I’m a Senior Research Manager at Rethink Priorities, an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Texas State University, and the Director of the Society for the Study of Ethics & Animals.
Bob Fischer
Karma: 2,647
The Welfare Range Table
Rethink Priorities’ Welfare Range Estimates
Causes and Uncertainty: Rethinking Value in Expectation
An Introduction to the Moral Weight Project
Don’t Balk at Animal-friendly Results
The Risks and Rewards of Prioritizing Animals of Uncertain Sentience
Rethink Priorities’ Worldview Investigation Team: Introductions and Next Steps
Octopuses (Probably) Don’t Have Nine Minds
If Adult Insects Matter, How Much Do Juveniles Matter?
Do Brains Contain Many Conscious Subsystems? If So, Should We Act Differently?
Theories of Welfare and Welfare Range Estimates
Economics of Animal Welfare: Call for Abstracts
If Contractualism, Then AMF
Thanks for all this, Hamish. For what it’s worth, I don’t think we did a great job communicating the results of the Moral Weight Project.
As you rightly observe, welfare ranges aren’t moral weights without some key philosophical assumptions. Although we did discuss the significance of those assumptions in independent posts, we could have done a much better job explaining how those assumptions should affect the interpretation of our point estimates.
Speaking of the point estimates, I regret leading with them: as we said, they’re really just placeholders in the face of deep uncertainty. We should have led with our actual conclusions, the basics of which are that the relevant vertebrates are probably within an OOM of humans and shrimps and the relevant adult insects are probably within two OOMs of the vertebrates. My guess is that you and I disagree less than you might think about the range of reasonable moral weights across species, even if the centers of my probability masses are higher than yours.
I agree that our methodology is complex and hard to understand. But it would be surprising if there were a simple, easy-to-understand way to estimate the possible differences in the intensities of valenced states across species. Likewise, I agree that “there are tons of assumptions and simplifications that go into these RP numbers, so any conclusions we can draw must be low confidence.” But there are also tons of assumptions and biases that go into our intuitive assessments of the relative moral importance of various kinds of nonhuman animals. So, a lot comes down to how much stock you put in your intuitions. As you might guess, I think we have lots of reasons not to trust them once we take on key moral assumptions like utilitiarianism. So, I take much of the value of the Moral Weight Project to be in the mere fact that it tries to reach moral weights from first principles.
It’s time to do some serious surveying to get a better sense of the community’s moral weights. I also think there’s a bunch of good work to do on the significance of philosophical / moral uncertainty here. I If anyone wants to support this work, please let me know!
Hi Sabs. We can discuss this a bit in a comment thread, but the issues here are complicated. If you’d like to have a conversation, I’m happy to chat. Please DM me for a link to my calendar.
Brief replies to your questions:
I think you matter an enormous amount too. I am not saying this facetiously. It’s probably the thing I believe most deeply.
I don’t know how much the median EA thinks you matter.
I’m unsure about all four assumptions. However, I’m also unsure about their practical importance. You might not be comfortable with the results of any cross-species cost-effectiveness analysis.
If it’s you or a hundred chickens, I’d save you. I’d also save my children over a hundred (human) strangers. I don’t think this means that my children realize more welfare than those strangers. Likewise, I don’t think you realize 100x more welfare than a chicken can.
Thanks for your discussion of the Moral Weight Project’s methodology, Carl. (And to everyone else for the useful back-and-forth!) We have some thoughts about this important issue and we’re keen to write more about it. Perhaps 2024 will provide the opportunity!
For now, we’ll just make one brief point, which is that it’s important to separate two questions. The first concerns the relevance of the two envelopes problem to the Moral Weight Project. The second concerns alternative ways of generating moral weights. We considered the two envelopes problem at some length when we were working on the Moral Weight Project and concluded that our approach was still worth developing. We’d be glad to revisit this and appreciate the challenge to the methodology.
However, even if it turns out that the methodology has issues, it’s an open question how best to proceed. We grant the possibility that, as you suggest, more neurons = more compute = the possibility of more intense pleasures and pains. But it’s also possible that more neurons = more intelligence = less biological need for intense pleasures and pains, as other cognitive abilities can provide the relevant fitness benefits, effectively muting the intensities of those states. Or perhaps there’s some very low threshold of cognitive complexity for sentience after which point all variation in behavior is due to non-hedonic capacities. Or perhaps cardinal interpersonal utility comparisons are impossible. And so on. In short, while it’s true that there are hypotheses on which elephants have massively more intense pains than fruit flies, there are also hypotheses on which the opposite is true and on which equality is (more or less) true. Once we account for all these hypotheses, it may still work out that elephants and fruit flies differ by a few orders of magnitude in expectation, but perhaps not by five or six. Presumably, we should all want some approach, whatever it is, that avoids being mugged by whatever low-probability hypothesis posits the largest difference between humans and other animals.
