Epistemic Status: This is uncertain and not deeply researched, but I could not find a simple way to come to a different conclusion.
How do you compare human and non-human animal suffering and interventions?
With the vast numbers of factory farmed animals raised and killed every year (~60 billion), I find it hard to imagine that this is not a more promising cause area than any short to medium-term human interventions.
It seems to me that factory farming is a worse atrocity than anything currently harming humans. There seems to be far greater suffering for far greater numbers than in humans although there may be a longtermist argument against this? Still, wouldn't there be a case for ensuring a permanent end to factory farming over the likelihood of improving or extended future human well-being, because a future where we are committing an on-going moral atrocity is not a good one?
I also find it hard to discount the negative impact of factory farming because if animals are worthy of moral status, we are causing immense suffering that would not have happened otherwise (as opposed to wild animal welfare where we have a less direct role).
To discount factory farming to the extent that would make it similar in importance to short-term human based interventions (like GiveWell's recommendations), it seems to me that you would have to believe at least one of the following:
- animals are not conscious or less conscious than humans
- animals suffer less than humans
- animal suffering matters less than human suffering
- we can't know how much we are improving animal suffering
But I can't find a serious case for thinking any of these things—at the very least with greater than 50% certainty—and even then the amount of animal suffering would vastly outweigh that of human suffering.
Regarding tractability, I can't currently find any dollar estimates for "years of factory farmed animal suffering prevented" or a similar metric (if you know of these, please send them!). It does seem likely to me that direct interventions or investing in alternative animal protein would likely reduce more suffering per dollar than we could for humans.
My other intuition here is that with whatever limited consciousness or pain an animal can feel, it seems that being a factory farmed animal would be significantly worse than not being alive at all. I'm significantly less confident about this regarding, for example, the 10% least fortunate people alive today.
But I doubt I'm accurately representing the good arguments that discount animal suffering, so please let me know what you think! How does the scale and intensity of suffering in factory farming not outweigh the scale and intensity of human suffering?
"I would guess most arguments for global health and poverty over animal welfare fall under the following:
"
I'm pretty skeptical that these arguments descriptively account for most of the people explicitly choosing global poverty interventions over animal welfare interventions, although they certainly account for some people. Polls show wide agreement that birds and mammals are conscious and have welfare to at least some degree. And I think most models on which degree of consciousness (in at least some senses) varies greatly, it's not so greatly that one would say that, e.g. it's more expensive to improve consciousness-adjusted welfare in chickens than humans today. And I say that as someone who thinks it pretty plausible that there are important orders-of-magnitude differences in quantitative aspects of consciousness.
I'd say descriptively the bigger thing is people just feeling more emotional/moral obligations to humans than other animals, not thinking human welfare varies a millionfold more, in the same way that people who choose to 'donate locally' in rich communities where ... (read more)
I agree with this for the broader philanthropic community, but I had the EA community in mind specifically. I think just speciesism and rationalization of eating animals account for most of the differences in society and charity broadly.
I think most of the other reasons you give wouldn't fit the EA community, especially given how utilitarian we are. The people who have thought about the issues will give answers related to consciousness and intensity of experience, and maybe moral status like Kagan as you mention. I suppose many newer EAs will not have thought about the issues much at all, though, and so could still have more speciesist views. I think half of EAs in the last EA survey were vegetarian or vegan, though.
I might have underestimated how much EAs prioritizing global health and poverty do so for the better evidence base, and the belief that it is more cost-effective with pretty skeptical prior.