Alistair Stewart

• Alistair Stewart 26 Feb 2026 1:30 UTC

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  on: What Suc­cess Looks Like For Animals

  Cool piece Jess, thanks for writing. :)

Is EA sleep­ing on mak­ing dogs and cats ve­gan?

• Alistair Stewart 26 Jan 2026 17:32 UTC

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  on: How I’m think­ing about the next 3 years

  Extremely interesting and valuable piece Niki, thank you!

• Alistair Stewart 15 Jan 2026 0:58 UTC

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  on: Should an­i­mal ad­vo­cates treat ve­g­anism as a su­pereroga­tory com­mit­ment or a moral baseline?

  For veganism:

  1. To me, veganism seems like a moral obligation in the same way that not torturing puppies for chocolate seems like a moral obligation

  2. Veganism is a costly signal that is important for movement-building and motivating animal advocates

  3. Seems intuitive and plausible to me that there is some kind of social tipping point for veganism, where you go slowly from 1 to 25% of the population being vegan, then quickly from 25 to 99%

  Against veganism:

  1. It makes entry to the animal movement demanding, perhaps unnecessarily and growth-stuntingly so: “[the animal movement] is one of the only social justice causes whose point of entry is entirely negotiated by real, quantifiable, fundamental behavior change [veganism].” Source

  2. Perhaps social tipping points are overrated

  I tend to want a big, diverse animal movement with people trying different approaches –from “holding non-vegans accountable”-style vegan outreach, to FarmKind’s offsetting approach (minus their criticism of Veganuary/​veganism). That diversity will appeal to different audiences and bring in different resources (allies, committed activists, money, political attention). The diversity does trade off against movement unity, though, but I think it’s worth it if we learn from experimenting and retain some level of movement solidarity.

• Alistair Stewart 14 Jan 2026 22:32 UTC

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  in reply to: Brad West🔸’s comment on: Should an­i­mal ad­vo­cates treat ve­g­anism as a su­pereroga­tory com­mit­ment or a moral baseline?

  Nice, got it.

  If we’re going to promote offsetting, I reckon these kinds of considerations will not be interesting to the vast majority of the target audience, and they wouldn’t expect to have them explained. Just do the maths, taking into account positives avoided as well as negatives caused, and tell people how much they need to donate to offset those impacts of their non-veganism.

  (I say this as someone who is pretty sceptical of offsetting non-veganism, for both moral/​deontologically-flavoured reasons and strategic/​consequentialist ones.)

• Alistair Stewart 14 Jan 2026 21:55 UTC

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  in reply to: Ben Stevenson’s comment on: Should an­i­mal ad­vo­cates treat ve­g­anism as a su­pereroga­tory com­mit­ment or a moral baseline?

  Super interesting. I think I’d say that sexual orientation and meat cravings (if that’s what you mean by “personal desire”) are sufficiently different that this analogy doesn’t really hold.

• Alistair Stewart 14 Jan 2026 21:51 UTC

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  in reply to: Brad West🔸’s comment on: Should an­i­mal ad­vo­cates treat ve­g­anism as a su­pereroga­tory com­mit­ment or a moral baseline?

  Thanks. To be clear, is your original question asking about a) whether the animal movement should take into account the positives avoided by offsetting non-veganism when deciding whether or not to promote offsetting to non-vegans, or b) whether the animal movement should tell non-vegans about the positives avoided by offsetting?

  I think definitely yes to a), and we shouldn’t lead with it whilst remaining transparent for b).

• Alistair Stewart 14 Jan 2026 21:43 UTC

  2 points

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  in reply to: SiobhanBall’s comment on: Should an­i­mal ad­vo­cates treat ve­g­anism as a su­pereroga­tory com­mit­ment or a moral baseline?

  I think pressing a button to make everyone (ethically) vegan would be a much more robust way to end factory farming (and all forms of animal exploitation) than pressing a button to get cultivated meat on supermarket shelves at a competitive price point.

  • If everyone is ethically vegan: the social/​cultural pressure to remain vegan is much stronger –> ex-veganism is heavily stigmatised –> far fewer ex-vegans –> not enough demand for factory farming to survive or return

    • Even before that, presumably factory farming would be undermined from every angle: lawmakers would ban it, employees would quit/​strike, consumers would boycott

  • As far as I know, cultivated meat faces a number of cultural barriers

  Clearly it’s much much harder to make everyone vegan than to get affordable cultivated meat on supermarket shelves! That’s one reason why I think cultivated meat is currently a more powerful tool at our disposal than vegan outreach for helping animals.

  But I want the vegan outreachers to continue doing their work. One reason is I think that veganism is, deontologically, a moral obligation; another is that I think veganism is a costly signal that binds the animal movement together, which can serve to keep advocates motivated.

