I disagreed with this because good, sophisticated consequentialists should follow those rules on consequentialist grounds.
JBentham
That’s a pretty impressive and thorough piece of research, regardless of whether you agree with the conclusions. I think one of its central points — that x-risk/longtermism has always been a core part of the movement — is correct. Some recent critiques have overemphasised the degree to which EA has shifted toward these areas in the last few years. It was always, if not front and centre, ‘hiding in plain sight’. And there was criticism of EA for focusing on x-risk from very early on (though it was mostly drowned out by criticisms of EA’s global health work, which now seems less controversial along with some of the farmed animal welfare work being done).
If someone disagrees empirically with estimates of existential risk, or holds a person-affecting view of population ethics, the idea that it is a front for longtermism is a legitimate criticism to make of EA. Even more resources could be directed toward global health if it wasn’t for these other cause areas. A bit less reasonably, people who hold non-utilitarian beliefs might even suspect that EA was just a way of rebranding ‘total utilitarianism’ (with the ‘total’ part becoming slowly more prominent over time).
At the same time, EAs still do a lot in the global health space (where a majority of EA funding is still directed), so the movement is in a sense being condemned because it has actually noticed these problems (see the Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics).
This isn’t to say that the paper itself is criticising EA (it seems to be more of a qualitative study of the movement).
Hi Emma, thanks for your work. It was encouraging to see the plight of chickens being featured so prominently by the RSPCA at the beginning of the year. Some questions:
How do you respond to accusations of “humane washing”, and do you think your standards are the best they could be? For instance, your standards allow for pigs to be gassed in slaughterhouses despite the RSPCA having called for a ban on the gassing of pigs in 2018 and expressed concern about chickens being exposed to highly aversive levels of carbon dioxide?
There has also been a lot of coverage recently (some of it driven by the concerns of your President, the broadcaster Chris Packham) about the atrocious welfare standards on UK salmon farms, including the high prevalence of sea lice infestation and high mortality rates. Yet, in a submission to a Parliamentary committee, you said that 100% of salmon production in the UK is RSPCA-certified, meaning that as a September 2023 report found, RSPCA-certified farms with mortality rates of up to 74 percent can carry the label.
Even though your standards are clearly better for farmed animals, how confident are you that farms are actually adhering to them? A number of investigations over the years have found poor welfare for animals at RSCPA-assured farms. I see that your scheme involves pre-announced inspections unless there has been a complaint, in which case unannounced inspections may occur. Would you be willing to move to unannounced inspections across the board? We now have CCTV cameras in slaughterhouses in the UK (though it has led to some improvement, the degree to which the footage is being monitored is in question) - would you support mandatory CCTV on RSPCA-certified farms too?
How many farms have been RSCPA-certified over the years and how many have you removed from the scheme due to poor welfare practices?
How do you balance engagement with industry with ensuring that your standards are as stringent as possible? I see that the egg industry has recently complained about your proposed new standards (around natural lighting and verandas) for egg-laying hens.
I see that you have an email campaign encouraging supermarkets to adopt the Better Chicken Commitment. How combative are you willing to be if they don’t?
Do you see the Better Chicken Commitment as complementary to your existing scheme? Are there any major differences between your own scheme and the Commitment? As your website notes, only 1.2% of chicken produced in the UK is RSCPA-assured, so if retailers and suppliers follow through on the Commitment do you envisage that this percentage will rise?
The RSPCA has tremendous respect and therefore has social and political capital. What would you say to people who think you should use some of that capital to more forcefully argue that people should drastically reduce or eliminate their consumption of animal products, particularly chickens, turkeys, eggs, fishes and pigs?
What are some of the major pledges on farmed animal welfare that you’d like to see from political parties ahead of this year’s UK general election?
Thank you for this post. I agree that EA’s moral roots are very weird to almost everyone, but it’s for that reason that I’m unclear why the “Western-Eastern” dichotomy needed to be invoked? I imagine vegetarianism has been poorly received by many Western parents/families too.
Many of the philosophical ideas that underpin EA are also very close to those found in some “Eastern/Asian” traditions, including Mohism, Buddhism and Jainism (edit: and Hinduism). Asia probably had the first recorded consequentialist (Mozi, in China), the first recorded utilitarian (Santideva, in India) and the first recorded vegan (al-Ma’arri, in Syria) in history. And estimates vary, but India probably has the highest prevalence of vegetarianism in the world?
