emre kaplan🔸

Find­ing our peo­ple in an­i­mal advocacy

• emre kaplan🔸Feb 19, 2025, 3:29 PM

  1 point

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: ASuchy’s comment on: Hy­pothe­ses on how we can mo­bil­ise peo­ple for an­i­mal welfare

  Thanks a lot for your comments Alex. I really appreciate it as I want to develop my thinking on topic. Thanks a lot for the suggestions as well.

Hy­pothe­ses on how we can mo­bil­ise peo­ple for an­i­mal welfare

• emre kaplan🔸Feb 6, 2025, 6:56 AM

  2 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Benquo’s comment on: Eth­i­cal Ve­ganism is Wrong

  There are some forms of agreements you can make with animals and there are some forms you cannot. I don’t see why they can’t intentionally coordinate based on understanding of our choices. A cow or a crow might move closer to someone giving them food and act kindly towards them later on, but they will refuse to move closer and cooperate if they realise that person has a history of deception.

  There are also possible worlds in which animals’ intelligence can be enhanced even further. It could even happen during our lifetimes given a technology explosion. In those possible worlds animals will be able to meet any threshold you want them to pass.

  I really struggle to see a consistent way to be respectful towards people in coma or babies without also respecting the animals. You need a very specific argument on why both of these are true:

  1. Being uncooperative to animals is fine even though they might become agents(according to your threshold) with some additional technology.

  2. Being uncooperative to babies is not fine because many of them will become agents in future.

  I believe the only consistent way to disregard animal interests is to deny that animals have interests at all as Yudkowsky does. As long as animals have interests it’s very difficult to explain why screwing them over won’t send a signal of “I might screw over others if I can get away with it”.

• emre kaplan🔸Feb 2, 2025, 9:36 AM

  4 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Alistair Stewart’s comment on: Why is ‘an­i­mal welfare’ more com­mon in EA than ‘an­i­mal rights’?

  Many advocates try to practice non-violent communication by merely criticising actions instead of individuals. But non-violent communication is stricter than that. Here’s one example from “Non Violent Communication: A Language of Life”. The anecdote starts with a cab driver making an antisemitic remark:

  MBR: “You know, when you first started to talk, I felt a lot of anger, a lot of frustration, sadness and discouragement, because I’ve had very different experiences with Jews than you’ve had, and I was wanting you to have much more the kind of experiences I’ve had. Can you tell me what you heard me say?”
  Man: “Oh, I’m not saying they’re all . . . ”
  MBR: “Excuse me, hold on, hold it. Can you tell me what you heard me say?

  Man: “What are you talking about?”
  MBR: “Let me repeat what I’m trying to say. I really want you to just hear the pain I felt when I heard your words. It’s really important to me that you hear that. I was saying I felt a real sense of sadness because my experiences with Jewish people have been very different. I was just wishing that you had had some experiences that were different from the ones you were describing. Can you tell me what you heard me say?”

  Man: “You’re saying I have no right to talk the way I did.”

  MBR: “No, I would like you to hear me differently. I really don’t want to blame you. I have no desire to blame you.”

  In this section many advocates would not be happy with correcting the expression “You’re saying I have no right to talk the way I did.”.

  In general, I think the language used for rights based theories is in continuity with religious ethics in which actions are divided into “positive/​neutral/​negative” categories. When you do negative actions you incur some kind of debt and that debt should and will be repaid in terms of punishment in hell. Forbidden actions are forbidden because God backs them up with authority. He exercises punishment when people disregard his authority.

  I think given the history and culture it’s very difficult to divorce “You have no right to do that” from “It would be good if you were punished” and “Hey, people around, punish that guy and be happy when this guy gets punished”.

  To be fair, non-violent communication is pretty much against all morality statements. But I think welfarist language(makes happier, gives suffering, better things to do, worse things to do, results in worse/​better/​best/​worst state of affairs) is less continuous with the religious tradition around debts and punishment.

• emre kaplan🔸Jan 28, 2025, 3:49 PM

  12 points

  5 ∶ 0

  on: Eth­i­cal Ve­ganism is Wrong

  You say:

  “But this assumes the other party can engage in the kind of reciprocal decision-making that grounds such rights. Most animals’ decision processes don’t mirror ours in the way needed for this kind of relationship—they can’t make or honor agreements, or intentionally retaliate based on understanding our choices. The question returns to welfare considerations: whether their lives are net positive.”

