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MTGandP comments on Giving What We Can, 80,000 Hours, and Meta-Charity - Less Wrong
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This is purely speculative. You have not presented any evidence that (a) the compounding effects of donating money to alleviate poverty outweigh the direct effects, or that (b) this does not create enough animal suffering to outweigh the benefits. And it still ignores the fact that animal welfare charities are orders of magnitude more efficient than human charities.
It's almost certainly more like -10,000N. One can determine this number by looking at the suffering caused by eating different animal products as well as the number of animals eaten in a lifetime (~21000).
On (a). The argument for this is based on the first half of Bostrom's Astronomical Waste. In saving someone's life (or some other good economic investment), you move technological progress forward by a tiny amount. The benefit you produce is the difference you make at the end of civilisation, when there's much more at stake than there is now.
Why might I worry about the -10,000N figure? Well, first, the number you reference is the number of animals eaten in a lifetime by an American - the greatest per capita meat consumers in the world. I presume that the number is considerably smaller for those in developing countries, and there is considerably less reliance on factory farming.
Even assuming we were talking about American lives, is the suffering that an American causes 10,000 times as great as the happiness of their lives? Let's try a back of the envelope calculation. Let's accept that 21000 figure. I can't access the original source, but some other digging suggests that this breaks down into: 17,000 shellfish, 1700 other fish, 2147 chickens, with the rest constituting a much smaller number. I'm really not sure how to factor in shellfish and other fish: I don't know if they have lives worth living or not, and I presume that most of these are farmed, so wouldn't have existed were it not for farming practices. At any rate, from what I know I suspect that factory farmed chickens are likely to dominate the calculation (but I'm not certain). So let's focus on the chickens. The average factory farmed chicken lives for 6 weeks, so that's 252 factory farmed chicken-years per American lifetime. Assuming the average American lives for 70 years, one American life-year produces 3.6 factory farmed chicken years. What should our tradeoff be between producing factory farmed chicken-years and American human-years? Perhaps the life of the chicken is 10x as bad as the American life is good (that seems a high estimate to me, but I really don't know): in which case we should be willing to shorten an American's life by 10 years in order to prevent one factory-farmed chicken-year. That would mean that, if we call one American life a good of unit 1, the American's meat consumption produces -36 units of value.
In order to get this estimate up to -10 000 units of value, we'd need to multiply that trade-off of 277: we should be indifferent between producing 2770 years of American life and preventing the existence of 1 factory farmed chicken-year (that is, we should be happy letting 4 vegan American children die in order to prevent 1 factory farmed chicken-year). That number seems too high too me; if you agree, perhaps you think that fish or shellfish suffering is the dominant consideration. Or you might bring in non-consequentialist considerations; as I said above, I think that the meat eater problem is likely more troubling for non-consequentialists.
At any rate, this is somewhat of a digression. If one thought that meat eater worries were strong enough that donating to GWWC or 80k was a net harm, I would think that a reasonable view (and one could give further arguments in favour of it, that we haven't discussed), though not my own one for the reasons I've outlined. We knew that something animal welfare focused had been missing from CEA for too long and for that reason set up Effective Animal Activism - currently a sub-project of 80k, but able to accept restricted donations and, as it grows, likely to become an organisation in its own right. So if one thinks that animal welfare charities are likely to be the most cost-effective charities, and one finds the meta-charity argument plausible, then one might consider giving to EAA.
I think that calculation makes sense and the -36 number looks about right. I had actually done a similar calculation a while ago and came up with a similar number. I suppose my guess of -10,000 was too hasty.
It may actually be a good deal higher than 36 depending on how much suffering fish and shellfish go through. This is harder to say because I don't understand the conditions in fish farms nearly as well as chicken farms.
I think Will is assuming that animal suffering has a fairly low moral weight compared to human suffering. Obviously, considerations like this scale directly depending on how you weight that. But I think most people would agree that animal suffering is worth less than human suffering, it's just a question of whether the multiplier is 1/10, 1/100, 0, or what.
