Stanford student (math/āeconomics). Formerly intern at Rethink Priorities (animal welfare) and J-PAL South Asia (IDEA Initiative).
Tejas Subramaniam šø
Karma: 306
I lean in favor of (some kind of) normative realism. My grounds for this are the relatively-basic ones: it certainly seems, for example, that some choices are plain irrational or that some states-of-affairs are bad in a stance-independent way. And of course, robust realists will always point to the partners-in-crime of moral facts, in other kinds of a priori domains.
My main source of uncertainty ā indeed, the reason I flip back and forth between realism and anti-realism ā is (various presentations of) the epistemological objection to moral realism. In particular, (i) Iām not sure if we have the right kind of epistemic access to any abstract facts (and find views like mathematical/ālogical conventionalism plausible for this reason) and (ii) even if we did, I often struggle to find an explanation for why we have moral knowledge specifically (it doesnāt seem obviously evolutionarily advantageous to know the true moral facts, and the idea that itās a mere byproduct of other a priori knowledge feels a bit unsatisfying, in that I donāt really know if thereās a connection between moral facts and facts about other platonic universals). See this essay by Carlsmith articulating this kind of objection. I like some of the responses to arguments of this general sort in this paper by David Enoch.
Strong upvoted. This (otherwise well-written) post made me update (mildly) in favor of these reforms, so for someone with my specific views, the original title felt a bit misleading, even if not technically wrong.
In my opinion, this is a neutral-to-positive update in favor of broiler welfare reforms (even though it increases the variance of possible outcomes as far as net harm goes). With high uncertainty, my best guess is that the average arthropod lives a net negative life (assuming sentience) ā Iām aware you are more undecided about this than I am. Additionally, also with high uncertainty, my best guess is that additional land use from feed reduces arthropod populations, which is also your conclusion. So for me, this is an increase in the expected value of broiler welfare reforms.
Iām not completely sure I would call your view constructivist, because of this comment by Sebo under the same piece.
Also, hereās a random thought, which I donāt necessarily think works/āholds for your view, but Iām curious what you think. I think objective tends to mean, as Huemer puts it in Ethical Intuitionism, constitutively independent of the attitudes of observers specifically, rather than anyoneās attitudes or stances. For example, a preference utilitarian can think there is an objective moral fact that it is bad to, all else equal, do something to someone that they disprefer, even though the ābadnessā comes from their dispreference. It seems like that would be subjective only if the claim was that it was bad according to some observer. But I donāt know if that means your view accepts objective or stance-independent moral facts.
I think the expected value of the long-term future, in the ābusiness as usualā scenario, is positive. In particular, I anticipate that advanced/ātransformative artificial intelligence drives technological innovation to solve a lot of world problems (e.g., helping create cell-based meat eventually), and I also think a decent amount of this EV is contained in futures with digital minds and/āor space colonization (even though Iād guess itās unlikely we get to that sort of world). However, Iām very uncertain about these futuresāthey could just as easily contain a large amount of suffering. And if we donāt get to those futures, Iām worried about wild animal suffering being high in the meantime. Separately, Iām not sure addressing a lot of s-risk scenarios right now is particularly tractable (nor, more imminently, does wild animal suffering seem awfully tractable to me).
Probably the biggest reason Iām so close to the center is I think a significant amount of existential risk from AI looks like disempowering humanity without killing literally every human, and hence, I view AI alignment work as at least partially serving the goal of āincreasing the value of futures where we survive.ā
The fourth objection, on who the victim is, has always seemed like the strongest explanation of the deontological moral difference to me. When you offset your CO2 emissions, you havenāt actually harmed anyone. (Iām personally inclined to place higher credence on utilitarianism than most other moral theories, so Iām not too bothered by this, and I also think itās certainly better than the most plausible alternative ā people eat meat but donāt offset it ā but regardless, interesting philosophical question.)
The Carlsmith article you linkedāpost 1 of his two-post seriesāseems to mostly argue against the standard arguments people might have for ethical anti-realists reasoning about ethics (i.e., he argues that neither a brute preference for consistency nor money-pumping arguments seem like the whole picture). You might be talking about the second piece in the two-post series instead?
Brian Tomasik considers more selection toward animals with faster life histories in his piece on the effects of climate change on wild animals. He seems to think itās not decisive (and ends up concluding that heās basically 50ā50 on the sign of the effects of climate change on overall animal suffering) for ~three reasons (paraphrasing Tomasik):
Some of the animals with slower life histories which get replaced are often carnivorous/āomnivorous, which might mean climate change decreases invertebrate populations.
Instability might also affect plants, which could lower net primary productivity and hence invertebrate populations.
Many of the āultimateā life forms with fast life histories will be microorganisms that we donāt put much moral weight in.
Iād be curious for how you think the arguments in the above post should change Tomasikās view, in light of these considerations.
I didnāt say they fell under the ethics of killing, I was using killing as an example of a generic rights violation under a plausible patient-centered deontological theory to illustrate the difference between āa rights violation happening to one person and help coming for a separate person as an offsetā and āoneās harm being directly offset.ā
(I agree that it seems a bit more unclear if potential people can have rights, even if they can have moral consideration, and in particular rights to not be brought into existence, but I think itās very plausible.)
Note, however, that I think the question of whether there can be deontic side-constraints regarding our treatment of animals is unclear even conditioning on deontology. Many deontologist philosophers ā like Huemer ā are uncertain whether animals have ārightsā (as a patient-centered deontologist would put it), even though they think (1) humans have rights and (2) animals are still deserving of moral consideration. Deontologists sometimes resort to something like ādeontology for people, consequentialism for animalsā (although some other deontologists, like Nozick, thought that this was insufficient for animals).