  I’m generally confused about this argument. If someone says “you can break your promises and violate trust if your counterparty is never able to find out or retaliate” they will get the retort “no no no decision theory doesn’t work that way”. If that person says “don’t worry, I really picked out those that really are unable to retaliate. I will be super careful with folks who are able to retaliate.”, they will get the response “nope, that doesn’t work”.

  When you hurt those who might have interests but are in no position to exercise agency, don’t you send a similar signal that “if you’re unable to understand what I’m doing, then I might hurt you”. You might say “don’t worry, I really picked out those that lack agency from birth, it will be fine” but I’m struggling to see a principled distinction.

  I also think many animals have some capacity to communicate, understand promises, feel anger and spite over betrayal and hold grudges. It’s possible to lie to many mammals and it’s also possible to trade with them.

• emre kaplan🔸Jan 26, 2025, 6:34 PM

  7 points

  1 ∶ 0

  on: Why is ‘an­i­mal welfare’ more com­mon in EA than ‘an­i­mal rights’?

  Here’s what I personally think about using welfare vs. rights jargon in my advocacy. These are some unpolished thoughts that I’m hoping to explore further in the future.
  
  Pro welfare:

  Some anti-incrementalist animal advocates try to gatekeep the term “animal rights”. They frequently complain when incrementalist folks use the expression “animal rights”. When I ask these advocates “What kind of empirical evidence would change your mind” sometimes I get the response “No biased study in this speciesist world would make me sell out my principles. Just like no evidence could convince me there could be merits to torture, I’m never going to negotiate on the basic rights of animals”. This makes me react “Ok, in that case I’m not going to swear allegiance to your banner and I will grow what I believe to be good”.

  Existing animal advocacy is already heavy on rights. Focusing on welfare jargon allows me to raise a distinct banner, differentiate my brand and organise people who are more sympathetic towards welfarist thinking.

  I’m happy with the philosophical welfarist tradition and their moral leadership on many issues. I want to signal continuity with that tradition.

  Rights based jargon is in strong tension with non-violent communication. Rights based jargon invokes a frame in which some people are sinners and should be punished. I’m not sure how useful non-violent communication is. But if it’s useful then it’s better to avoid rights jargon.

  When I look at the arguments themselves before taking peer disagreement into account, my first-order beliefs are very consequentialist. I think arguments against the significance of personal identity and arguments against the moral significance of act/​omission or intend/​foresee distinction are powerful and correct. As the main purpose of the communication is to make myself clear to the relevant stakeholders, welfare jargon is better equipped to make my beliefs clear.

  Pro rights

  Many people understand mere moral standing in terms of rights. Saying “animals have rights” is basically equivalent to saying “animals have moral standing” for these people. So singling out animals by talking about “animal welfare” when the whole world talks about “human rights” might diminish perceived moral standing of animals.

  In Turkish civil society, the term “rights based” is used to differentiate organisations that play by the rules of international human rights framework. I’m a huge fan of these norms and I’m happy to play by that book. Refusing being “rights based” because of my philosophical commitments would confuse people about where I stand in a political divide.

  Since I take peer disagreement very seriously, I give significant credence to rights based theories and I’m not a welfarist. I also would like basic legal human rights to be extended to non-human animals. Avoiding rights terminology makes it harder to communicate this aspect of my thinking.

  I want to maintain that incrementalist animal advocacy and wild animal welfare work are actually compatible with a rights based ethical theory. By avoiding rights language, I fear conceding this framework entirely to anti incrementalist advocates.

• emre kaplan🔸Dec 19, 2024, 5:39 PM

  20 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Ask Us Any­thing: EA An­i­mal Welfare Fund

  What is your bar for funding for some of the most common welfare interventions? On the margin, how many animals or animal-years should be affected per dollar for the following welfare improvements:

  a. Cage-free transition for egg-laying hens

  b. Stunning before slaughter for farmed sea bass and sea bream

  c. Transition to ECC/​BCC standards

• emre kaplan🔸Dec 11, 2024, 7:29 AM

  20 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Ozzie Gooen’s comment on: Ozzie Gooen’s Shortform

  Lewis Bollard:

  “I agree with Ellen that legislation /​ corporate standards are more promising. I’ve asked if the breeders would accept $ to select on welfare, & the answer was no b/​c it’s inversely correlated w/​ productivity & they can only select on ~2 traits/​generation.”

