Hi Miguel! Sorry I’m a week late replying to you here. I agree with your point, and I’m updating my document to reflect this. I’m copying your wording, but please let me know if you’d rather I rewrite. I was initially trying to balance minimising respondents’ time commitment with pushing on the most important/tractable questions, but I think you’re right that expanding the scope of affected animal products could really matter.
Ben Stevenson
Karma: 515
This was meant as a joke (I think OP got this) but on reflection it probably wasn’t funny / a good opportunity to try to be funny. I actually agree with your empirical/normative point, and I’ll retract the comment so others aren’t confused.
Moral trade opportunity: Alice donates a kidney, Bob donates part of their liver?
Hey!
The responses were written with input from animal welfare professionals, but they’re only suggestions and I would encourage you to share your own opinions too. I’m happy to talk through the object-level of any disagreements, if helpful.
On images specifically, I agree that misleading pictures could undermine the label’s effectiveness but I personally doubt the risk outweighs the reward of informing consumers about the real conditions of animal farming. Whether you choose ‘agree’ or ‘disagree’, I think you should detail your thoughts in the ‘explanation’ section and emphasise that businesses shouldn’t be allowed to use misleading photos of animals.
The labels will be imperfect, and it’s an open question whether policymakers and the public will stall on further progress. More empirical research here would be good. (If you’ve not seen it, you might find this resource interesting although it is a few years old). But I think that we have to try to score a goal whenever the opportunity presents itself, and that it’s very plausible both that political wins build momentum for the animal movement and that labelling increases public salience of welfare issues.
Independent assessment of welfare claims is covered in question 72. I’ve suggested strongly supporting it, except in cases where it made the labelling scheme unworkable.
I think it takes about 30 minutes to reply to this consultation, and I think it’s absolutely worth doing.
This Google Doc indicates the animal welfare-relevant questions and suggests responses. I encourage anybody to copy-paste these suggestions, or use them as inspiration for original responses. Note that the government recognises “that respondents may choose to use some standardised text to inform their response”, and accepts them as legitimate responses.
Thanks @haven for help writing this!
Thanks for writing this, Bella. I relate: I lived with mice recently and spent a lot of time fretting about their well-being as the landlord closed in.
I think that sympathy towards small, liminal animals speaks to an expanded moral circle and that, when we feel powerless to save the animals, bearing witness to their deaths as you’ve done here might be an important way of paying respect to them.
This is a great success story—well done to all involved!
the core message—some interventions are magnitudes more promising than others—was retained and even extended to other domains: from education, social programmes, and CO2 emissions reductions policies to efforts to change habits of meat consumption and voter turnout (Todd 2023)
Could you point me to the discussion of meat consumption in this source? I can’t seem to find it. Thanks!
This is a really interesting resource; inspired me to take Kitcher off the bookshelf. Looking forward to part 2.
(Btw, small typo: word missing in ZFG’s thesis title)
I’ve only skimmed this article, but also Coupet and Schehl (2021) claims “Much of the nonprofit performance theory suggests that donors are unlikely to base donation decisions on nonprofit production”.
I find this post interesting, because I think it’s important to be conceptually clear about animal minds, but I strongly disagree with its conclusions.
It’s true that animals (and AIs) might be automatons: they might simulate qualia without really experiencing them. And it’s true that humans might anthropomorphise by seeing qualia in animals, or AIs, or arbitrary shape that don’t really have them. (You might enjoy John Bradshaw’s The Animals Among Us, which has a chapter on just this topic).
