I am a philosopher and ethicist with a PhD in Philosophy (Applied Ethics) from the University of Birmingham. Current research primarily focused on the intersection between animal welfare and AI.
JessMasterson
Karma: 128
Thanks for reading and for this response—it’s valuable. I have to admit that I hadn’t considered these ideas (moral trade and ECL) before, but I will certainly look into them now. I will come back to you with a proper response soon.
Thanks for reading, Karen! The challenge you’ve mentioned—ensuring economic tools are used in service of moral circle expansion rather than commodification—is a major one. Human history, in this regard, lends itself more easily to pessimism than optimism. I don’t have any easy answers and I’d certainly need more time to think about it but my initial thought is that it seems there are two major steps we could consider here. Firstly, we need increased transparency in animal exploitation industries. And secondly, we need engagement in/facilitation of animal abuse to be seen as more of a black mark against a company than it currently is. If all goes well, AI could potentially help us act in service of these goals.
Thanks for reading it Max. You’ll know better than anyone—the more I read about possible applications in the future, the more the piece grew and grew! There are so many ideas and directions it could take; it feels encouraging.
Thanks for reading Alistair!
I totally understand that and I felt exactly the same. I think the most liberating thing is probably just trying to resist being too married to your ideas—it″ll be easier to take if people say they’re wrong.
I did suspect that animal welfare wins were moving us away from abolition by easing people’s guilt about consuming animal products (guilt that might otherwise have pushed them to give them up entirely). But more recently, I have done some more research on this and I think my instinct was probably wrong. It doesn’t seem to play out that way as far as we can tell, and people who support welfare reforms tend to be more amenable to ultimately giving up animal products. So I suspect your position might be right!
It’s a tricky one. The more seriously you are taken as a public intellectual, the higher the stakes are. The more people are listening, the less likely it is that you’ll take a risk and say something that might later be used to undermine your status as a public intellectual. It seems likely that people with less knowledge and less authority on particular issues actually share their intuitions much more readily because they have less to lose by later looking silly.
An expert or public intellectual also might have good reason, beyond the superficial, to want to preserve the perceived authority of their voice. Nobody wants to be the boy who cried wolf. Although I do agree with you that it’d be refreshing if more people were willing to risk being publicly wrong.
I don’t know how stores make ordering decisions, but I strongly suspect that being able to sell off animal products at a reduced rate would disincentivise more careful or conservative ordering of those products—they’ll make back the cost either way, and the potential profit would likely make the risk of needing to sell some items at cost price seem worth it. I think freeganism is a pretty solid idea, but only in the sense that does not require the purchasing of any animal products e.g. eating non-vegan leftovers after a family Christmas that would be thrown away otherwise. Buying vegan products is almost certainly worse overall (for the environment, for example) than just eating food that would otherwise be dumped.
This paper shows how strategic menu manipulation in a university canteen achieved a 30.7% reduction in carbon footprint without anyone noticing the nudge. It’s such a simple idea that could be implemented in universities, schools, hospital and prison cafeterias etc. It seems harmless and the gains seem disproportionately large when we look at the relative simplicity of carrying this out. The impact could be substantial for animal welfare (cutting down on the consumption of animal-based foods) and climate change.
I don’t know what would be needed to get measures like this to be implemented more widely, but it seems promising.
Absolutely right. There’s really nothing better to bring clarity to your ideas than walking/running (outside if possible).
I think you’re right about the reality of how people weigh up giving up meat vs donating. Many people would rather sacrifice a small amount of money than give up meat (as shown in your example). I suppose the best that we can do, in terms of advocacy, is encouraging people to do both or, failing that, one or the other. On paper, it’s possible that donating could look more impactful, but it can be hard to accurately summarise the impact of a social movement in numbers, especially when it’s still quite early days.
As @NickLaing has pointed out, I think how people perceive the campaign or interpret its message is a lot more important than what the intentions are behind it. We can try and spin it however we like, but this is a straightforwardly anti-vegan campaign, maybe not in intent but in actuality. It is absolutely horrible in its attitude towards vegans, even though vegans are probably more likely to donate money to animals than any other group. Here are just a few choice snippets from the site:
1. Someone trying to go vegan had to plan every meal, give up her favourite foods, annoy friends and family, and get bloated. For all that, she helped far fewer animals than someone with an overflowing platter of meat.
2. “Can you survive Veganuary?” implying that its some terrible trial that someone needs to endure.
3. “Every day can be hard when you’re vegan”. Hardly selling veganism.
4. Listing celebrities who couldn’t “make veganism stick,” including references to them feeling weak and struggling with ill health.
Honestly, you’d have a hard time finding a carnivore influencer who more passionately bashes veganism. People should donate money. They should also go vegan. If they can’t do both, they should at least do one. But if they can do both, they should do both. That isn’t implied anywhere; to the contrary, veganism is portrayed as a waste of time and vegans as weak, misguided, joyless fools.
I think corporate outreach has had, and will likely continue to have, a wider impact on animal welfare than getting rid of battery cages although that’s certainly one of the bigger wins. As to your second point, I think you’re right that this parameter depends on culture and regulation; although I want to be optimistic, it might be somewhat overly optimistic to think that alternative proteins will ever capture 100% of the market. This also ties into your fourth point on the barriers to shifting to alternative proteins. I’d have to look for the research on this but I’m confident that many people, today at least, would say that they’ll never switch in the future, even if taste and cost were the same (maybe down to tradition, fear of UPFs etc). So social norms will likely play a big role here, and shifting social norms can never be guaranteed—certainly not within a short time frame.