That said, you’ve raised some significant concerns about methods that aggregate over different relative scales of value. So, we’ll be sure to think more about the degree to which this is a problem for the work we’ve done—and, if it is, how much it would change the bottom line.
I agree with Ariel that OP should probably be spending more on animals (and I really appreciate all the work he’s done to push this conversation forward). I don’t know whether OP should allocate most neartermist funding to AW as I haven’t looked into lots of the relevant issues. Most obviously, while the return curves for at least some human-focused neartermist options are probably pretty flat (just think of GiveDirectly), the curves for various sorts of animal spending may drop precipitously. Ariel may well be right that, even if so, the returns probably don’t fall off so much that animal work loses to global health work, but I haven’t investigated this myself. The upshot: I have no idea whether there are good ways of spending an additional $100M on animals right now. (That being said, I’d love to see more extensive investigation into field building for animals! If EA field building in general is cost-competitive with other causes, then I’d expect animal field building to look pretty good.)
I should also say that OP’s commitment to worldview diversification complicates any conclusions about what OP should do from its own perspective. Even if it’s true that a straightforward utilitarian analysis would favor spending a lot more on animals, it’s pretty clear that some key stakeholders have deep reservations about straightforward utilitarian analyses. And because worldview diversification doesn’t include a clear procedure for generating a specific allocation, it’s hard to know what people who are committed to worldview diversification should do by their own lights.
Thanks for all this, Nuno. The upshot of Jason’s post on what’s wrong with the “holistic” approach to moral weight assignments, my post about theories of welfare, and my post about the appropriate response to animal-friendly results is something like this: you should basically ignore your priors re: animals’ welfare ranges as they’re probably (a) not really about welfare ranges, (b) uncalibrated, and (c) objectionably biased.
You can see the posts above for material that’s relevant to (b) and (c), but as evidence for (a), notice that your discussion of your prior isn’t about the possible intensities of chickens’ valenced experiences, but about how much you care about those experiences. I’m not criticizing you personally for this; it happens all the time. In EA, the moral weight of X relative to Y is often understood as an all-things-considered assessment of the relative importance of X relative to Y. I don’t think people hear “relative importance” as “how valuable X is relative to Y conditional on a particular theory of value,” which is still more than we offered, but is in the right ballpark. Instead, they hear it as something like “how valuable X is relative to Y,” “the strength of my moral reasons to prioritize X in real-world situations relative to Y,” and “the strength of my concern for X relative to Y” all rolled into one. But if that’s what your prior’s about, then it isn’t particularly relevant to your prior about welfare-ranges-conditional-on-hedonism specifically.
Finally, note that if you do accept that your priors are vulnerable to these kinds of problems, then you either have to abandon or defend them. Otherwise, you don’t have any response to the person who uses the same strategy to explain why they assign very low value to other humans, even if the face of evidence that these humans matter just as much as they do.
This is exactly right, Emre. We are not commenting on the average amount of value or disvalue that any particular kind of individual adds to the world. Instead, we’re trying to estimate how much value different kinds of individuals could add to the world. You then need to go do the hard work of assessing individuals’ actual welfare levels to make tradeoffs. But that’s as it should be. There’s already been a lot of work on welfare assessment; there’s been much less work on how to interpret the significance of those welfare assessments in cross-species decision-making. We’re trying to advance the latter conversation.
Hi Jeff. Thanks for engaging. Three quick notes. (Edit: I see that Peter has made the first already.)
First, and less importantly, our numbers don’t represent the relative value of individuals, but instead the relative possible intensities of valenced states at a single time. If you want the whole animal’s capacity for welfare, you have to adjust for lifespan. When you do that, you’ll end up with lower numbers for animals—though, of course, not OOMs lower.
Second, I should say that, as people who work on animals go, I’m fairly sympathetic to views that most would regard as animal-unfriendly. I wrote a book criticizing arguments for veganism. I’ve got another forthcoming that defends hierarchicalism. I’ve argued for hybrid views in ethics, where different rules apply to humans and animals. Etc. Still, I think that conditional on hedonism it’s hard to get MWs for animals that are super low. It’s easier, though still not easy, on other views of welfare. But if you think that welfare is all that matters, you’re probably going to get pretty animal-friendly numbers. You have to invoke other kinds of reasons to really change the calculus (partiality, rights, whatever).
Third, I’ve been trying to figure out what it would look like to generate MWs for animals that don’t assume welfarism (i.e., the view that welfare is all that matters morally). But then you end up with all the familiar problems of moral uncertainty. I wish I knew how to navigate those, but I don’t. However, I also think it’s sufficiently important to be transparent about human/animal tradeoffs that I should keep trying. So, I’m going to keep mulling it over.