But I don’t see why an ability to talk about your qualia would be a suitable test for your qualia’s realness. I can imagine talking automatons, and I can imagine non-talking non-automatons. If I prod an LLM with the right prompts, it might describe ‘its’ experiences to me; this is surreal and freaky, but it doesn’t yet persuade me that the LLM has qualia, that there is something which it is to be an LLM. And, likewise, I can imagine a mute person, or a person afflicted with locked-in syndrome, who experiences qualia but can’t talk about it. You write: “We expect that even if someone can’t (e.g., they can’t talk at all) but we ask them in writing or restore their ability to respond, they’d talk about qualia”. But I don’t see how “restor[ing] their ability to respond” is different to ‘granting animals the ability to respond’; just as you expect humans granted voice to talk about their qualia, I expect many animals granted voice to talk about their qualia. (It seems quixotic, but some researchers are really exploring this right now, using AI to try to translate animal languages). Your test would treat the “very human-like” screaming of pigs at slaughter as no evidence at all for their qualia. The boundary between screams and words is fuzzy, the distinction arbitrary. I think it’s a speciesist way to draw the line: the question is not, Can they talk?
I would be a little out of my depth talking about better tests for animal consciousness, but as far as I know the canonical book on fish consciousness is Do Fish Feel Pain? by Victoria Braithwaite. If you haven’t read it, I think you’d find it interesting. I also second Angelina and Constance’s comments, which share valuable information about our evidence base on invertebrate sentience.
Some evidence on animal consciousness is more convincing than other evidence. Braithwaite makes a stronger case than this post. But the questions definitely aren’t answered, and they might be fundamentally unanswerable! So: what do we do? I don’t think we can say, ‘I believe fish and shrimp don’t experience qualia, and therefore there are no ethical issues with eating them.’ We should adopt the Precautionary Principle: ‘I think there’s some chance, even if it’s a low chance, that fish and shrimp experience qualia, so there could be ethical issues with eating them’. In a world with uncertainty about whether fish and shrimp experience qualia, one scenario is the torture and exploitaton of trillions, and another scenario is a slightly narrower diet. Why risk an ethically catastrophic mistake?
(writing in a personal capacity)
[Event] Shrimp Farming: Vast in Scale, Diverse in Welfare Challenges (Rethink Priorities Webinar)
Thanks so much to Angelina for looking into this. This post illustrates two of my favourite things about EA: a willigness to dive in and do, and an openness to strange ideas being important. I agree that, from what we know, plant-based shrimp paste could be a way to save many lives, and I’d be excited to hear from any animal advocates thinking about this problem.
Rethink Priorites will soon be hosting a webinar on our farmed shrimp welfare research, where we’ll discuss the farming practices behind concerningly high pre-slaughter mortality rates. This research isn’t directly related to shrimp paste, but I expect it’ll still be interesting to anybody who enjoyed this post. The webinar will be held on Monday the 20th of November from 11am to 11-45am (East Coast US time). I’ve already sent Angelina a link; if anybody else is interesting in coming along, please DM me!
Hi Joe
I was pleasantly surprised to see this post on the EA Forum. This has never seemed like a space to talk much about the humanities. Quite reasonably: how do we justify something so indulgent as poetry when we are in triage? Can there be art after cost-effectiveness analysis, but before utopia?
I’m much less surprised to learn you’ve studied poetry. Something literary has always suffused your writing, bringing the clarity of words carefully chosen and the ambiguity of language at its limit. I don’t want to reduce poetry to something purely instrumental, but one part of its value to me has always been to draw up imperfect words for pre-concepts that still resist clear articulation and for pre-sentiments too primordial or too novel to be yet cleanly felt. That’s what I mean by language at its limit. It’s a gift to the philosopher, or to anybody trying to make sense of the world. I think that this skill in voicing things beyond words, like suffering and death, is what Glück offers the effective altruists, and offers humanity.
I only discovered Glück after she won the Nobel Prize, and I still have much left to read. I have a feeling I’ll learn a lot from her poetry. Soon enough, I’ll be feeling jealous that you got to learn from her in person. But for now, I’m feeling sympathy for those who knew her and will be especially keenly stung by her loss. My thoughts are with you.
Since her passing, I’ve been reading two of her short poems about death, ‘The Gold Lily’ and ‘Mother and Child’. In my reading, these pieces both teeter on a panpsychism or a oneness of being. Before gestation, ‘Mother and Child’ tells us, we were:
[...] earth and water.
