October 7-13th will be Animal Welfare vs Global Health Debate Week. We will be discussing the debate statement “It would be better to spend an extra $100m on animal welfare than on global health”.
As in our last debate week, you will be able to take part by:
- Writing posts with the debate week tag (tag TBD- I'll link it here when it is up).
- Voting on the debate banner.
- Using our dialogue feature to co-write a discussion with someone you substantively disagree with.
This time, we are adding a feature so that you can explain your vote on the banner, and respond to other people’s explanations on a post (explained below).
If you’d like to improve the quality of the debate, you can also:
- Comment any links you think should be added to the reading list in this post.
- Reach out to friends who might have interesting takes on the debate, and encourage them to take part.
Debate week features
During the debate week (7-13 October), we will have a banner on the front page, where logged in users can vote (non-anonymously) by placing their avatar anywhere from strongly agree to strongly disagree on a slider.
When a user votes, they’ll be given the option to add a comment explaining their vote, or highlighting their remaining uncertainties. This comment will be visible when users hover over each vote on the banner, and separately, it’ll appear as a comment on a debate week discussion thread, so users can respond to it.
Anyone can view the distribution of votes on the banner, in a convenient histogram format, even before they have voted, by clicking the reveal button on the banner.
We’ve added the histogram view, and the ability to comment on your vote, because of feedback from last time. Please feel free to give more feedback in the comments, or in dms.
Why this debate?
Figuring out how to prioritise between animal welfare and global health is difficult, but crucial. Prioritisation is a key principle that makes effective altruism unique, but we sometimes wonder where it happens. Why not here?
For the purpose of this debate, I’m defining animal welfare as any intervention which primarily aims to increase the wellbeing of animals, or decrease their suffering, and global health as the same for humans.
We’ve had the discussion publicly a few times, including in this popular post from last November: Open Phil Should Allocate Most Neartermist Funding to Animal Welfare. Some of the anecdata we collected from the Donation Election last year, and the recent Forum user survey, suggested that this post and Forum discussion in general, have updated people towards animal welfare. I’d love to see the most persuasive arguments out in the open, so we can examine them further.
The Forum’s past engagement on the question suggests that it matters to people, and that we are open to truth-seeking and productive debate on the question.
Let’s discuss!
Crucial considerations
A crucial consideration is a question which, if answered, might substantially change your cause prioritisation.
Below are a few questions which I think may be crucial considerations in this debate. Feel free to add more in the comments. If you are interested in taking a crack at any of these questions, I strongly encourage you to write a post for debate week.
- What are the most promising uses of $100 million in animal welfare and global health?
- How should we weigh the suffering of humans and animals?
- To what extent are farmed animals suffering?
- How should we compare the value of near-certain near-term life improvements with speculative research?
- After how much funding would animal welfare interventions face diminishing returns?
Reading list
- Open Phil Should Allocate Most Neartermist Funding to Animal Welfare – Ariel Simnegar
- Prioritising animal welfare over global health and development? – Vasco Grilo
- The Moral Weight Project Sequence – Rethink Priorities
- Check out @MichaelStJules's more comprehensive reading list in this comment.
- Suggest more in the comments!
Useful tools
- You can play around with OpenPhilanthropy’s grant data in this spreadsheet (thanks @Hamish McDoodles)
- Rethink Priorities’ cross-cause cost-effectiveness model can help you figure out how you should vote/ what your key uncertainties are.
FAQs
Why $100m?
I chose a precise number because I wanted to make the debate more precise (last time the phrasing of the debate statement was a bit too vague).
I chose $100m because it lets us think about very ambitious projects, on the scale of projects available to major foundations such as OpenPhilanthropy. For scale, consider that the Against Malaria Foundation has raised $627m since it started in 2005, and the amount donated to farmed animal advocacy in the US annually has been estimated to be $91m.
Is this $100m this year? Or over ten years?
Imagine this is a new $100m trust that can be spent down today, or over any time period you desire. All you have to do now, is decide whether the trust will be bound to promote animal welfare, or global health.
What is in scope for the debate?
You may wonder about the scope of the debate— “what if I think that traditional global health interventions aren’t as cost-effective as animal welfare interventions, but increasing economic growth would be more cost-effective? How should I vote?”
The answer is: I think this debate should be very permissive about the interventions that we include. Discussions about the best approaches within the causes of animal welfare and global health are very much in-scope, even if those interventions are less discussed.
If you’re unsure whether the intervention you are considering is in scope for the debate, refer to my definition: “I’m defining animal welfare as any intervention which primarily aims to increase the wellbeing of animals, or decrease their suffering, and global health as the same for humans”.
When you vote, you will have the option to briefly explain your vote. This will be visible on the banner on the frontpage, and separately as a comment on a post-page, so that other users can reply to it. If you think you might have a non-standard interpretation of the question, feel free to explain that in your comment, or in a post.
Do I have to pretend to be a neartermist[1] for this debate?
For example, perhaps you are thinking — “I think AI is the most important cause, and animal welfare and global health are only important insofar as they impact the chances of AI alignment”. This is a reasonable position.
Though I would guess that the most useful/ influential posts during debate week will be based on object level discussion of animal welfare and global health interventions, it is also reasonable to base your decision on second order considerations.
As mentioned above, this is part of the reason we are setting up an easy way for you to explain your vote. For example, if you want to argue that we should prioritise global health because we want people to be economically empowered before the singularity— go ahead.
What should a debate week post look like?
You can contribute to the debate by:
- Writing a full justification of your current vote, and inviting people to disagree with you in the comments.