Corporate outreach almost guarantees small wins (when compared with ending, or almost ending, animal farming) today, so investment is low-risk. The chance of this kind of advocacy hugely reducing the number of farmed animals overall though seems almost negligible. Alternative proteins, if everything goes well, could result in a much bigger win, but the risk seems pretty high at the moment—it must be higher than many people are comfortable with.
Thanks for writing. I’m with you on the idea of a self-imposed tax—seems like a reasonable idea for those who can do it and certainly the impact of donating can be more impactful than many other actions we can take. However, I don’t know if we can discount the gains that veganism (I’ll use veganism as it’s a lot more straightforward) makes so quickly. I know you’ve said that veganism isn’t bad or stupid, but that it’s not as impactful as other things we could do, so I’m keeping that in mind. I’m only thinking out loud here based on my intuition, so let’s see if this makes sense.
Veganism—as you know—is a philosophy against the exploitation of animals, based on ideas around animal sentience and the moral status of animals. Here are some thought that come to me based on that definition and your argument here:
One vegan meal, instead of a meat-based one, may make little difference compared to donating money, but by choosing a vegan meal someone is participating in a broader social movement and making a statement against animal exploitation. It’s a drop in the bucket, but every bit helps push the movement forward. The more individuals choose vegan options, the stronger and more influential the group gets as a whole which gives us more political leverage.
Veganism doesn’t ask people to do anything extra (like pay more for luxury goods). Instead, it asks people to refrain from doing something they otherwise would have done. This makes it feel different in kind than asking people to donate money, although I’ll admit that this doesn’t seem to make the former any easier unfortunately.
The vegan movement doesn’t only help animals exploited for food, but those in labs, zoos, circuses etc. In this way, contributing towards a more influential vegan movement could have a wider impact than it initially seems when we choose a vegan meal.
Those are just some initial thoughts that make me feel like the first step in your money pump argument (‘I give up one animal product-based meal in exchange for a less filling, vegetarian meal, which results in a slightly higher expected quality of life for some animals’) might be more like ‘I give up one animal product-based meal in exchange for a vegan meal (it surely doesn’t need to be less filling) which contributes to a stronger, more influential movement against animal exploitation’. Perhaps the extent to which this is true depends on the context in which you’re eating.
I’d love to hear more of your thoughts!
Could you possibly elaborate on what you mean here: “perhaps it adopts an explicit position of metaethical uncertainty… but avoids applying this to its own values”? I’m very much still learning about alignment, but my instinct is that AI value alignment would result in an AI that acknowledges unavoidable moral uncertainty. Do you think that alignment efforts push for certainty when there really isn’t any? I’m just trying to get a sense of your perspective.
I’ve been doing a lot of reading and research lately on the relationship between AI development and animal welfare. I’m really looking forward to seeing this! Thanks for sharing.
Here are some of my thoughts on what you’ve written. Of course, there isn’t a consensus on what qualifies someone as a “good person” but we can certainly speculate on the relationship between “being good” and “being impactful”. To me, we can look at these as distinct but related ideas. You say that many people are “desperately trying to increase their impact to help them feel like they’re a good person”. I would suggest that someone might be desperately trying to increase their impact because the desire to make that effort is indicative of a good person, not the achievement of the impact itself. It’s like layers that are built upon each other:
Layer 1: I want to be a good person with good intentions
Layer 2: A good person with good intentions would want to make the world better
Layer 3: A strong desire to improve the world pushes me to achieve maximal impactLayers 1 and 2 are what matter when we think about what a good person is. They might not be someone who has a huge positive impact (because this is, to a notable degree, out of our hands) but they are somebody who would want to, or have the intention to, have a huge positive impact.
If Amy and Sam (random names I picked) are both good people, then they both have the desire to change the world in a positive way. Amy gets a job in AI safety and Sam gets a job in an animal welfare organisation. They are both working on meaningful projects. After a couple of years, due to funding issues, the animal welfare organisation shuts down. Sam has not yet had a significant impact. On the other hand, Amy has been influential in shaping policy around safer AI development. Is Amy a better person than Sam? I’d bet that pretty much everyone would say no, even the people desperately trying to increase their impact. We can’t always control what we achieve, but we can control what we want to achieve.
Telling people to eat less protein, or that they don’t need nearly as much protein as they think, seems like a bad idea. I mean, most people do eat far more protein than they need to, but as vegans we are already often considered weak and protein-deficient; we probably don’t want to strengthen that stereotype (even though it’s plainly ridiculous).
Instinctively, I feel like working to eliminate some of the fear around “processed foods” is probably our best bet. Yes, some vegan protein comes from UPFs but so does plenty of non-vegan protein (like whey protein powder and protein bars) and the protein-obsessed meat-eaters seem to have little issue consuming that—sales of these powders/bars are booming.
Thanks for writing. I think that a kind of hopelessness is common across numerous causes—AI risk and animal welfare are the two that come to mind immediately. As you’ve mentioned, hopelessness can also be contagious and it can crop up a lot in the communities working on these issues. The strategies you’ve included here are definitely helpful; I also think, though, that we should give some thought to have we tell the story of AI futures, the future of animal welfare etc. Doom narratives can lead to despondency, and that’s something we need to be wary of.
So far, much of technological development seems to have gone well for humans—for example, in developed nations, we have never had to do less hard manual labour, or had access to more information. That has not led to an improvement in the quality of non-human animal lives. In fact, we have seen exactly the opposite. AGI is likely to amplify this effect unless we make a significant conscious and coordinated effort to steer it another direction.