Brigitte GothiĆØre, SĆ©bastian Arsac and Marek VorÅ”ilka
emre kaplanšø
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ChatGPT seems to have taken it from the training data, without much change. I will replace the translation with this one.
Do you currently think non-human animals are replaceable in a way humans arenāt? Can a hedonist argue for that claim consistently?
What keeps you going when you are at your lowest?
In your previous writing on Animal Liberation, you state:
āWith the benefit of hindsight, I regret that I did allow the concept of a right to intrude into my work so unnecessarily at this point; it would have avoided misunderstanding if I had not made this concession to popular moral rhetoric.ā
What do you currently think about using rights and justice jargon when advocating for animals? John Stuart Mill is currently regarded as an early proponent of several movements for rights without much controversy. He often made use of the terms ārightā and ālibertyā in his writings. On the other hand the word ārightā is very loaded in animal advocacy world, with some insisting on a very specific, strictly deontological interpretation of the word. Should people who care about animal welfare dispense with the term ārightsā or should they push for a more generic understanding of the term(e.g. fundamental interests that should be protected by the state) and keep using it?
In your interviews, you tend to offer bullet-biting, pure utilitarian responses to moral dilemmas. What do you think about the concept of moral uncertainty, and how does it affect your decision-making? Do you sometimes consider providing answers that give credence to other moral theories in your responses?
You are both an academic philosopher and a public advocate for several causes. How do you balance the requirements of these two roles? Academic philosophy requires one to follow the arguments to their conclusions, no matter how controversial they are. This must affect advocacy work to some extent. What are the rules of thumb you follow?
You should be familiar with this from activism, people use ālikeās and mass comments in social media to make bystanders more likely to believe in an idea or have certain attitudes just through social proof effect. I feel a similar vibe with discussions under heated posts.
I find it emotionally draining when heated topics become battlegrounds for social proofing through mass use of agreement vote/ākarma. It makes me feel like people are trying to manipulate me by illegitimate means and Iām a target of aggression. I donāt have any good solutions here but I wanted to offer feedback on my experience.
How is HBD action-relevant for EA in a pre-AGI world? Do you think getting people accept HBD is one of the top 50 interventions for making progress on AI safety and governance?
āthere have been a bunch of radical-leftist animal rights people at various conferences that have been cited to me many times as something that made very promising young people substantially less likely to attend (I donāt want to dox the relevant attendees here, but would be happy to DM you some names if you want).ā
Iām curious about the type of behaviour rather than the names of the people.
I have seen popular uses of the term āeffective altruistā in a way that doesnāt require self-identification. In this example Peter Singer refers to Bill Gates, Melinda French Gates and Warren Buffet as the most effective altruists in history.
My two cents:
I shortly looked into where wealthy Muslims in TĆ¼rkiye donate to for their zakat. A few people mentioned that one common way businesspeople pay their zakat is through paying bonuses to their employees. I saw quite a lot discussion of this in Islamic jurisprudence websites but I couldnāt identify someone explicitly doing that as people are discouraged from talking about their donations.
āconstraint on warranted hostility: the target must be ill-willed and/āor unreasonable.ā
Trying to apply this constraint seems to contradict with non-violent communication norms on not assuming intent and keeping the discussion focused on harms/ābenefits/āspecific behaviours.
Very interesting and exciting. Looking forward to learning from this.
Does requiring ex-ante Pareto superiority incentivise information suppression?
Assume I emit x kg of carbon dioxide. Later on, I donate to offset 2x kg of carbon dioxide emissions. The combination of these two actions seems to make everyone better off in expectation. Itās ex-ante Pareto superior. Even though we know that my act of emitting carbon and offsetting it will cause the deaths of different individuals due to different extreme weather events compared to not emitting at all, climate scientists report that higher carbon emissions will make the severity of climate change worse overall. Since our forecasts are not granular enough and nobody is made foreseeably worse off by reducing emissions, itās morally permissible to reduce the total amount of emissions.
This position seems to incentivise information suppression.
Assume a climate scientist creates a reliable and sophisticated climate model that can forecast specific weather events caused by different levels of carbon emissions. Such a model would allow us to infer that reducing emissions by a specific amount would make a specific village in Argentina worse off. The villagers from there could complain to a politician that āyour offsetting/āreduction policy foreseeably causes severe drought in my region, therefore it makes us foreseeably worse offā.
Policy makers who want to act permissibly would have incentives to prevent such a detailed climate model if ex-ante Pareto superiority were a sound condition for permissibility.
Many grantee organisations report the lessons they learnt to their donors. Open Philanthropy must have accumulated a lot of information on the best practices for animal welfare organisations. As far as I understand, grant makers are wary of giving object level advice and micromanaging grantees. On the other hand, many organisations already spend a lot of time trying to learn about the best (and worst) practices in other organisations. Could Open Phil animal welfare team prepare an anonymised write up about what their grantees report as the reasons for their successes and failures?
I believe weāre in agreement that the official definition of veganism is vague as you also use words like āambiguityā or āunclearā while describing it. In my comment Iām stating that vagueness of that definition isnāt that much of a problem.
Iām also curious why do you think animal tested ingredient consumption is first-order harm whereas crop deaths are a second-order harm. I can see how tractors crushing animals might be accidental instead of intentional. But when I compare pesticides to animal testing, both of them seem to be instances of intentionally exposing animals to harmful chemicals to improve product quality.
I think vagueness isnāt that much of a problem. Many useful categories are vague. Even murder and rape are vague. People can say āwe donāt know the exact point where harm to animals becomes unacceptable. But morality is very difficult. Thatās to be expected. We know some actions(such as eating animal products) are definitely too bad, for that reason we can confidently claim they are non-vegan.ā
I think bigger problems with the consistency of veganism are:
-Some obviously vegan actions harm more animals than some obviously non-vegan actions.
-Some vegans cause more animal killings than some non-vegans.
-Veganism itself optimises for minimising animal product consumption. It doesnāt optimise for minimising killings caused or minimising harm caused or minimising the suffering in the world.
I think what happens is that human brain finds it much easier to attribute moral emotions like disgust and shame to physical objects. So our emotional reactions track ācan I sustainably disgust this physical objectā rather than āis this action causing the least harm possibleā. If something can be completely eliminated it gets tabooed. On the other hand itās unstable to wear clothes but also feel disgusted when someone buys way too many clothes. So you canāt create a taboo over clothing or vehicle use. I wrote more about this topic here.
Hereās my understanding of the current state of evidence, keep in mind that I am not a researcher or grantmaker:
To my knowledge there is no scientifically rigorous experiment showing that some intervention has a statistically significant effect on the number of vegans.
Vegan education organisations also donāt tend to report the number of counterfactual vegans they create, to some extent because of measurement difficulties.
My guess is that most effective ways(having conversations about veganism with people who trust you) of spreading veganism canāt be funded to scale up.
Probably education initiatives produce small effects but we donāt have sufficiently powered studies to catch these effects. So we have very little data to compare vegan education initiatives to each other.