[TL;DR: I didn't find much of value in the book. The quality of argumentation is worse than on most blogs I read. Maybe others will have better luck discerning any hidden gems in the mix?]
The Good It Promises, the Harm It Does: Critical Essays on Effective Altruism (eds. Adams, Crary, & Gruen) puts me in mind of Bastiat’s Candlestick Makers' Petition. For any proposed change—be it the invention of electricity, or even the sun rising—there will be some in a position to complain. This is a book of such complaints. There is much recounting of various “harms” caused by EA (primarily to social justice activists who are no longer as competitive for grant funding). But nowhere in the volume is there any serious attempt to compare these costs against the gains to others—especially the populations supposedly served by charitable work, as opposed to the workers themselves—to determine which is greater. (One gets the impression that cost-benefit analysis is too capitalistic for these authors to even consider.) The word “trade-off” does not appear in this volume.
A second respect in which the book’s title may be misleading is that it is exclusively about the animal welfare wing of EA. (There is a ‘Coda’ that mentions longtermism, but merely to sneer at it. There was no substantive engagement with the ideas.)
I personally didn’t find much of value in the volume, but I’ll start out by flagging what good I can. I’ll then briefly explain why I wasn’t much impressed with the rest—mainly by way of sharing representative quotes, so readers can judge it for themselves.
The Good
The more empirically-oriented chapters raise interesting challenges about animal advocacy strategy. We learn that EA funders have focused on two main strategies to reform or eventually upend animal agriculture: (i) corporate cage-free (and similar) campaigns, and (ii) investment in meat alternatives. Neither involves the sort of “grassroots” activism that the contributors to this volume prefer. So some of the authors discuss potential shortcomings of the above two strategies, and potential benefits of alternatives like (iii) vegan outreach in Black communities, and (iv) animal sanctuaries.
I expect EAs will welcome discussion of the effectiveness of different strategies. That’s what the movement is all about, after all. By far the most constructive article in the volume (chapter 4, ‘Animal Advocacy’s Stockholm Syndrome’) noted that “cage- free campaigns… can be particularly tragic in a global context” where factory-farms are not yet ubiquitous:
The conscientious urban, middle-class Indian consumer cannot see that there is a minor difference between the cage-free egg and the standard factory-farmed egg, and a massive gulf separating both of these from the traditionally produced egg [where birds freely roam their whole lives] for a simple reason: the animal protection groups the consumer is relying upon are pointing to the (factory- farmed) cage-free egg instead of alternatives to industrial farming. (p. 45)
Such evidence of localized ineffectiveness (or counterproductivity) is certainly important to identify & take into account!
There’s a larger issue (not really addressed in this volume) of when it makes sense for a funder to go “all in” on their best bets vs. when they’d do better to “diversify” their philanthropic portfolio. This is something EAs have discussed a bit before (often by making purely theoretical arguments that the “best bet” maximizes expected value), but I’d be excited to see more work on this problem using different methodologies, including taking into account the risk of “model error” or systemic bias in our initial EV estimates. (Maybe such work is already out there, and I just don’t know about it? The closest I can think of is Open Philanthropy’s work on worldview diversification, which I like a lot.)
The Bad
My biggest complaint about the book is that (with the notable exception quoted above) it contains very little by way of evidence or argument. It’s effectively a testimonial of social-justice perspectives, but if you don’t already agree with social-justice activists that they know best, there’s little here to change your mind. As the editors make clear in their introduction, their central beef with EA is that its data-driven approach is:
directly at odds with the aims and practices of numerous liberation movements, many of which are distinguished by their insistence on starting with the voices of the oppressed and taking simultaneously empathetic and critical engagement with these voices to guide the development of strategies for responding to suffering. (p. xxvii)
If it’s not obvious to you that oppressed communities know best how to promote animal welfare, well, you’re just a bad person, I guess.
The editors next lament that EA funders’ willingness to fund “care work” on animal sanctuaries is conditional on the sanctuaries doing further indirect good (e.g. by inspiring visitors to subsequently support other effective animal charities), because the direct benefit is so small in scale compared to other efforts. The editors object:
This is not a way of registering the value of care, empathy, and the pursuit of genuine altruism, however, but rather a way of denying these values and reducing them to mere means to other ends. This instrumentalization of deep values makes crucial aspects of the lives of those who bear them invisible— another grave harm of EA. (pp. xxviii-xxix.)
In other words, Animal Charity Evaluators is too focused on helping animals, and objectionably view animal charities as instrumental to that end, instead of appreciating that the proper purpose of animal charities is to make their employees feel seen.
I guess that does pretty well sum up a core disagreement between EAs and the critics represented in this volume.