I don't think Will is making any such assumption. His argument does not rely on any moral claim about the relative importance of human versus non-human forms of suffering, but instead rests on an empirical claim about the indirect effects that saving a human life has on present non-human animals, on the one hand, and on future sentient beings, on the other hand. He acknowledges that the benefit to the person whom we save might be outweighed by the harm done to the animals this person will consume. But he adds that saving this life will also speed up technological progress, and as a consequence increase the number of future posthuman life-years to a much greater degree than it increases the expected number of future animal life-years. As he writes, "whereas the benefits of saving a life continue until the humanity race (or its descendants) dies out, the harm of increasing meat consumption ends only after a few centuries (when we move beyond farming)."
Of course, someone like Brian Tomasik might counter that, by increasing present meat consumption, we are contributing to the spread of "speciesist" memes. Such memes, by influencing future decision-makers with the power to do astronomical amounts of evil, might actually have negative effects that last indefinitely.
Thanks benthamite, I think everything you said above was accurate.
I was only addressing the point I directly quoted, where MTGandP was questioning the multiplicative factor that Will suggested. I was merely pointing out why that might look low!
I agree that the argument is still pretty much in force even if you put animals pretty much on parity.
I think most people give way too small a multiplier to the weight of animal suffering. A non-human animal may not be able to suffer in all the same ways that a human can, but it is still sufficiently conscious such that its experiences in a factory farm are probably comparable to what a human's experiences would be in the same situation.
What should be objective grounds for such a multiplier? Not all suffering is valued equally. Excluding self-suffering (which is so much subjectively different) from the discussion, I would value the suffering of my child as more important than the suffering of your child. And vice versa.
So, for any valuation that would make sense to me (so that I would actually use that method to make decisions), there should be some difference between multipliers for various beings - if the average homo sapiens would be evaluated with a coefficient of 1, then some people (like your close relatives or friends) would be >1, and some would be <1. Animals (to me) would clearly be <1 as illustrated by a simple dilemma - if I had to choose to kill a cow to save a random man, or to kill a random man to save a cow, I'd favor the man in all cases without much hesitation.
So an important question is, what should be a reasonable basis to quantitatively compare a human life versus (as an example) cow lifes - one-to-ten? one-to-thousand? one-to-all-the-cows-in-the-world? Frankly, I've got no idea. I've given it some thought but I can't imagine a way how to get to an order of magnitude estimate that would feel reasonable to me.
I wouldn't try to estimate the value of a particular species' suffering by intuition. Intuition is, in a lot of situations, a pretty bad moral compass. Instead, I would start from the simple assumption that if two beings suffer equally, their suffering is equally significant. I don't know how to back up this claim other than this: if two beings experience some unpleasant feeling in exactly the same way, it is unfair to say that one of their experiences carries more moral weight than the other.
Then all we have to do is determine how much different beings suffer. We can't know this for certain until we solve the hard problem of consciousness, but we can make some reasonable assumptions. A lot of people assume that a chicken feels less physical pain than a human because it is stupider. But neurologically speaking, there does not appear to be any reason why intelligence would enhance the capacity to feel pain. Hence, the physical pain that a chicken feels is roughly comparable to the pain that a human feels. It should be possible to use neuroscience to provide a more precise comparison, but I don't know enough about that to say more.
Top animal-welfare charities such as The Humane League probably prevent about 100 days of suffering per dollar. The suffering that animals experience in factory farms is probably far worse (by an order of magnitude or more) than the suffering of any group of humans that is targeted by a charity. If you doubt this claim, watch some footage of what goes on in factory farms.
As a side note, you mentioned comparing the value of a cow versus a human. I don't think this is a very useful comparison to make. A better comparison is the suffering of a cow versus a human. A life's value depends on how much happiness and suffering it contains.
I personally treat lives as valuable in and of themselves. It's why I don't kill sad people, I try to make them happier.
Most people would argue that animals are less capable of experiencing suffering and thus the same amount of pain is worth less in an animal than a human.
EDIT:
Do you also support tiling the universe with orgasmium? Genuinely curious.
Why? What sort of life has value? Does the life of a bacterium have inherent value? How about a chicken? Does a life have finite inherent value? How do you compare the inherent value of different lives?