Thank you for this. I particularly appreciated the “counterarguments” and “anti-claims” sections, which I felt accurately represented the views of those of us who disagree.
One further counterargument I’d mention, to balance out the point you make about honesty, is that it also feels potentially dicey/dishonest to be gaming out ways of how to get people to do things we want, on grounds we don’t ourselves find to be the most compelling. To be clear, I think there is a good way of going about this, which involves being honest about our views while making it clear that we’re trying to appeal to people of different persuasions.
And that goes in both directions: some find it intuitively unreasonable to think that humans can realise far more welfare than some other animals. Additionally, the undiluted experience model seems pretty intuitive to many.
I would hope that in a community committed to impartiality, one need not have to make the case for why it’s worth caring about the welfare of beings that happen not to be members of our species, so it is totally fine not to include that in your post.
Alternatives to QALYs (such as WELLBYs) have been put forward from within the EA movement. But if we’re trying to help others, it seems plausible that we should do it in ways that they care about. Most people care about their quality of life or well-being, as well as the amount of time they’ll have to experience or realise that well-being.
I’m sure there are people who would say they are most effectively helping others by “saving their souls” or promoting their “natural rights”. They’re free to act as they wish. But the reason that EAs (and not just EAs, because QALYs are widely used in health economics and resource allocation) have settled on quality of life and length of life is frankly because they’re the most plausible (or least implausible) ways of measuring the extent to which we’ve helped others.
I’ll have a look, thanks! I do tend to be quite sceptical of this research due to the replication crisis and I’m not sure how useful it is. The same was true with Heinrich’s questionable “WEIRD” book. The common factor linking people whose parents/families object to them becoming vegetarian isn’t being Eastern/Western or Asian/Western, but “having families who object to vegetarianism”. This post uses a personal anecdote and those of two other people raised in East Asian households to speak on behalf of every single Asian on the planet — “those of us brought up in Asian households” apparently find these issues “particularly challenging”.
On a population scale, there are of course behavioural and ideological differences on average. And this can inform population-level policies and strategies, to some extent. Farmed animal welfare charities might use this information to tailor their messages to audiences in different countries, for example. But applying population averages to individuals is not good practice.
Thank you for this, Keir. I agree that some conclusions that EAs have come to are uncontroversial among non-utilitarians. And EAs have tried to appeal to non-utilitarians. Singer’s Drowning Child thought experiment does not appeal to utilitarianism. Ord and MacAskill both (while making clear they are sympathetic to total utilitarianism) try to appeal to non-utilitarians too.
However, there are some important cause prioritisation questions that can’t really be answered without committing to some philosophical framework. It’s plausible that these questions do make a real, practical difference to what we individually prioritise. So, doing EA without philosophy seems a bit like trying to do politics without ideology. Many people may claim to be doing so, but they’re still ultimately harbouring philosophical assumptions.
You bring up the comparison between donating to the opera and donating to global health as one that non-utilitarians like Sen can deal with relatively easily. But Amartya Sen is still a consequentialist and it’s notable that his close colleague (and ideological soulmate) Martha Nussbaum has recently written about wild-animal suffering, a cause which utilitarians have been concerned about for some time. Consequentialists and pluralists (as long as they include some degree of consequentialism in their thinking) can still easily prioritise. It’s less clear that pure deontologists and virtue ethicists can, without ultimately appealing to consequences.
Finally, I don’t think there’s much philosophical difference between Bill Gates and Peter Singer. Gates wrote a blurb praising Singer’s The Most Good You Can Do, and in his recent annual newsletter he said that his goal is to “give my wealth back to society in ways that do the most good for the most people”.
Thank you for this. I would only caution that we should be vigilant when it comes to poor reasoning disguised as “intuition”. Most EAs would reject out of hand someone’s intuition that people of a certain nationality or ethnic group or gender matter less, even if they claim that it’s about suffering intensity as opposed to xenophobia, racism or sexism. Yet intuitions about the moral weight of nonhuman animals that often seem to have been plucked out of thin air, without any justification provided, seem to get a pass, especially when they’re from “high-status” individuals.
