This is a thought-provoking post.
It makes me wonder how much Homo erectus or even early agriculturalists would find our values and projects desirable and worthy. Or have we already diverged too much for them?
There must be a literature on this at least. Maybe as it relates to moral progress?
“Given the extremely high recidivism rate, we reasoned that most of the people who had “liked” a vegetarian Facebook page in the past would have gone back to eating meat.”
What reason do we have to believe that people don’t curate their profiles? That is, is there evidence that people don’t update their profiles as their beliefs and behaviors change?
“The average cost of getting a person in the former-vegetarian community to pledge to go veg (again) and order an MFA Vegetarian Starter Guide was about 2-3 times less ($2.65) than for the general population ($5-$8).”
An alternative hypothesis is that people who were already “veg” wanted to read the guides. Is there any way to rule this hypothesis out with the data you collect at the time people order the ads?
I’m also increasingly skeptical about persuasion on its own, so I’m interested in this line of thinking.
Can you say more about what you mean by “institutional change” in the context of animal rights? What are some examples of what would qualify?
“So welfarism did not prevent European countries from eventually adopting rights-like reforms.”
What do you have in mind when you mention rights-like reforms?
This is a very nice post. I very much agree with these statements:
“This means that the relative value of donations to cellular agriculture research and animal activism at any given point will largely be constrained by how promising cellular agriculture appears at the time, and its need for funding.”
“This does not mean the mix of strategies which constitutes animal activism at present is optimal. For instance, the non-negligible possibility of cost-competitive cellular agriculture may imply the need for a greater balance of liberationist messaging, as this kind of approach will be strengthened if CAPs are available to replace factory farming.”
I’m not sure I entirely agree about the second sentence here, if you’re talking about the absolute number of funders: “As approaches to reducing animal suffering, cellular agriculture and animal activism compete to some extent for funding. There is some reason to believe overlap in potential funders is not too great.” Though there’s a lot of VC money that appears ready to fund private ventures, I believe a large amount of the funding going to research (e.g., what New Harvest recommends or to New Harvest) is coming from those individuals who are choosing between organizations and efforts to reduce animal suffering. My sense though is that the Dutch government’s prior funding outweighs all of that in sum though.
Small correction: New Crop Capital has not invested $25 million yet. They’ve invested $5 million of $25 million and will invest the remaining $20 million over the next four years.
It seems kind of obnoxious that this message was sent to people who were already explicitly rejected.
Hey NAME, quick update for folks that aren’t going to be able to attend EA Global this year.
For the next few days, if you nominate five people who you think might want to go to EA Global we’ll send each of them a free copy of Doing Good Better for applying and we’ll give you a free EA t-shirt. We’ll stop giving away tickets when we run out. Sound fair?
Did some mailing lists get mixed up?
Please accept my apologies!
I learned the application was made using a different email address than I sent the invite to. Not the best customer experience but it makes sense why it happened.
This is a nice article. Thanks for writing it.
Regarding: “Consideration of the far future is the strongest factor in favor of prioritizing animal advocacy for many long-time EAs, including myself.”
How do you see animal advocacy as a cause area stacking up against work on existential risks?
In contemporary ethics, Derek Parfit has tried to find convergence in his ‘On What Matters’ books.
Thanks, Michael. When you talked to GFI or researched them did you find anything indicating they would be able to meaningfully spend $2.6 million? Or are you taking it on faith given your positive interactions with you had with them and their strong evidence mindedness?
I ask because I’m similarly interested in donating to spur the development of animal product alternatives. To date, it’s seemed like GFI has had no issue raising money.
New Harvest has also done pretty well in raising money, and one thing I’ve liked about them is that they continually find new projects to fund as they get money. They have a great track record for that and have a very nice plan to help make it easier for others to produce cultured products—through creating cell lines and promoting open research.
GFI being about a year old doesn’t have the same track record and given their ability to raise substantial sums anyway, I’ve been more inclined to donate to New Harvest, though I’m watching GFI closely.
I’m curious for your thoughts.
Since I just listened to it I can’t help but see parallels to Mauricio Miller describing the certain visions the poor need to latch onto in order to be lifted from poverty: http://www.econtalk.org/mauricio-miller-on-poverty-social-work-and-the-alternative/
I doubt there’s a good way of manipulating EA culture to present the variety of visions people would need to jump on board. I suspect it will take a decent amount of time for EA to mature and develop before there are the multiplicity of alive paths that will attract a greater number of people.
This advertisement for a Faculty Ethics Bowl on investment in the far future made me think of the anti-debate type concept. It’s not exactly that, but they say: “But this won’t be your ordinary run-of-the-mill debate. Ethics Bowl is very different from traditional debate formats. The teams are docked for using rhetoric, spin, aggression, and clever rationalization. Instead, each team is judged on the basis of active listening, flexibility, collaboration, and analytical rigor—essential ingredients for a meaningful discussion on difficult topics.”
See https://news.ucsc.edu/2019/05/faculty-ethics-bowl.html
Brian Tomasik.
I’m not in a position to evaluate the strength of the argument of the paper you make versus any other scholarly work on the topic, but there is a book out there that makes the case that moral arguments have played a role in slavery abolition, though perhaps more so in other countries.
See ‘Argument and Change in World Politics: Ethics, Decolonization, and Humanitarian Intervention’ by Neta Crawford.
Thanks for the link.
Did they have any suggestions for possible interventions based on these findings? Do you have any?
On the subject of recognizing the moral worth of animals, Subhuman: The Moral Psychology of Human Attitudes to Animals by TJ Kasperbauer offers a good summary of issues. In particular, he argues that there are psychological processes at work that humans frequently use to distance themselves from animals that are different than what they apply to humans, though there are cases of overlap too.
Fwiw, I didn’t find anything particularly actionable in the book. But I do think he argues well that different approaches to motivating people to morally care about animals (namely, welfarism and abolitionism) are both premised on moral psychological beliefs that we don’t have very much empirical evidence to help adjudicate.
I’m curious under what circumstances we can judge thinking to be better or worse but can’t make such judgments of “metamoral reasoning”.