* * *
Something I find especially frustrating about the volume is a lack of clarity about when authors think that EA principles are ill-suited to achieving our goals of welfare-promotion, and when they instead reject these as the wrong goals and hold that we should instead be expressing care (by refusing to countenance hard trade-offs), prioritizing social justice, or maintaining purity (via non-association with corporations), for their own sakes. Those of us already convinced that these non-utilitarian values are misguided could then simply ignore those sections. But without this clarity, it’s hard to know how much of the book is really relevant to those who just want to do the most good. (My sense is: very little.)
For example, on p.196, a proponent of animal sanctuaries asks:
As we’re marching toward our shared and glorious vision of a world free from suffering, is it truly okay to ignore the mind-numbing suffering of those we could save in order to [save more via indirect means]?
Such full-throated endorsement of the identifiable victim bias doesn’t inspire confidence. (Obviously, if you don’t save more via indirect means, then you are ignoring the mind-numbing suffering of an even greater number of those we could save. Trade-offs exist, however determined these authors are to deny their reality.)
[Correction: I've deleted a passage from a different chapter that it turns out I misread; my apologies to that author for the unfair criticism. I should instead just say that my impression of the volume as a whole is that it contains a lot of anti-EA moral assertions without sufficient engagement with the reasons why EAs disagree.]
Yet another opposes the popularization of impossible burgers (p.18):
What have we come to when we call a diversification of business portfolios by these [agribusiness and fast food] companies—which are involved, through their caucus in Congress, in the dismantlement of environmental laws, human rights, and animal protection laws—a success for the animals, and even going as far as to offer “vegan” certifications to a Unilever product?
(I would’ve thought that any vegan product could be certified as such, but apparently it doesn’t count if it’s made by the wrong people?)

Now, it’s certainly conceivable that “complicity” with agribusiness will turn out to do more harm than good, and many of the authors in this volume speculate that this is so. But they don’t really provide evidence to support this claim, so if your priors (like mine) favour reform over revolution, again, there’s little here to change your mind. And given their evident independent opposition to pragmatic compromise “complicity”, listening to these authors on the consequences of pragmatic reform seems akin to listening to conservative catholics lecturing on the social harms of contraception. You know their mind was made up long before they came across the cherry-picked study that they’re now so keen to share.
Moreover, the editors seem to hint at the idea that their view could not possibly be supported on welfarist, utilitarian grounds. On p.xxviii, they write: “EA doesn’t have resources for fundamentally criticizing the pertinent capitalistic structures.” This sounds like a confession that their proposed alternatives do not offer a good bet for promoting overall welfare. (Otherwise, there would seem no principled barrier to making the case that their politics is a high-expected-value risk worth taking, just like x-risk reduction. It’s just… not very substantively plausible.) Only by abandoning EA principles, Crary writes, could EAs “finally [take] a step toward doing a bit of good.” (p. 246) Saving kids from malaria evidently isn’t worth a damn.
Anti-utilitarian moralizing seeps from nearly every page. One author denounces:
MacAskill’s morally repugnant call for an increase in the number of sweatshops in the Third World [as] merely the artifact of a utilitarian ideology incapable of recognizing exploitation as a moral or social problem. (p. 222)
Of course, there’s no critical engagement with MacAskill’s reasons. These authors don’t believe in reasons. They believe in righteousness. Which brings us to…
The Ugly
At the end of the first chapter (p. 7), we’re told that:
[failing to fund] work being done by a Black activist in Black communities is upholding white supremacist ideas about which communities are worthy of support and which ones aren’t. In other words, it’s racist, plain and simple.
The second chapter tells us that featuring endorsements from attractive celebrities constitutes “body shaming, ableism, and sexism.” (p. 13)
From the third, we learn that “Normative Whiteness is cooked into the ideological foundation, because it focuses on maximizing the effectiveness of donors’ resources.” (p. 28)
And so on. It’s like a caricature of delusional humanities professors invented to provide fodder to Tucker Carlson. Except it’s real. Apparently some people really think this kind of thing passes for argumentation.
Illogical reasoning is also present in other forms of “argument” found in this volume. For example, we’re told that rising consumption of animal products, during a time when EA funders gave over $144 million to animal welfare causes, “demonstrates that EA is not effective at achieving its purported goal of saving animals.” (p. 187, emphasis added.) The notion of slowing a rate of increase is apparently not within the sphere of logical possibility to this author. (Not to mention that the main EA strategies mentioned above would, if successful, lead to either (i) improved animal welfare, not reduced consumption, from corporate cage-free campaigns; or (ii) later payoffs, from alt-meat development.)
Or, from Lori Gruen (p. 255):
In a comment that clearly identifies EA’s inability to acknowledge injustice as bad, MacAskill writes, “I think that it is unlikely in the foreseeable future that the [EA] community would focus on rectifying injustice in cases where they believed that there were other available actions which, though they would leave the injustice remaining, would do more good overall.”