For what it’s worth, my impression is that the reason it’s not regularly administered is because doctors think it slightly increases the risk of complications for the mother (e.g. bleeding) and would make the procedure slightly more expensive and time-consuming. That, plus the assumption that the drugs given to the mother during the procedure are sufficient. Also, there have been efforts by pro-life lawmakers to draw attention to fetal pain, though this is probably a tactic to increase anti-abortion sentiment in general.
From this 2015 Washington Post article:
”Fetuses are routinely sedated during surgery, for reasons beyond the fear that the operation might cause them pain. Anesthetics stop a fetus from kicking around, making the operation safer. And though a fetus might not be conscious of pain, its body can respond to pain and stress in ways that interfere with its recovery. Painkillers alleviate that problem. That can happen directly or indirectly. During fetal surgery, women typically receive general anesthesia or sedation, making them unconscious or semi-conscious and pain-free. These drugs pass through the placenta to affect the fetus. For more involved operations, doctors inject extra painkillers directly into the fetus...
For as long as the fetus is alive during the abortion, it will experience some anesthetic effects depending on what drugs the mother receives. But would indirect anesthesia suffice to provide the “adequate relief” from pain that HB 479 demands? Just to make sure, Olszewski would prefer that fetuses are anesthetized directly during an abortion. He says that doctors can readily learn how to use an ultrasound-guided needle to deliver a cheap dose of painkillers to the fetus.”
Yes, I probably should have mentioned Hinduism too, because that is after all what explains the prevalence of vegetarianism in India.
I do again agree that the East doesn’t take EA ideas well. But neither, unfortunately, does the West, despite being much wealthier and better educated on average. Even people within the existing community find it difficult to commit to impartiality.
EA is a movement that aims to use reason and evidence to do the most good, so the centrality of “rationality” (broadly speaking) shouldn’t be too surprising. Many EAs are also deeply familiar with alternatives to utilitarianism. While most (according to the surveys) are utilitarians, some are non-utilitarian consequentialists or pluralists.
I suspect that the movement is dominated by utilitarians and utilitarian-leaning people because while all effective altruists shouldn’t necessarily be utilitarians, all utilitarians should be effective altruists. In contrast, it’s hard to see why a pure deontologist or virtue ethicist should, as a matter of philosophical consistency, be an effective altruist. It’s also difficult to see how a pure deontologist or virtue ethicist could engage in cause prioritisation decisions without ultimately appealing to consequences.
Thank you for the reply. As in mathematics and logic, rational intuition is ultimately my yardstick for determining the truth of a proposition. I think it self-evident that the good of any one individual is of no more importance than the good of any other and that a greater good should be preferred to a lesser good. As for what that good is, everything comes down to pleasure on reflection. The objections to this view fall prey to numerous biases (scope insensitivity, status quo bias), depend on knee-jerk emotional reactions, or rest on misunderstandings of the theory (for example, attacking naive as opposed to sophisticated utilitarianism). Some are even concerned with the practicality of the theory, which has no bearing on its truth.
There is no consensus in part because philosophers are under great pressure to publish. If Henry Sidgwick had figured most things out in his great 19th Century treatise The Methods of Ethics (the best book on ethics ever written, even according to many non-utilitarians), then that would rather spoil the fun. If you are interested in a painstaking attempt by a utilitarian to consider the alternatives, then have a read. It is extremely dense, but that is what’s required. A good companion is the volume published nine years ago by Singer and Lazari-Radek.Hurting other sentient beings is the antithesis of utilitarianism, as you know. Mr Bankman-Fried’s alleged actions should serve as a warning against naive utilitarianism and are a reminder that commonly accepted negative duties should almost always be followed (on utilitarian grounds). We don’t know whether these alleged actions were the product of his philosophical beliefs, or whether it had more to do with the pernicious influence of money and power. Regardless, that he went down such a career path in the first place was the result of his philosophical beliefs and we should therefore take some responsibility as a community.
But I’m far more concerned about avoiding the (in)actions of virtually everyone in recent history, who fail to do anything about the plight of hundreds of billions of sentient beings (human and non-human) or who actively exacerbate their suffering. Most of these people are under the pernicious influence of “common-sense morality”, which tells them that they have few positive duties toward others. Others think that being or feeling “virtuous” is sufficient. A few are recognised as evildoers for violating the admirable negative duties of common-sense morality that most at least accept. Such evildoers have almost always subscribed to profoundly anti-utilitarian ideologies, whether it be fascism, Stalinism, racism or nationalism.