Killing people makes them have 0 happiness (in practice, it actually reduces the total happiness in the world by quite a bit because killing someone has a lot of side effects.) Making people happy gives them positive happiness. Positive happiness is better than 0 happiness.
I don't care what most people think. The majority is wrong about a lot of things. I believe that non-human animals [1] experience pain in roughly the same way that humans do because that's where the evidence seems to point. What most people think about it does not come into the equation.
Probably. I'm reluctant to make a change of that magnitude without considering it really, really carefully, no matter how sure I may be right now that it's a good thing. If I found myself with the capacity to do this, I would probably recruit an army of the world's best thinkers to decide if it's worth doing. But right now I'm inclined to say that it is.
[1] Here I'm talking about animals like pigs and chickens, not animals like sea sponges.
I must admit I am a tad confused here, but intelligence or whatever seems a good rule of thumb.
Oh, yes. Nevertheless, even if it would increase net happiness, I don't kill people. Not for the sake of happiness alone and all that.
The same way, sure. But introspection suggests I don't value it as much depending on how conscious they are (probably the same as intelligence.)
Have you read "Not for the Sake of Happiness (Alone)"? Human values are complicated.
I was asking questions to try to better understand where you're coming from. Do you mean the questions were confusing?
Are you saying that moral worth is directly proportional to intelligence? If so, why do you think this is true?
Why not? Do you have a good reason, or are you just going off of intuition?
Yes, I've read it. I'm not entirely convinced that all values reduce to happiness, but I've never seen any value that can't be reduced to happiness. That's one of the areas in ethics where I'm the most uncertain. In practice, it doesn't come up much because in almost every situation, happiness and preference satisfaction amount to the same thing.
I'm inclined to believe that not all preferences reduce to happiness, but all CEV preferences do reduce to happiness. As I said before, I'm fairly uncertain about this and I don't have much evidence.
You can probably think of a happiness-based justification for any value someone throws at you. But that's probably only because you're coming from the privileged position of being a human who already knows those values are good, and hence wants to find a reason happiness justifies them. I suspect an AI designed only to maximise happiness would probably find a different way that would produce more happiness while disregarding almost all values we think we have.
No, I mean I am unsure as to what my CEV would answer.
Because I'll kill a bug to save a chicken, a chicken to save a cat, a cat to save an ape, and an ape to save a human. The part of me responsible for morality clearly has some sort of criteria for moral worth that seems roughly equivalent to intelligence.
... both?
Fair enough. Unfortunately, the area of ethics where I'm the most uncertain is weighting creatures with different intelligence levels.
Thing like discovery and creativity seem like good examples of preferences that don't reduce to happiness IIRC, although it's been a while since I thought everything reduced to happiness so I don't recall very well.
Not sure what this means.
To be clear, you are arguing that this is a bias to be overcome, yes?
Scope insensitivity?
No, I'm not arguing that this is a bias to overcome - if I have to choose wether to save my child or your child, the unbiased rational choice is to save my child, as the utility (to me) of this action is far greater.
I'm arguing that this is a strong counterexample to the assumption that all entities may be treated as equals in calculating "value of entity_X's suffering to me". They are clearly not equal, they differ by order(s) of magnitude.
"general value of entity_X's suffering" is a different, not identical measurement - but when making my decisions (such as the original discussion on what charities would be the most rational [for me] to support) I don't want to use the general values, but the values as they apply to me.
... oh.
That seems ... kind of evil, to be honest.
OK, then I feel confused.
Regarding " if I have to choose wether to save my child or your child, the unbiased rational choice is to save my child, as the utility (to me) of this action is far greater" - I was under impression that this would be a common trait shared by [nearly] all homo sapiens. Is it not so and is generally considered sociopathic/evil ?
Consider: if you attach higher utility to your child's life than mine, then even if my child has a higher chance of survival you will choose your child and leave mine to die.
Not true as a general statement, not if you're maximizing your expected utility gain.
Also, "if"? One often attaches utility based on ... attachment. Do you think there's more than, say, 0.01 parents per 100 that would not value their own child over some other child? Are most all parents "evil" in that regard?
Another situation that has some parallels and may be relevant to the discussion.
