilemma and hoping the other side doesn’t do the same.
I’ve 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..
You’re right to say that one way to think about universalisability is “if it’s okay for me to break the law to achieve what I consider to be a moral goal here, why can’t everyone break the law to achieve their own moral goals?”. But another way to think about universalisability is to go “if I were the one in Ridglan / Unit 731 / Willowbrook, what actions would I support to end my suffering?”
I don’t 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.
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/fine question and the answer is “they’ll go to jail and then stop”. I think maybe you’re conflating this question and the following:
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 shouldn’t 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
It’s like a sin tax (not a perfect term here tbc) - you want some amount of Pigouvian tax on the thing that you’re 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 “in addition to the correctly priced carbon tax you’d be paying on the gas, consider your impact on the environment by driving”
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 doesn’t 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 doesn’t 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 don’t think we should speak of “lawbreaking” as a general case in this context; some argue that shoplifting is too lightly punished/prosecuted (especially in eg liberal US cities), but even assuming that’s true, the question remains as to whether the more specific category of say “property damage via protest” is punished too lightly, too harshely, or about right.
My best guess is that it’s not “too lightly” from a purely normie “law and order and human welfare right now” perspective. Many people believe moral-ish things strongly and don’t 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 doesn’t 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 doesn’t repair damaged property or restore trust in the democratic process.
I think we are/were both sort failing to decouple Pigouvian taxes and restitution. My understanding about both how the term “Pigouvian tax” 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 “social disorder” supplied, but the tax revenue is just a transfer of economic power from one party to another—it’s 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)
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 others’ 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 EA’s worst scandal (FTX) without preventing EA’s 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 don’t 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] It’s 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. DxE’s own history is instructive here—their 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/EAA 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 Ridglan’s 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 don’t justify using tactics that are neither clearly effective nor robustly permissible across moral views.
I don’t 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 doesn’t 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 doesn’t extend to cases like animals, where suffrage isn’t possible and there’s no natural bound on how many such groups might be invoked to justify lawbreaking.
Great points. Thank you for writing this up. I think it’s 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: “you’d break a window to save a dog stuck in locked car on a hot day”, 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 that’s the basis for why I chose to do what I did. I wasn’t there for the one last weekend in April and don’t 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 don’t 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 don’t think it is ever likely to be primary and I don’t want it to be, but I also don’t want it to be ignored and I think it largely has been around here.
A chunk of your argument boils down to what’s 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 “OK” 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 you’re making? “It was ethically necessary for me to kidnap the doctor who was about to start their shift at Planned Parenthood. Yes, it’s normally illegal to kidnap people, but those babies* were in imminent danger of being killed by the doctor, and it’s permissible to break laws to avoid a forseeable imminent harm.” (*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.)
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 there’s a sense in which the constraints I’m 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 doesn’t 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 it’s disanalogous because it took place in a dictatorship, where the rule utilitarian and contractualist constraints on action look very different.[1] I’m 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 “protecting innocent sentient beings from torture” is a higher moral priority than “living together in a society with people of greatly differing moral views”?
I’m 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 you’re 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 isn’t addressing what happens if other people think the same way. The equilibrium where everyone with strong moral convictions feels licensed to break laws doesn’t seem to me like it’s better for vulnerable groups, just more chaotic. I think that to some extent you’re proposing smashing the “defect” button in a prisoner’s dilemma and hoping the other side doesn’t do the same.
On your second, I agree that it’s not a clear line between flawed democracy and dictatorship, but in the US today this isn’t 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 wasn’t legal. Many parents and guardians retained custody and could have legally removed their children. The constraint was that families without resources didn’t 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’ve 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..
You’re right to say that one way to think about universalisability is “if it’s okay for me to break the law to achieve what I consider to be a moral goal here, why can’t everyone break the law to achieve their own moral goals?”. But another way to think about universalisability is to go “if I were the one in Ridglan / Unit 731 / Willowbrook, what actions would I support to end my suffering?”
I don’t 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.
I think this is a good/fine question and the answer is “they’ll go to jail and then stop”. I think maybe you’re 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 shouldn’t 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
It’s like a sin tax (not a perfect term here tbc) - you want some amount of Pigouvian tax on the thing that you’re 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 “in addition to the correctly priced carbon tax you’d be paying on the gas, consider your impact on the environment by driving”
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 doesn’t 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 doesn’t repair damaged property or restore trust in the democratic process.
Ok yeah I was using terms too loosely. But still:
I don’t think we should speak of “lawbreaking” as a general case in this context; some argue that shoplifting is too lightly punished/prosecuted (especially in eg liberal US cities), but even assuming that’s true, the question remains as to whether the more specific category of say “property damage via protest” is punished too lightly, too harshely, or about right.
My best guess is that it’s not “too lightly” from a purely normie “law and order and human welfare right now” perspective. Many people believe moral-ish things strongly and don’t 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/were both sort failing to decouple Pigouvian taxes and restitution. My understanding about both how the term “Pigouvian tax” 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 “social disorder” supplied, but the tax revenue is just a transfer of economic power from one party to another—it’s 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)
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.