PhDs in physics (thermodynamics of ecosystems), moral philosophy (animal rights) and economics (altruistic motivation and incentives for blood donation), co-founder of EA Belgium, environmental footprint analyst at Ecolife
Stijn Bruers 🔸
Karma: 877
on a first view, I think the cost-effectiveness of egg replacement precision fermentation R&D is the same order of magnitude as my (low) estimate of cultivated chicken meat R&D. Your precision fermentation estimate: roughly 1 layer hen life spared per dollar. My cultivated meat estimate: roughly 10 broiler chicken lives spared per dollar. But lifespan of layer hen is ten times longer than broiler chicken, and suffering intensity is about the same, so in terms of avoiding suffering, both are comparable in cost-effectiveness
I’m curious how your calculation compares to my model, described here: https://stijnbruers.wordpress.com/2020/08/10/the-extreme-cost-effectiveness-of-cell-based-meat-rd/
[Question] Why do EA longtermists not discuss the alleged problem of cognitive decline?
small herbivorous animals with high reproduction rates compete for food with large herbivores. A large herbivore captures more of the plant biomass than a small animal, and consequently large herbivores prevent large populations of small herbivores.
Good question: it is unsure. Problem with large animals is that they more likely accidentally kill (trample) small insects. That might be a good thing is the reproduction rates of insects are so high that they have net-negative welfare levels. The large herbivore reduces the population sizes of the insects that have lives not worth living. An advantage of the large animals in grasslands, is that their manure attracts dung beetles, and the flowers in the grassland attract bees. Now, dung beetles and bees are the best, kindest or nicest kinds of insects: they do not hunt and kill other insects, they are not parasites, they do not compete much for food with other animals, they fertilize the soil and the plants which means more food for other animals, they are highly intelligent and sentient. If you want to help insects, I’d say prioritize helping bees and dung beetles.
Good question! I have no idea.
A problem with broader conservationist initiatives is that they more likely support interventions that could increase wild animal suffering, e.g. by helping predator species or species with high reproduction rates.
How to systematically reduce wild animal suffering in the near future
Rational Animal Ethics (my top 10 ideas of all time)
I agree, that’s why I generally support it.
I generally support this idea of diet offsetting, although purely morally speaking I have several objections, explained here: https://stijnbruers.wordpress.com/2019/08/22/carbon-offsetting-versus-meat-offsetting/
There are morally relevant differences between carbon offsetting and meat offsetting.
Nice work, Soemano. Strongly upvoted.
In my calculation, which you refer to (Bruers, 2024), I used the smaller own-price elasticities and higher cross-price elasticities of demand (based on Lusk, J. L., & Tonsor, G. T. (2016). How meat demand elasticities vary with price, income, and product category. Applied Economic Perspectives and Policy, 38(4): 673-711.), and perfect elasticity of supply. When I use your model, but using the Lusk & Tonsor elasticities of demand, I obtain an increase in chicken meat and pork, as in my original calculation. I agree that you used better estimates of own and cross price elasticities of demand (from a meta analysis, and from 2024 paper), so I have more confidence in your results.
When I did your calculations, I noticed a small typo in your paper, ‘Table 2, model input data’: I think L_d and L_s for chicken and pork should be reversed (your values for chicken correspond with my values for pork).
Are fishing and agriculture bad for animals?
“Still—if I remember correctly—in this case we have some existing studies pointing out that people who just ate beef are less inclined to grant cows sentience, or something similar, so maybe the argument is warranted.” Indeed, the relevant studies:
Bastian B., Loughnan S., Haslam N. & Radke H. (2012). Don’t Mind Meat? The denial of mind to animals used for human consumption. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin vol. 38 no. 2 p.247-256.
Loughnan S., Haslam N. & Bastian B. (2010). The role of meat consumption in the denial of moral status and mind to meat animals. Appetite 55 p.156–159.
I strongly disagree with your position, Christoph.
First, I agree with Marc: this argument to eat ‘happy meat’ (from happy animals) can be easily applied to justify slavery and cannibalism: let’s breed happy slaves, let’s give birth to happy babies and then eat them.