- Providing an answer to a crucial consideration question, such as those listed above.
- Linkposting interesting work that is relevant to the debate.
- Bring up new considerations, which haven’t been discussed.
Note that: a valuable post during debate week is one that helps people update their opinions. How you do that is up to you.
Let me know your thoughts
If you are reading this, this event is for you. I’m very grateful to receive feedback, positive or constructive, either in the comments here, or via direct message.
- ^
I know that you don't have to be a neartermist to care about animals, or a longtermist to care about AI. I've included this section just to make it clear that, although this debate is limited to animal welfare and global health, that doesn't mean you have to pretend to have a different philosophy of cause prioritisation in order to vote.
Some other potentially useful references for this debate:
Healthier Hens is shutting down or has already shut down, according to the Charity Entrepreneurship Newsletter. Their website is also down.
Thanks, Michael! Here are a few more posts:
Program aiming to increase the consumption of plant-based foods at schools and universities in the United Kingdom (UK).
Thank you! These are great. I'll link the comment in the text.
Great idea ! I really support this debate, I think it is a topic that is currently not taken into account enough.
I'd be surprised if there isn't something in the order of a 100x difference in cost effectiveness in favour of animals interventions (as indicated in some of the resources above).
Animals are much more numerous, neglected, and have terrible living conditions, so there's simply much more to do. And as indicated through research on the moral weight Project, it's hard to have a high confidence that their level of sentience is very low compared to humans.
We have a natural tendency to prefer humans (we know them well, after all), so a context in which we can challenge this assumption is welcome.
It would be better to call this: Animal Welfare vs Human Welfare Debate Week
When your scope extends to "any intervention which primarily aims to increase the wellbeing of animals, or decrease their suffering, and...the same for humans”, the term "global health" only represents a sub-set of possible interventions.
Thanks for bringing this up Barry! The exact phrasing has gone through a lot of workshopping, but I didn't spot this. Perhaps I should change the debate statement to "global health and wellbeing" to cover this area.
On your specific suggestion, I disagree because "Animal Welfare vs Human Welfare" seems to suggest a necessary trade-off between animal and human welfare, whereas I'm hoping that we will be discussing the best ways to increase welfare overall, whether for humans or animals.
Thanks Toby! Health is part of wellbeing, so "global wellbeing" would be sufficient.
However, it's worth noting that "global wellbeing" should apply to all moral patients, whereas "global health" is usually understood as a human-specific set of interventions.
Exactly- I was also thinking of "global wellbeing" but then realised that would also include animals. "Global health and wellbeing" is the name for the cause area in OpenPhilanthropy's terminology which only applies to humans, so I think that would have meaning to some people (although it is easy to overestimate average EA context when you've been around it so long).
Another alternative is to do something like we did on the last debate week, and have definitions of the terms appear when you hover over them in the banner. I'll chat to Will, who is developing the banner, about our options when I see him tomorrow.
Cheers!
Maybe you should have a separate debate week on the most appropriate name for the "global health" cause area ;o)
I've just been informed that "global health and wellbeing" actually is intended by OP to include animal welfare- so I'm disagree-reacting the above comment.
It seems like the whole premise of this debate is (rightly) based on the idea that there is in fact a necessary trade-off between human and animal welfare, no? I.e. if we give the $100 million towards the most cost-effective human focused intervention we can think of then we are necessarily not giving it towards the most cost-effective animal-focused intervention we can think of, no? Of course it is theoretically possible that there exists some intervention which is simultaneously the most cost-effective intervention on both a humans-per-dollar and animals-per-dollar but that seems extremely unlikely.
Yep- there is a trade-off in the sense that the money will go to one, and the other will miss out. I wasn't very clear in my previous comment- sorry!
What I meant is that we ideally aren't pitting human and animal welfare against each other. Most arguments, I expect, will be claiming that giving the money in one direction will increase welfare overall. In fact, this increase in welfare will accrue to either animals or humans, but the question was never "which is more deserving of welfare", it was "which option will produce the most welfare". Does that make it clearer? It's a subtler point than I thought while making it.
I wonder if it would be worthwhile to include a yes/no/undefined set of buttons that people could use to share if they are basing their decision primarily on second order considerations. Conditional on a significant fraction of people doing so, we might learn something interesting from the vote split in each category. That wouldn't provide the richness of data that a custom narrative yields, but it is easier to statistically analyze a fixed-response question, and more people may respond to a three-second question than provide a narrative.
That's interesting- I guess I'm expecting so much diversity in responses that one fixed response question would probably raise more questions than it answered (i.e. "which second-order consideration?"). An alternative would be to send out a short survey afterwards to a randomised group of voters from across the spectrum. Depending on the content of people's comments maybe we could also categorise them and do some kind of basic analysis (i.e. without sending a survey out).
Makes sense -- one use case for me is that I'd be more inclined to defer to community judgment based on certain grounds than on others in allocating my own (much more limited!) funds.
E.g., if perspective X already gets a lot of weight from major funders, or if I think I'm in a fairly good position to weigh X relative to others, then I'd probably defer less. On the other hand, there are some potential cruxes on which various factors point toward more deference.
The specific statement I was reacting to was that people might vote based on their views about what happens after a singularity. For various reasons, I would not be inclined to defer to GH/animal welfare funding splits that were promised on that kind of reasoning. (Not that the reasoning is somehow invalid, it's just not the kind of data that would materially update how I donate.)
Agree react to this comment if you'd be interested in taking part in a virtual co-working session (probably in gather.town) to get some accountability on writing a post for debate week.