Helping starving kids is Good - that's well understood. However, my upbringing and current gut feeling says that this is not unconditional. In particular, feeding starving kids is Good if you can afford it; but feeding other starving kids if that causes your own kids to starve is not good, and would be considered evil and socially unacceptable. i.e., that goodness of resource redistribution should depend on resource scarcity; and that hurting your in-group is forbidden even with good intentions.
It may be caused by the fact that I'm partially brought up by people that actually experienced starvation and have had their relatives starve to death (WW2 aftermath and all that), but I'd guess that their opinion is more fact-based than mine and that they definitely had put more thought into it than I have, so until/if I analyze it more, I probably should accept that prior.
That is so - though it depends on the actual chances; "much higher chance of survival" is different than "higher chance of survival".
But my point is that:
a) I might [currently thinking] rationally desire that all of my in-group would adopt such a belief mode - I would have higher chances of survival if those close to me prefer me to a random stranger. And "belief-sets that we want our neighbors to have" are correlated with what we define as "good".
b) As far as I understand, homo sapiens do generally actually have such an attitude - evolutionary psychology research and actual observations when mothers/caretakers have had to choose kids in fires/etc.
c) Duty may be a relevant factor/emotion. Even if the values were perfectly identical (say, the kids involved would be twins of a third party), if one was entrusted to me or I had casually accepted to watch him, I'd be strongly compelled to save that one first, even if the chances of survival would (to an extent) suggest otherwise. And for my own kids, naturally, I have a duty to take care of them unlike 99.999% other kids - even if I wouldn't love them, I'd still have that duty.
Even if one assigned exactly zero terminal value to non-sapient beings (as IIRC EY does), it takes a hella more resources to grow 2000 kcal's worth of lamb than to grow 2000 kcal's worth of soy, and if everyone wanted to live on the diet of an average present-day American I don't think the planet could handle that; so until we find a way to cheaply grow meat in a lab/terraform other planets, eating meat amounts to defecting in an N-player Prisoner's Dilemma. (But the conclusion “...and therefore we should let people born from the wrong vagina die from malaria so they won't eat meat” doesn't feel right to me.)
(EDIT: I'm not fully vegetarian myself, though like the author of the linked post I eat less meat than usual and try to throw away as little food as possible.)
(Edited to remove the mention of the Tragedy of Commons -- turns out I was using that term in a non-standard way.)
It's not the tragedy of the commons because farms are privately owned. There might be some aspects like that (e.g. climate change) but "resources used" is in general a problem whose costs are fully internalised and can thus be dealt with by the price system.
I don't know much economics so I might be talking through my ass, but doesn't consuming more meat cause the price of meat to increase if the cost of producing meat stays constant, incentivizing farmers to produce more meat? (The extreme example is that if nobody ate meat nobody would produce meat as they would have no-one to sell it to, and if everybody only ate meat nobody would grow grains for human consumption.) And what about government subsidies?
Yes, the price would go up until no-one else wanted to eat meat. No extra planets required, and no market failure.
Still trying to wrap my head around this... [Off to read Introduction to Economic Analysis by R. Preston McAfee. Be back later.]
Tragedies of the commons only occur when the costs of your decisions are bourne by you. But that's not the case here; buying more meat means you have to pay more, compensating the farmer for the increased use of his resources.
Yes, you slightly increase the cost of meat to everyone else. You also slightly reduce the price of the other things you would otherwise have spent your money on. But it is precisely this price-raising effect that prevents us from accidentally needing three earths: long before that, the price would have risen sufficiently high that no-one else would want to eat meat. This is the market system working exactly as it should.
If it were the case that meat farming caused unusually large amounts of pollution, there might be a tragedy of the commons scenario. But it would have nothing to do with the amount of resources required to make the meat.
The idea that eating stuff that requires 100 units of energy to be grown when I could easily live on stuff that requires 1 unit of energy instead is totally unproblematic so long as I pay for it still sounds very counter-intuitive to me. I think I have an idea of what's going on, but I'm going to finish that introductory economics textbook first because I might be badly out of whack.
It's problematic only to the extent that you could otherwise have spent the money on even more useful things.