I think offsetting emissions and offsetting meat consumption are comparable under utilitarianism, but much less comparable under most deontological moral theories, if you think animals have rights. For instance, if you killed someone and donated $5,000 to the Malaria Consortium, that seems worse ā from a deontological perspective ā than if you just did nothing at all, because the life you kill and the life you save are different people, and many deontological theories are built on the āseparateness of persons.ā In contrast, if you offset your CO2 emissions, youāre offsetting your effect on warming, so you donāt kill anyone to begin with (because itās not like your CO2 emissions cause warming that hurts agent A, and then your offset reduces temperatures to benefit agent B). It might be similarly problematic to offset your contribution to air pollution, though, because the effects of air pollution happen near the place where the pollution actually happened.
Why do you think excruciating pain is 10k as intense as disabling pain? If I use these conversion factors (p. 30) instead, chicken welfare campaigns seem to win.
[Question] Where would you donate $100 to anĀiĀmal welfare?
Do you think there are promising ways to slow down growth in aquaculture?
This post by Carl Shulman is very similar to this, I think.
[Question] What are the best defenses of huĀman lives beĀing worth livĀing?
Somewhat relevant (takes the hard proves-too-much stance): https://āāwww.econlib.org/āāarchives/āā2014/āā10/āādear_identity_p.html
She co-authored a piece a few months back about finding AI safety emotionally compelling. Iād be interested in her thoughts on the following two questions related to that!
How worried should we be about suspicious convergence between AI safety being one of the most interesting/āemotionally compelling questions to think about and it being the most pressing problem? There used to be a lot of discussion around 2015 about how it seemed like people were working on AI safety because itās really fun and interesting to think about, rather than because itās actually that pressing. I think that argument is pretty clearly false, but Iād be curious how she views this post as interacting with those concerns.
It seems a bit like the post doesnāt draw a clean distinction between capabilities and safety. I agree that, to some extent, theyāre inseparable (the people building transformative AI should care about making it safe), but how does she view the downside risks of, e.g., some of the most compelling parts of AI work being capabilities-related? More generally, how worried should we be, as a community, about how interconnected safety and capabilities work are?
Somewhat related: As Patrick Collison puts it, people working on making more effective engineered viruses arenāt high-status among people working on pandemic prevention, so why are capabilities researchers high-status among safety researchers?
(I have a decent sense of different answers within the community ā this is not really a top concern of mine ā but Iād nonetheless be interested in her take! My sense is that (1) the distinction isnāt nearly as clean since you want to build AI and make it go safely and (2) itās good for capabilities work to be more safety-geared than the counterfactual.)
Thanks for writing this up! I disagree for a few reasons:
This feels more like a problem at the point between āalternative proteins have scaled up and weāve replaced a bunch of meatā and āthis results in a meat ban.ā It seems possible to me that moral advocacy efforts can happen after alternative proteins have scaled up, but before there are laws to stop factory farming for food entirely. I donāt think alternative proteins replacing, say, 80% of meat will result in people thinking non-meat uses of animals is morally okay in a lock-in kind of way.
I think a lot of peopleās moral reasoning about animals is posthoc/ābased on cognitive dissonance. That is, people like eating meat, or itās a valuable part of their culture, and their moral intuitions around animal exploitation are built around that. So it seems plausible to me that moral advocacy efforts become substantially more effective if weāre able to quickly replace one of the biggest uses of animals.
Iām not sure Iām compelled by the mechanism for lock-in. One mechanism appears to be overconfidence/ācomplacency as a society, which reduces the drive toward moral progress. This seems somewhat plausible, but it feels like this is possible to solve (for instance, animal advocacy organizations pivot toward other uses of animals, and are more able to dedicate resources focused on animal advocacy). Another mechanism seems to be that āletting automobiles replace horses as practical transport instead of listening to the horse advocates and becoming better humans, humanity has lost a great opportunity to do something for the animals for moral reasons, and do so by accepting an economic loss.ā But I guess Iām not sure why ā in either the horse case or the factory farming case ā this is a unique opportunity. I donāt think the existence of factory farming necessarily strengthens the argument, to an average person, about the urgency of animal advocacy, because if people donāt buy the moral reasoning for caring about animals, Iām not sure the scale of suffering that exists currently affects whether they buy the moral reasoning. So in the case of horses, for example, I donāt think it was easier to convince people that horses matter before they were replaced as practical transport.
I feel like this is just intractable. Meat has the advantage of being embedded in culture and identity for generations. Without proposing any alternative, and going entirely through the moral route, means going up against this generational idea that eating meat is okay. Success seems hard. Iām wary of taking such a risk, when thereās also the possibility of factory farming for food persisting into the future (and Iād guess, in business-as-usual scenarios, it remains a bigger problem than other kinds of factory farming). I will also say Iām not convinced that expanding our moral circle to animals helps expand our moral circle to things like digital minds in the far future, though thatās a conversation for another day.
Iām uncomfortable about this argument for nonconsequentialist reasons. If factory farming is a grave injustice that ought be abolished (even if youāre a consequentialist who buys moral uncertainty), it seems like letting it stay for much longer and taking a huge risk that it stays forever because you want to do it for the right reasons could be a massive negligent injustice in itself. It feels like, in a moral way, saying āitās bad to hire more beat cops to deter crime, because deterring crime through fear doesnāt convince anyone that their crime is wrong.ā One reason a lot of people would find that intuitively bad is because it feels like itās instrumentalizing the victims of crime for a dubious future consequence.
āIn general, continued economic growth in low- and middle-income countries is in the interests of nonhuman animals.ā
(This seems like a pretty important question to me, and Iām not sure how to weigh effects like increased factory farming against the plausible reduction in invertebrate populations that economic growth comes with.)