In population ethical terms: once you bring into existence a farmed animal, that animal would be better-off on an animal sanctuary, so they you have a duty not to kill it but to take care of it on a sanctuary. I wrote a paper on this (Population ethics and animal farming, Bruers 2022, https://www.pdcnet.org/enviroethics/content/enviroethics_2022_0999_10_26_45). It also follows from my moral theory ‘mild welfarism’, as explained here: https://stijnbruers.wordpress.com/2022/08/23/mild-welfarism-avoiding-the-demandingness-of-totalitarian-welfarism/ . All population ethical views that use cardinal interpersonally comparable welfare and that say that eating happy meat is always better than not breeding farmed animals (e.g. total utilitarianism), entail the repugnant conclusion which in this case means we should breed a huge number of animals, sacrifice ourselves to take care of them on animal sanctuaries such that they have positive lives barely worth living, and definitely not slaughter them. If you believe that the life/welfare of an animal can be compared with non-existence but cannot be compared with the welfare of a human, then you cannot apply those population ethical views like total utilitarianism, and then you can take a view that entails it is permissible or good to eat happy meat. But I think those conditions are very unlikely: if animal welfare can be compared with non-existence, and human welfare can be compared with non-existence, then it is weird why animal and human welfare cannot be compared with each other. It is like heaving a measure with a zero point but no scale. Possible, but weird.
Actually, my theory of mild welfarism gives two reasons why eating happy meat is not allowed: one based on population ethical preferences (to avoid the repugnant conclusion, to respect the procreation asymmetry, to have a more person-affecting view, to be dynamically consistent,...), the other on a deontological principle (not use someone as a means against their will).
So, a coherent ethical theory that gives two arguments against eating happy meat, plus strong intuitions against eating happy babies and breeding happy slaves, makes me pretty confident that eating happy meat is impermissible.
From a practical viewpoint: I think it is harder for consumers to find cheap, tasty, healthy animal-based meat products of which the animals had clearly positive lives and where the animals were treated according to their personal animal welfare standards that they would apply to other animals such as dogs, than to find cheap, tasty, healthy animal-free meat products. Organic meat is more expensive than a lot of plant-based meats, and even with organic farming people do not seem to be very confident that those animals have positive lives. People would not eat organic dog meat, for example.
Your claim: “I personally don’t think that alt-protein will result in everybody stopping to eat meat”. I also personally don’t think organic meat will result in everybody stopping eating conventional meat. After all, we have organic meat on the market for more decades than plant-based meat and still not many people are buying organic meat. The organic meat market is growing less than the plant-based meat market.
“So going from a messaging of “ideally everybody should be vegan and let’s trust tech to solve it” to “ideally everybody should treat animal products as something sacred and really care for how they are treated” is something that probably the majority of people could get on board with.” Many people also get on board with cultivated meat tech development.
I agree. It strongly depends on the framing of questions. For example, I asked people how strongly they value animal welfare compared to human welfare. Average: 70%. So in one interpretation, that means 1 chicken = 0.7 humans. But there is a huge difference between saving and not harming, and between ‘animal’ and ‘chicken’. Asking people how many bird or human lives to save, gives a very different answer than asking them how many birds or humans to harm. People could say that saving 1 human is the equivalent of saving a million birds, but that harming one human is the equivalent of harming only a few birds. And when they realize the bird is a chicken used for food, people get stuck and their answers go weird. Or ask people about their maximum willingness to pay to avoid an hour of human or chicken suffering, versus their minimum willingness to accept to add an hour of suffering: huge differences. (I conducted some unpublished surveys about this, and one published: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/21606544.2022.2138980.) In short: in this area you can easily show that people give highly inconsistent answers depending on the formulations of the questions.
“On the other extreme end, you can imagine a total equalist.[7] They would say that a chicken and a human are morally equivalent, X=1. They would rather save two chickens from suffering than one human. Given that 86% of the world eats meat, this would also be a rather unpopular opinion. ”
I ran a survey in Belgium: the majority of meat eaters put X=1 (or better: their answers to the questions logically entail X=1) https://stijnbruers.wordpress.com/2024/05/21/the-suffering-of-a-farmed-animal-is-equal-in-size-to-the-happiness-of-a-human-according-to-a-survey/
That seems like saying: “Let’s not donate to animal charities because there are people who would donate to the most effective human charities but decide to donate to the less effective human charities when they see people who donate to the most effective human charities switch their donations to animal charities.” Probably I’m not following the logic...
