I’ve been somewhat disappointed in reading this post. But as I know some folks I like are reading it, I feel the need to share a few thoughts as a legal scholar and theorist. Your post I think demonstrates some misunderstandings about the nature of law.
1. You seem to misunderstand contractarianism, by making it an argument for quietism, as well as the nature of law in a democracy. We don’t agree to many laws as a society; most extant laws are conditions that no one ever agrees on. They are traditions. Take property law — no one ever voted to make animals property. That’s an inherited concept. There is a difference between a law that is democratically enacted, and a vestige of the English common law. The same goes for trespass, a common law principle. Moreover, no contractarian worth her salt is going to claim you can never break an unjust law. Going back to Aquinas, there is broad agreement that sometimes breaking an unjust law is morally appropriate, or at least defensible.
2. No one could reasonably argue this tactic is universalizable. It is strategic — it is a non-universalizable tactic meant to create significant attention and pressure for change toward universalizable norms. And more — the argument that if they do it, everyone will, can be a dangerous slippery slope. It’s infeasible for everyone to do this: they have jobs. More important, I would very much caution against that kind of thinking. It has been used to justify atrocities in the past. Take slaveholders: they used that kind of argument to push back against slave rebellions—it would destroy the antebellum south, socially and economically. That is not an argument worth keeping. I am not defending the Ridglan approach, but I am cautioning against these types dismissals of what they are doing.
3. Historically, you seem to again misunderstand the nature of law. Slaves were considered property, and their rebellions certainly damaged their property status. They also moved the north toward abolitionism. Elements of the civil rights movement and the labor movement in the United States engaged in tactics that damaged property and yet ultimately won reforms. Property is a convention—it should not interfere with moral obligation and serious moral intervention.
I’ll just mention one thing about donors. Doing what is right sometimes risks making certain people unhappy. That’s why social movements shouldn’t rely on the whims of wealthy individuals. The right donors will see the right priorities for what they are. The priority should be supporting one another within a social movement.
State laws are path dependent, and rely very often on common law principles and concepts uncritically applied. That does not equate to democratic legitimacy for every codified version of property and criminal law.
I think we have fundamentally incompatible views on the appropriate frame to apply to balancing questions—I am not at all a utilitarian, and I don’t think you should be either. But I’ll set that aside.
You again seem to conflate lawbreaking with immorality. Please don’t do that. Rosa Parks broke the law. So did the Ridglan rescuers. That doesn’t make what they did wrong. That’s a separate question. The symbolic/non-symbolic distinction is not one I find compelling.
You seem to see humans and animals as categorically different from a legal perspective. Humans care for animal welfare but animals have no voice. I fundamentally disagree — animals should have rights, including a right to a voice. That means they should have institutions that represent their interests. So there is no fundamental difference between the slave revolts and what people are trying to do here for animals in terms of voice, as their representatives. I suggest Zoopolis on this point.
Your articulation of the EA bias toward donors is particularly problematic. Successful social movements historically have not relied on extremely wealthy individuals for funding. Your concern to persuade donors is troubling. You should be worried about persuading people, not persuading donors. Lots of people are going to be needed to change social perspectives and institutions around animals. A social narrative that focuses on “earning to give” or major donors is likely to be unmoored from a durable movement.