Moss between rocks, pieces of leaves and grass.
And before, cells in a great darkness.
And before that, the veiled world.
Glück finds herself at the edge of something unknowable. She’s reaching out for those imperfect words for pre-concepts and pre-sentiments, and all she can do is gesture out at the expanse of the unsayable, into the darkness, beyond the veil. The raw edge, as you say, Joe.
How does Glück orient herself towards death, knowing that there is more than is dreamt of in her philosophy, yet knowing nothing concrete of a metaphysics beyond the veil? ‘The Gold Lily’ is bleakly physicalist: the speaker is “not / a flower yet, a spine only, raw dirt”. Only her “yet” offers hope of reintegration into what Glück calls, with a touch of Whitman, the “leaves and grass”, by which I think she means, like Emerson and his transparent eyeball, a selfless unity with nature. But ‘Mother and Child’ says something more interesting. Glück didn’t find answers for suffering and ignorance and purpose, but she thought that life was an intergenerational project and that we could keep on asking. The poem continues:
This is why you were born: to silence me.
Cells of my mother and father, it is your turn
to be pivotal, to be the masterpiece.
I improvised; I never remembered.
Now it’s your turn to be driven;
you’re the one who demands to know:
Why do I suffer? Why am I ignorant?
Cells in a great darkness. Some machine made us;
it is your turn to address it, to go back asking
what am I for? What am I for?
Here we find motivation for the next generation, and perhaps motivation that resonates with the effective altruist: we should reckon with suffering, reckon with ignorance, and be agentic: “be pivotal, [...] be the masterpiece. [...] be driven”. Let’s demand to know. Address the machine. Keep asking: what am I for?
And so goes Glück’s wisdom on how to survive her. Thanks for your thoughts, Joe. Thanks to anybody who has read mine.
Thanks Ren!
As with all of Animal Ask’s output, I found this insightful and clear. I appreciate the statement on human justice and the authors’ privileges.
You identified Nigeria as a country with a steady, low baseline of meat consumption rather than a country with declining meat consumption. You also quote Whitton, et al: “Decrease in per capita meat consumption in Nigeria and Ethiopia is also driven by population growth with meat consumed only on special occasions”. Is the distinction here that your assessments aren’t done on a per capita basis?
I’m particularly curious about Nigeria given the population growth forecasts.
Thanks for your work!
Btw Ajeya Cotra is a woman and uses she/her pronouns :)
Hi Angelina!
I agree: this seems like a potentially high-impact entrepreneurial opportunity and, although I’m not absolutely certain that nobody owns this project right now, I’m confident it’s under-explored/under-actioned.
Thanks Ben! Glad it was helpful1
EDIT 2024-06-10: We are no longer accepting applications. Thank you to all who got in touch.
The Animal Welfare Department at Rethink Priorities is recruiting volunteer researchers to support on a high-impact project!
We’re conducting a review on interventions to reduce meat consumption, and we’re seeking help checking whether academic studies meet our eligibility criteria. This will involve reviewing the full text of studies, especially methodology sections.
We’re interested in volunteers who have some experience reading empirical academic literature, especially postgraduates. The role is an unpaid volunteer opportunity. We expect this to be a ten week project, requiring approximately five hours per week. But your time commitment can be flexible, depending on your availability.
This is an exciting opportunity for graduate students and early career researchers to gain research experience, learn about an interesting topic, and directly participate in an impactful project. The Animal Welfare Department will provide support and, if desired, letters of experience for volunteers.
If you are interested in volunteering with us, contact Ben Stevenson at bstevenson@rethinkpriorities.org. Please share either your CV, or a short statement (~4 sentences) about your experience engaging with empirical academic literature. Candidates will be invited to complete a skills assessment.
We are accepting applications on a rolling basis, and will update this listing when we are no longer accepting applications.Please reach out to Ben if you have any questions. If you know anybody who might be interested, please forward this opportunity to them!