• emre kaplan🔸Nov 25, 2024, 3:11 PM

  3 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Mean­ingfully re­duc­ing meat con­sump­tion is an un­solved prob­lem: meta-analysis

  Thank you so much for this research. Is there a more intuitive way to interpret SMD values? For example, how many standard deviations is an average vegetarian away from the average person in the general population?

Je­sus Among The Utilitarians

• emre kaplan🔸Nov 13, 2024, 3:05 PM

  12 points

  4 ∶ 0

  on: EA An­i­mal Welfare Fund: 2024 Re­view, Changes, and Plans

  What does EA AWF think about publishing annual impact reports reporting the outcomes of its previous grants? I understand how this might be much more difficult than publishing an impact report for a single organisation. But as it stands, donating to EA AWF requires a lot of trust in fund managers and EA movement as there is little data available on the impact of previous grants. I care a lot about the growth of this fund and I’d have much easier time recommending this fund to potential donors if they could learn more about its past impact.

• emre kaplan🔸Nov 5, 2024, 5:20 PM

  6 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Re­mem­ber­ing Joseph Rot­blat (born on this day in 1908)

  Thank you for writing this. I really appreciate EA’s focus on highlighting people doing the right thing out of good judgment. Normally people tend to focus on selflessness, courage and hard work instead of good judgment when they think of praiseworthy figures. These are also pretty important but it’s nice to learn more about people succeeding in this overlooked requirement for doing good.

• emre kaplan🔸Oct 31, 2024, 6:04 PM

  7 points

  1 ∶ 0

  on: The goal isn’t ‘end fac­tory farm­ing’, but re­duce as much suffer­ing as possible

  I thought about this question over the last few months while drafting our strategy and vision. A few thoughts and observations:

  Some other EA organizations also seem to have adopted directional visions instead of static visions describing an ideal world. 80k had this in their 2014 business model:
  ”Our aim is to have the biggest possible social impact.”

  and they currently have this more detailed blog post about the meaning of social impact.

  2022 CEA:
  ”CEA’s overall aim is to do the most we can to solve pressing global problems — like global poverty, factory farming, and existential risk — and prepare to face the challenges of tomorrow.”

  What I primarily need from a vision statement is to succinctly and clearly communicate my goal to my team, supporters, and the general public. The problem with static vision statements is that they are unable to properly communicate what we are trying to do.

  Making the ideal world come sooner or making it more likely to come is only one part of doing good. Another important part of doing good is affecting non-ideal worlds by making them less bad or making the worst futures less likely. It becomes more difficult to explain my focus on harm-mitigation with a static vision statement, because in many cases harm-mitigation doesn’t obviously make the ideal world come sooner. I think harm mitigation is worthwhile even if it has zero impact on when the ideal world comes.

  On the other hand, one main distinction that both the general public and animal advocates are primarily interested in is whether the organization is against all animal farming or not. Directional vision statements make your position on this unclear. When you say “I’m trying to do the most good for the animals”, people(both mainstream public and animal advocates) keep asking you “I don’t get it, are you a vegan organisation or not?”.

  Pretty much all animal advocacy organizations I know of have static vision statements describing an ideal world. I’m still confused about what is the best way to proceed here.

• emre kaplan🔸Oct 16, 2024, 5:37 PM

  2 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Mo Putera’s comment on: Dis­cus­sion thread: An­i­mal Welfare vs. Global Health De­bate Week

  I appreciate the correction. When I said “I generally feel much more comfortable standing behind Givewell’s estimates” that was for their main page recommendations. I currently won’t prioritise reviewing these BOTECS in detail in the short term but as a future exercise I will look into the linked analyses and compare them to animal welfare ones.