• Alistair Stewart 14 Jan 2026 19:09 UTC

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  in reply to: Brad West🔸’s comment on: Should an­i­mal ad­vo­cates treat ve­g­anism as a su­pereroga­tory com­mit­ment or a moral baseline?

  I think it’s very important we (try to) consider the full counterfactual – what’s the reason not to?

• Alistair Stewart 14 Jan 2026 19:08 UTC

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  in reply to: Ben Stevenson’s comment on: Should an­i­mal ad­vo­cates treat ve­g­anism as a su­pereroga­tory com­mit­ment or a moral baseline?

  For those (like me) who don’t know what political lesbianism is:

  Political lesbianism asserts that sexual orientation is a political and feminist choice, and advocates lesbianism as a positive alternative to heterosexuality for women^[1] as part of the struggle against sexism… Heterosexual behavior is seen as the basic unit of the patriarchy’s political structure, and therefore lesbians who reject heterosexual behavior are disrupting the established political system.

  https://​​en.wikipedia.org/​​wiki/​​Political_lesbianism

  Though I’m not sure I follow why veganism is like political lesbianism Ben, can you explain?

• Alistair Stewart 14 Jan 2026 19:03 UTC

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  in reply to: SiobhanBall’s comment on: Should an­i­mal ad­vo­cates treat ve­g­anism as a su­pereroga­tory com­mit­ment or a moral baseline?

  If we made everyone vegan in an instant, how would that not end factory farming?

• Alistair Stewart 7 Jan 2026 11:51 UTC

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  on: Sim­ple sum­mary of AI Safety laws

  Super helpful, thanks Joseph /​ Matilda /​ PauseAI UK team!

• Alistair Stewart 5 Jan 2026 16:17 UTC

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  on: What does re­search­ing ar­tifi­cial sen­tience and ar­tifi­cial con­scious­ness look like?

  Great to see this Firat!

• Alistair Stewart 3 Jan 2026 17:28 UTC

  10 points

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  in reply to: Aidan Alexander’s comment on: Pagw’s Shortform

  Veganuary seeming against it is part of the bit.

  This seems to be contradicted by Wendy’s comment above.

  I’m pretty concerned (and confused) about the lack of alignment between FarmKind’s perspective and Veganuary’s on the extent of cooperation between the two ahead of the campaign launch.
  
  EDIT:

  Thom says at 34:50 in this YouTube interview:

  I hope that we haven’t implied that Veganuary was sort of in on it or something like this because I wouldn’t want to do that. That’s not the the case.

• Alistair Stewart 29 Dec 2025 22:41 UTC

  6 points

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  in reply to: Aidan Alexander’s comment on: Pagw’s Shortform

  Hi Aidan, two points:

  measuring impact and saying we shouldn’t give resources to organizations that don’t perform well against these measurements

  Are FarmKind claiming that Veganuary is one of those organisations?

  There hasn’t been backlash to this campaign from average people, only EAs and animal advocates.

  Depends what you mean by “backlash”—kind of unclear to me what backlash from average (non-vegan) people would look like, especially given I suspect most of them who have read a headline about it think this is just an anti-vegan campaign.

  The comments on the Daily Mail piece (which should be taken with a huge pinch of salt, given it’s the Daily Mail + online comments in 2025) look quite a lot like backlash to me though.

• Alistair Stewart 22 Nov 2025 15:12 UTC

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  on: An­nounc­ing ClusterFree: A cluster headache ad­vo­cacy and re­search ini­ti­a­tive (and how you can help)

  Great work, thanks Alfredo and others

• Alistair Stewart 18 Nov 2025 20:20 UTC

  13 points

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  on: New dona­tion op­por­tu­nity: the Cen­ter for Wild An­i­mal Welfare

  Awesome to see this, and I couldn’t think of better people to be leading it than Richard and Ben!

• Alistair Stewart 11 Nov 2025 13:59 UTC

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  on: Part 3/​4: Scru­ti­nis­ing Ob­jec­tions to (Tra­di­tional) Abo­li­tion­ist Approaches

  I think this is well put together and extremely interesting Dhruv. I set it as the reading for a Revolutionists’ Night a couple of weeks ago, which I didn’t end up attending as I was sick, but I’ll try to catch up on what was discussed and let you know when we next cross paths!

• Alistair Stewart 22 Oct 2025 10:43 UTC

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  on: AI and An­i­mal Welfare: A Policy Case Study from Aotearoa New Zealand Policy

  Thanks for writing this up Karen – interesting and important.

• Alistair Stewart 19 Oct 2025 20:52 UTC

  8 points

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  on: Emerg­ing ev­i­dence on treat­ing cluster headaches with DMT

  Given the intensity of the suffering caused by cluster headaches and humans’ welfare range (i.e. our capacity for suffering), I think this is extremely important work – thank you.