The distinction between philosophers and animal activists might be relevant. For instance, his name was also listed last on a 2007 book he co-edited with two woman philosophers (Lori Gruen and Laura Grabel). In contrast, he was listed first on a 2006 book he co-authored with animal activist Jim Mason (a man). But the claim that he “appropriates” people’s voices is unsubstantiated, never mind the stronger claim that he appropriates some people’s voices simply because they are women.
Thanks for your reply! I’m not saying that EA should be able to exclude others’ visions because others are doing so. I’m claiming that it’s impossible not to exclude others’ visions of the future. Let’s take the pluralistic vision of the future that appeals to MacAskill and Ord. There will be many people in the world (fascists, Islamists, evangelical Christians) who disagree with such a vision. MacAskill and Ord are thus excluding those visions of the future. Is this a bad thing? I will let the reader decide.
I don’t quite see how existentialism, structuralism, post-structuralism and fascism are going to help us be more effectively altruistic, or how they’re going to help us prioritise causes. Communism is a different case as in some formats it’s a potential altruistic cause area that people may choose to prioritise.
I also don’t think that these ideas are more “modern” than utilitarianism, or that their supposed novelty is a point in their favour. Fascism, just to take one of these movements, has been thoroughly discredited and is pretty much the antithesis of altruism. These movements are movements in their own right, and I don’t think they’d want EAs to turn them into something they’re not. The same is true in the opposite direction.
By all means, make an argument in favour of these movements or their relevance to EA. But claiming that EAs haven’t considered these movements (I have, and think they’re false) isn’t likely to change much.
That display seems to illustrate my point — that the West/East distinction is a bit odd and rather outdated — well! People in cities in Brazil, Costa Rica, Malawi, India and China were more helpful than people in the United States, the Netherlands, Italy and Israel. But also, people in Vienna, Madrid and Copenhagen were more helpful than people in other parts of Europe, while people in Shanghai were more helpful than people in Taipei, Bangkok and Kuala Lumpur.
Why many EAs are so eager to make broad, hasty generalisations about entire continents and hemispheres is something I’ve never understood.
Great comment, thanks for clarifying your position. To be clear, I’m not particularly concerned about the survival of most particular worldviews as long as they decline organically. I just want to ensure that there’s a marketplace in which different worldviews can compete, rather than some kind of irreversible ‘lock-in’ scenario.
I have some issues with the entire ‘WEIRD’ concept and certainly wouldn’t want humanity to lock in ‘WEIRD’ values (which are typically speciesist). Within that marketplace, I do want to promote moral circle expansion and a broadly utilitarian outlook as a whole. I wouldn’t say this is as neglected as you claim it is — MacAskill discusses the value of the future (not just whether there is a future) extensively in his recent book, and there are EA organisations devoted to moral values spreading. It’s also partly why “philosopher” is recommended as a career in some cases, too.
If we want to spread those values, I agree with you that learning about competitor philosophies, ideologies, cultures and perspectives (I personally spend a fair bit of time on this) would be important, and that lowering language barriers could be helpful.
It could also be useful to explore whether there are interventions in cultures that we’re less familiar with that could improve people’s well-being even more than the typical global health interventions that are currently recommended. Perhaps there’s something about a particular culture which, if promoted more effectively, would really improve people’s lives. But maybe not: children dying of malaria is really, really bad, and that’s not a culture-specific phenomenon.
Needless to say, none of the above applies to the vast majority of moral patients on the planet, whether they’re factory farmed land animals, fishes or shrimps. (Though if we want to improve, say, shrimp welfare in Asia, learning local languages could help us work and recruit more effectively as well as spread values.)
The claim that Professor Singer appropriates women’s voices because his name appeared first on a couple of bylines seems belied by the fact that Helga Kuhse and Katarzyna de Lazari-Radek (both women co-authors of his, in the 20th and 21st Century respectively) are listed first on all of the books they’ve written with him as far as I can tell. In his recent interview with Tyler Cowen, he assiduously mentioned Lazari-Radek whenever his work with her was mentioned.