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Pablo_Stafforini comments on When should you give to multiple charities? - Less Wrong Discussion
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Comments (43)
According to Brian Tomasik's estimates, a dollar donated to the most cost-effective animal charity is expected to prevent between 100 days and 51 years of suff ering on a factory farm. Even if you think this charity is only 5% more effective than your next choice, donating to this charity would alleviate between 5 days and 2.55 years of suffering more than would donating to the second best charity. On a very modest donation of, say, $200 per year, the difference amounts to between ~3 and ~500 years of suffering. In light of these figures, it doesn't seem that the fact that "you find it painful to pick only one" charity is, in itself, a good reason to pick both.
If I'm giving $200/year there are lots of options I could take to improve my impact:
All of these are painful to myself but have benefits to others, so to maximize my positive impact I should prioritize them based on the ratio of self-pain to other-beneft. What I'm claiming here is that the last option has a poor ratio, for charities that are close enough together in impact.
Not directly relevant, but is there a LW post or other resource of similar or greater caliber defending the idea that we should be assigning significant moral weight to non-human animals?
There is a very simple meta-argument: whatever your argument is for giving value to humans, it will also be strong enough to show that some non-human are also valuable, due to a partial overlap between humans and non-humans in all the properties you might credibly regard as morally relevant.
In any case, I was using animal charities only because I'm more familiar with the relevant estimates of cost-effectiveness. On the plausible assumption that such charities are not many orders of magnitude more cost-effective than the most cost-effective human charity, the argument should work for human charities, too.
How about in-group affiliation with members of your own species?
Do you really believe that, when a creature suffers intensely, your reasons for relieving this creature's suffering derive from the fact that you share a particular genotype with this creature? If you were later told that a being whom you thought belonged to your species actually belongs to a different species, or to no species at all (a sim), would you suddenly lose all reason to help her?
I don't, but I don't dismiss the possibility that other people may; I've certainly known people who asserted such.
I don't know of a good argument for that position, but there's good evidence that some of the universal emotions discussed in CFAR's "Emotional API" unit (namely SEEKING, RAGE, FEAR, LUST, CARE, PANIC/GRIEF and PLAY) are experienced by nonhuman mammals. That fact might cause one to care more about animals.
Good question, how would one do this consistently? If you value agency/intelligence, you have to develop a metric which does not lead to stupid results, like having your utility function being overwhelmed by insects and bacteria, due to their sheer numbers. Of course, one can always go by cuteness.
Is that necessarily stupid? Obviously it is if you only value agency/intelligence, and it's an empirical question whether insects and bacteria have the other characteristics you may care about, but given that it is an empirical question the only acceptable response seems to be to shut up and calculate.
Also not directly relevant, but is there any argument opposed to prioritizing animals of higher intelligence and "capacity for suffering", such as primates and cetaceans?
Personally, while I assign negative utility to animals suffering in factory farms, I adjust for the mental capacity of the animals in question (in broad terms "how much do I care about this animal's suffering relative to a human's?") and in many cases this is the controlling factor of the calculation. If I were deciding between charities which prevented human suffering on that order, clearly the difference between top charities would outweigh the magnitude of my suffering, but when the animals in question are mostly chickens, it's not clear to me that this is still the case. I discount tremendously on the suffering of a creature capable of this relative to humans.
I wasn't arguing that you should donate to non-human animal charities. I was arguing that if you do donate to non-human animal charities, you should donate solely to the most cost-effective such charity, even if you would get more fuzzies by splitting your donation between two or more charities. I was also implicitly suggesting that if you believe that non-human animal human charities are comparably cost-effective, the argument generalizes to human charities, too. Discounting the suffering of non-human animals only serves to strengthen my argument, since it decreases the cost-effectivenss of non-human animal charities relative to that of human charities.
In that case, I'm not sure what your original argument was.
The argument was explained in the sentences immediately preceding the one you quoted.
The painfulness of the decision is also a form of disutility that has to be balanced against the difference between the charities though, which was the point of my original comment. If the difference between the values of the donations, when adjusted for the species involved, is less utility than the amount you personally lose from agonizing over how to apportion your donation, splitting it may result in higher utility overall.
Obviously, this is heavily dependent on how large the utility differences between the top charities are; if it weren't, my comment about discounting the suffering of less intelligent species wouldn't have been relevant.