• emre kaplan🔸Oct 11, 2024, 11:36 PM

  24 points

  3 ∶ 0

  on: Dis­cus­sion thread: An­i­mal Welfare vs. Global Health De­bate Week

  Some other factors not mentioned here but I sometimes think about:

  -PETA used to do welfare campaigns and proudly own up their work on welfare campaigns when they talk about their history. But they stopped doing welfare campaigns around 10 years ago and even published public statements against some of the initiatives. I keep wondering whether that has anything to do with EA entering into space, refusing to fund PETA, and PETA withdrawing from welfare work to differentiate itself from welfare campaigning organisations in response. That would reduce cost-effectiveness of welfare campaigns significantly.

  -One part I often see missing from human-animal comparisons is that animal welfare work prevents very extreme types suffering that would be classified as torture in human contexts. If I were to choose between extending a human life for 50 years versus preventing a person from suffering for one full year in a wire coffin, I would choose the latter. Similarly choosing between preventing 20.000 years of non-stop chicken torture vs. saving a human life is a lot different from saving the lives of 20.000 chickens versus saving the life of a human being. I think $5000 is currently able to fund alleviating 40000 years of chicken suffering by about half.

  -Animals suffer from acts of deliberate violence. If acts of violence are also axiologically bad in themselves then there are more reasons to prevent violence than prevent deaths due to neglect. I don’t endorse this position but I think it is aligned with folk ethics. People are willing to spend much more on preventing murders than preventing deaths due to natural causes.

  -In animal welfare CEAs, it’s often assumed that advocacy speeds up eventual progress by 10 years. I think that’s a bit short. Here’s one data point from France:
  

  

  From 1997 to 2017, the number of hens in cages was reduced by 10 million hens in 20 years. In 2017, Open Philanthropy came in. After that, the number of hens in cages was reduced by 20 million hens in 7 years. If the rate of decline had remained constant, that reduction would have happened in 40 years instead.

  -If we’re in the business of speculating about sociological side effects of interventions, many animal activists like arguing that violence against animals is breeding ground for all kinds of violence. Calling people “cockroaches” or “rats” is an important part of legitimising violence. I don’t like this type of arguments as they can be used to justify any type of intervention. But I think at the very least this should serve as an example to be wary of this kind of hardly falsifiable arguments.

• emre kaplan🔸Oct 11, 2024, 8:44 PM

  1 point

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Mo Putera’s comment on: Dis­cus­sion thread: An­i­mal Welfare vs. Global Health De­bate Week

  This seems to be a representative publicly available estimate from 4 years ago by Lewis Bollard:

  “This is a major question for us, and one we continue to research. Our current very rough estimate is that our average $ spent on corporate campaigns and all supporting work (which is ~40% of our total animal grant-making) achieves the equivalent of ~7 animals spared a year of complete suffering. We use this a rough benchmark for BOTECs on new grants, and my best guess is this reflects roughly the range we should hope for the last pro-animal dollar. ”

  I think several more up to date estimates will be available soon.

  For advocacy evaluation, a concrete area for improvement is the following. Saulius’s analysis has a really nice section titled “Ways this estimate could be misleading”. Other advocates cite concerns similar to those when they argue against corporate welfare campaigns. They usually don’t have empirical evidence, but I don’t have super strong evidence to show them wrong either. I’m not very happy about that.

• emre kaplan🔸Oct 10, 2024, 8:29 PM

  5 points

  1 ∶ 0

  in reply to: nathan hart-hodgson’s comment on: Dis­cus­sion thread: An­i­mal Welfare vs. Global Health De­bate Week

  Unitarian views are actually pretty common in the field. It’s hard to have all three of these:

  1. There is no moral hierarchy between humans, no matter what their mental capacities are.

  2. Species-membership itself is merely genetics and it’s morally irrelevant. What morally matters is other morally relevant capacities like sentience, consciousness, mental capacities etc.

  3. There is some kind of moral hierarchy between humans and animals.

• emre kaplan🔸Oct 10, 2024, 9:21 AM

  64 points

  6 ∶ 1

  on: Dis­cus­sion thread: An­i­mal Welfare vs. Global Health De­bate Week

  Disclaimer: I’m funded by EA for animal welfare work.

