emre kaplan🔸

Karma: 1,882

emre kaplan🔸Jul 29, 2024, 9:29 PM
7 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Peter Singer AMA (July 30th)
What keeps you going when you are at your lowest?

emre kaplan🔸Jul 29, 2024, 9:23 PM
4 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Peter Singer AMA (July 30th)
In your previous writing on Animal Liberation, you state:
“With 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.”
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 “right” and “liberty” in his writings. On the other hand the word “right” 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 “rights” 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?

emre kaplan🔸Jul 27, 2024, 12:07 PM
11 points
1 ∶ 0
on: Peter Singer AMA (July 30th)
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?

emre kaplan🔸Jul 27, 2024, 12:00 PM
5 points
1 ∶ 0
on: Peter Singer AMA (July 30th)
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?

emre kaplan🔸Jun 19, 2024, 8:52 PM
1 point
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in reply to: Jakub Stencel’s comment on: emre kaplan’s Quick takes
You should be familiar with this from activism, people use “like”s 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.

emre kaplan🔸Jun 19, 2024, 8:02 PM
11 points
0 ∶ 1
on: emre kaplan’s Quick takes
I find it emotionally draining when heated topics become battlegrounds for social proofing through mass use of agreement vote/karma. It makes me feel like people are trying to manipulate me by illegitimate means and I’m a target of aggression. I don’t have any good solutions here but I wanted to offer feedback on my experience.

emre kaplan🔸Jun 19, 2024, 1:52 PM
4 points
1 ∶ 0
in reply to: Roko’s comment on: Why so many “racists” at Manifest?
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?

emre kaplan🔸Jun 19, 2024, 12:03 PM
14 points
5 ∶ 0
in reply to: Habryka [Deactivated]’s comment on: My experience at the controversial Manifest 2024
“there 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 don’t want to dox the relevant attendees here, but would be happy to DM you some names if you want).”
I’m curious about the type of behaviour rather than the names of the people.

emre kaplan🔸Jun 17, 2024, 10:04 AM
4 points
1 ∶ 0
in reply to: Karthik Tadepalli’s comment on: Mr Beast is now officially engaged in effective giving!
I have seen popular uses of the term “effective altruist” in a way that doesn’t 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.

emre kaplan🔸Jun 10, 2024, 6:02 PM
6 points
1 ∶ 0
on: On Estimates of how much Zakat there is
My two cents:
I shortly looked into where wealthy Muslims in Türkiye 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 couldn’t identify someone explicitly doing that as people are discouraged from talking about their donations.

emre kaplan🔸May 17, 2024, 11:44 AM
3 points
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on: Beneficentric Virtue Ethics
“constraint on warranted hostility: the target must be ill-willed and/or unreasonable.”
Trying to apply this constraint seems to contradict with non-violent communication norms on not assuming intent and keeping the discussion focused on harms/benefits/specific behaviours.

emre kaplan🔸May 14, 2024, 11:17 PM
4 points
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on: Announcing UK Voters for Animals!
Very interesting and exciting. Looking forward to learning from this.

emre kaplan🔸May 3, 2024, 3:11 PM
6 points
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on: emre kaplan’s Quick takes
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. It’s 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, it’s 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 “your offsetting/reduction policy foreseeably causes severe drought in my region, therefore it makes us foreseeably worse off”.

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.

emre kaplan🔸May 1, 2024, 11:34 PM
17 points
1 ∶ 0
on: AMA: Lewis Bollard, Program Director of Farm Animal Welfare at OpenPhil
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?

emre kaplan🔸Apr 26, 2024, 7:56 AM
2 points
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in reply to: Venky1024’s comment on: What is veganism anyway?
I believe we’re in agreement that the official definition of veganism is vague as you also use words like “ambiguity” or “unclear” while describing it. In my comment I’m stating that vagueness of that definition isn’t that much of a problem.
I’m 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.

emre kaplan🔸Apr 25, 2024, 7:54 PM
4 points
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on: What is veganism anyway?
I think vagueness isn’t that much of a problem. Many useful categories are vague. Even murder and rape are vague. People can say “we don’t know the exact point where harm to animals becomes unacceptable. But morality is very difficult. That’s 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.”
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 doesn’t 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 “can I sustainably disgust this physical object” rather than “is this action causing the least harm possible”. If something can be completely eliminated it gets tabooed. On the other hand it’s unstable to wear clothes but also feel disgusted when someone buys way too many clothes. So you can’t create a taboo over clothing or vehicle use. I wrote more about this topic here.

emre kaplan🔸Apr 11, 2024, 4:21 PM
2 points
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in reply to: Julia_Wise🔸’s comment on: Deontological Constraints on Animal Products
Thank you. Particularly the section with “It’s typically legal for children of any age to work for their parents’ business.” is new to me. I will replace the examples.

emre kaplan🔸Apr 9, 2024, 7:58 PM
5 points
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in reply to: Larks’s comment on: Deontological Constraints on Animal Products
My understanding is that there are often minimum age limits for minor employment with a blanket ban below a certain age. When I use the expression “child labour”, I don’t mean 17 years olds. But you’re right that my phrasing isn’t precise there. I also agree people won’t mind children selling lemonades on their own. But in my conversations there was a general agreement that you shouldn’t make your 10 years old child work full-time and you absolutely shouldn’t employ any kid of that age as an employer.
Even less controversially, since there is agreement that early children’s rights legislation was way below the acceptable standard, it serves as an example for “getting someone to do something less bad but still forbidden”.

Deontological Constraints on Animal Products

emre kaplan🔸Apr 9, 2024, 10:40 AM

59 points

7 comments18 min readEA link

emre kaplan🔸Apr 8, 2024, 1:18 PM
2 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: GraceAdams🔸’s comment on: Considering pledging but haven’t? Help us understand!
If taking a salary cut is considered as honest fulfilment of the GWWC pledge, I’m willing to take the pledge.

emre kaplan🔸

Deon­tolog­i­cal Con­straints on An­i­mal Products

Deontological Constraints on Animal Products