Also: if donating to the top-effective animal charities is +100 times as cost-effective as donating to the top-effective human charities, that backfire effect (people donating to the less effective human charities instead of the top effective human charities) should be very strong: more than 100 people should show this backfire effect (i.e. remain non-EA) per effective altruist who donates to top-effective animal charities. That seems very unlikely to me.
“So it is more important to convince someone to give to e.g. the EA animal welfare fund if they were previously giving to AMF than to convince a non-donor to give that same amount of money to AMF.” More generally, I think it is more important to convince an EA human health and development supporter to diversify and donate say 50% of the donation budget to the most effective animal welfare causes, than to convince a non-EA human charity supporter to diversify and donate say 50% of the donation budget to AMF or similar high-impact human-focused charities.
I think there is much room for more funding of alternative protein R&D, and that is very cost-effective to reduce farmed animal suffering
Two important considerations to strongly favor animal welfare
Saving a human life is likely net negative due to increased meat consumption and animal suffering. According to a survey, most people believe the welfare of a farmed chicken is negative and equal in size to the positive welfare of a human. Also most people believe the welfare of birds count almost as much as the welfare of humans (they give animal welfare relative to human welfare an 8 on a scale from 0 to 10). But there are more farmed chickens than humans on earth (3 chickens per human), so total welfare is negative. See also this post: net global welfare is negative and declining. This also means that saving a human (meat eater) most likely negatively contributes to global welfare, as it increases meat consumption and hence farmed animal suffering. This is a strong version of the meat eater problem (strong in the sense that saving humans not only increases animal suffering, but increases it so much that total welfare decreases).
Saving a vegetarian human life is likely less cost effective than avoiding farmed animal suffering. There are extremely cost-effective animal welfare interventions. For example development of alternative protein such as cultivated meat saves the suffering of +10 farmed animals per dollar. An average human eats 10 farmed animals per year. So $100 donation to cultivated meat R&D saves the suffering of 1000 farmed animals, which equals the amount of farmed animal suffering caused by 100 years of meat consumption by a human. In size (absolute value), the suffering of 1000 farmed animals is more than a lifetime of human happiness (roughly 3 times as much). In other words: avoiding the suffering of 1000 farmed animals is better than saving a child’s life such that the child lives 100 happy years. According to GiveWell’s estimate, saving a child’s life costs +1000$. Saving 100 healthy human life years easily costs +10.000$. So avoiding farmed animal suffering is +100 times as cost effective as saving a child’s life (assuming the child is vegetarian or vegan).
The difference in cost-effectiveness estimates of animal welfare reforms versus alt protein is only a factor of three. Given the large uncertainties in these estimates, which can easily result in uncertainty ranges of a factor of 10 or more, my rule of thumb is that if the first best cost-effectiveness estimates do not show a difference larger than an order of 10, I assume the difference in cost-effectiveness is not (statistically) significant.
The probability that animal welfare reforms is more cost effective than alt protein may be higher than 50%, because you easily derived such a result with reasonable assumptions, but given these large uncertainties, I expect the probability is not much larger. Say 51% likelihood that animal welfare reforms are more effective than alt protein. If you keep the estimates to yourself (i.e. you don’t make recommendations to others based on your estimates), and if you are a small donor, there are no decreasing marginal returns and no coordination issues, and hence it is rational to donate 100% of your own donations to the most effective charity according to your first best estimates, which has a 51% probability of being the best charity. However, for large donations, or for the total donations of the EA community as a whole, there may be decreasing marginal returns, and I think in that case diversifying is more important than putting all eggs in one basket (pun intended) with a 51% probability of being the best basket. I believe as a rule of thumb, if you communicate your results to other EA people and give recommendations, you have to consider the total donations of the EA community instead of the donations of an individual, small EA donor. Otherwise your recommendations should mention the need for coordination with other donors, but that message is more complex. So you can recommend: “Donate everything to this charity that has a 51% probability of being the most cost-effective, but keep an eye on what other effective altruists are doing, how much they are donating to the different charities.”, or you can recommend “Diversify: donate something to animal welfare reforms and the rest to alt protein.”
Hence, given you published the above post and made it public to the community, I suggest you recommend diversifying donations to both animal welfare reforms and alt protein. And privately you can donate 100% of your donations to what you believe is the most effective charity, as long as you do not recommend others to do the same.