  Some thoughts:

  a. So much of the debate feels like a debate on identities and values. I’d really love to see people nitpicking into technical details of cost-effectiveness estimates instead.

  b. I think it’s worth reminding that animal welfare interventions are less cost-effective than they were when Simcikas conducted his analysis.

  c. I generally feel much more comfortable standing behind Givewell’s estimates but Givewell doesn’t analyse cost-effectiveness of advocacy work. My biggest misgivings about cost-effectiveness estimates are due to the difficulty of assessing advocacy work. I think we should make a lot more progress on this.

  d. People seem to keep forgetting that uncertainty cuts both ways. If the moral worth of animals is too uncertain, that is also a reason against confidently dismissing them.

  e. I don’t think we have made much progress on the question of “How much important is cage to cage-free transition for a chicken in terms of human welfare?”. I don’t think Rethink Priorities Welfare ranges answer that question. In general I’m confused about the approach of trying to find overall welfare capacities of different species rather than just focusing on comparing specific experiences of different individuals. In RP’s report, here’s how the question of welfare comparison was addressed:

  “I estimated the DALY equivalent of a year spent in each type of pain assessed by the Welfare Footprint Project by looking at the descriptions of and disability weights assigned to various conditions assessed by the Global Burden of Disease Study in 2019 and comparing these to the descriptions of each type of pain tracked by the Welfare Footprint Project.”

  I think this is the core question on this issue and it merits a much longer and thorough analysis. I would love to see a team of biologists, animal behaviour experts and human health experts coming together to produce a more detailed report on this.

  f. I think there should be more concrete examples for PR costs of animal welfare work. Animal welfare has been around for sometime and I don’t see that it has created notorious enemies for EA that try to drag down the movement. On the contrary it has even brought in new donors for some of the non-animal welfare parts of the movement(The Navigation Fund). EA-supported interventions on animal welfare are generally pretty moderate and popular. Cage-free referendums were always won by over 60% support(78% support in Massachusetts!). End The Cage Age petition got 1.4 million signatures in the EU. EA-supported Nähtamatud Loomad got the NGO of the year award from Estonian president. Animal welfare work has its enemies, but they don’t seem to have affected EA that much.

  g. On the contrary I found animal welfare quite useful for EA community building. Open Philanthropy donating an additional 5 million dollars to AMF doesn’t create new entry opportunities to EA. Whereas many of the EA organisers in Turkey got involved in the movement through the local EA supported animal advocacy organisation. Animal advocacy offers localised, effective and non-monetary ways to contribute. That is pretty useful in low trust or middle income countries.

  But overall I think animal welfare spending should be evaluated primarily according to its impact on animals. If someone thinks that some positive or negative side-effect is significant enough they should concretely show it and provide an estimate for it.

  h. I feel similarly about ripple effects. If someone is attempting to maximise that kind of outcome, they should choose an intervention that maximises ripple effects. Otherwise both animal advocacy work and global health work have loads of side effects on people’s values, ideas, population growth, economic growth and it’s an extremely ambitious effort to sum these all up and have a verdict on the overall direction of them. I’m also surprised that people think animal advocacy’s effect is isolated on animals only. It’s a mass communications work that leaves an impact on millions of people. That is a whole load of ripples.

• emre kaplan🔸Oct 9, 2024, 7:15 PM

  6 points

  2 ∶ 1

  in reply to: nathanhb’s comment on: Dis­cus­sion thread: An­i­mal Welfare vs. Global Health De­bate Week

  “I do not believe that any amount of the qualitatively different animal suffering adds up to any amount of human suffering.”

  I was responding to my interpretation of the sentence above. I agree that it’s a common position to assign infinitely higher importance to saving a human life compared to preventing any amount of animal suffering. My understanding of the quote above was that you made an even stronger claim since the expression is “any amount of human suffering”, which should include very low amounts of human suffering.

  But I still think folk ethics on this issue is overconfident and doesn’t take moral uncertainty properly into account. I also think that kind of incommensurability claims face other more general theoretical problems. “Saving” a life is just another expression for extending it, since no intervention makes people immortal. That position would claim 0,0000000001% increase in the chance of prolonging a human life by one day is more important than preventing 1000000000 animals to be born into torture.