Clearly, if injustice does not receive lexical priority, this implies that it must not be bad at all! *facepalm*
On p. xxv, the editors tell us that:
EA’s principles are actualized in ways that support some of the very social structures that cause suffering, thereby undermining its efforts to “do the most good.”
That’s an awfully sneaky use of “thereby”. I would’ve thought it entirely possible (indeed, plausible) that you might do the most good by supporting some structures that cause suffering. (For one thing, even the best possible structures—like democracy—will likely cause some suffering; it suffices that the alternatives are even worse. For another, even a suboptimal structure might be too costly, or too risky, to replace. But you’ll find no consideration of such ideologically inconvenient ideas in this volume.)
Alice Crary argues (well, asserts) that “EA is a straightforward example of moral corruption.” (p. 226) Why? That remains unclear to me. But we are told that:
an Archimedean view deprives us of the resources we need to recognize what matters morally, encouraging us to read into it features of whatever moral position we happen to favor. (p. 235)
This is in contrast to Crary’s preferred view, on which only those with a “developed sensibility” can directly perceive the values enmeshed in “the weave of the world” (p. 235). Like, that EA funders should give her friends more money.
Epistemic Implications
This is precisely the anti-EA volume we would expect to see if EA were in fact doing everything right. We should fully expect maximizing welfare to generate complaints about “inequitable cause prioritization” (p. 82) from those who care more about social justice. We should expect affirmations of ineffectiveness, like the following, from those who lose out from competition:
It is unhelpful to think that you are searching for the single most effective way your money can be used. Instead, you are looking for a good way to support a project that aligns with your priorities, is well-run, and looks like it has a good chance of achieving its goals. (p. 107)
Another author urges that “we all need to reject the injurious intolerance of Effective Altruism in favor of a more modest and generous mode of relating to the projects of others.” (p. 125) Apparently it’s intolerant to prefer to give money to more effective causes over less effective ones. This is the “harm” that effective altruism does. You know, to the wallets of the authors and their allies.
Elsewhere, we’re informed that EA “misidentifies the biggest problems today as global health, factory farming, and existential threats” when really “the global poor suffer from adverse health outcomes because of capitalist social relations.” (p. 218)
For a moment, I wondered whether the low quality of this book might constitute positive evidence in support of effective altruism (“if these are the best objections they can come up with…”). Unfortunately, many of the authors seem so ideologically opposed to cost-effectiveness evaluation that I expect they would’ve written the same tripe even if there was strong evidence available that EA interventions really were worse in expectation. So I guess it’s just a wash.
The Crux of the Dispute
I previously suggested that EA may inspire backlash in part because it challenges conventional moral status hierarchies. There’s a certain kind of radical leftist for whom doing good outside of their preferred political framework is very threatening. (If we can address major global problems without a revolution, how are they going to recruit new acolytes?)
The overwhelming impression I got from this volume (especially the more “theoretical” contributions) is a sense of sourness that EAs aren’t blindly deferential to the social justice crowd, don’t share their priorities or perspective, and that if this competing ideology spreads it could do “grievous harm” to them and their movement. One author explicitly laments:
the over-valorization of billionaires and financiers in EA discourse, and a corresponding undervalorization of grass-roots activists and radicals. (p. 211)
(What if billionaires and financiers could actually do more good than grass-roots activists and radicals? This thought is verboten.)
Gruen similarly laments that EA priorities tend to “marginalize some of the most committed activists and their work.” (p. 261) This is taken to be self-evidently unjust.
Of course, for all I’ve said here it might be that social justice activists really are the best and most effective people in the world, in which case all their criticisms might be spot-on. But this book offers no independent reason to believe this. It’s just one big exercise in question-begging. Again, these complaints are exactly what we’d expect to find even if EAs were right about everything. So I don’t see how this volume advances the dialectic at all.
For what it’s worth, I find the worldview on offer in these pages incomprehensibly alien. It’s one on which answers to economic questions are best found by consulting “eco-feminists” rather than economists. That just doesn’t seem remotely plausible to me, and no reasons were offered in this volume to change my mind.
Generally speaking, I think economic growth and technological progress are good. (Crazy, I know!) As Kelsey Piper writes in The Costs of Caution:
Medical research could cure diseases. Economic progress could make food, shelter, medicine, entertainment and luxury goods accessible to people who can’t afford it today. Progress in meat alternatives could allow us to shut down factory farms.
Hastening such progress, while prudently guarding against existential (and other severe) risks, is—in my view—plausibly the best thing we can do for the future of humanity.
By contrast, an eco-doomer contributor to the volume confidently predicts that:
Effective Altruists will no doubt continue to see hopeful signs of incremental, quantitative progress in specific areas of policy—e.g., in extreme poverty or malaria reduction—right up to the moment when the entire system collapses, leaving billions to starve to death and all animal life obliterated. (pp. 218-19, emphasis added)
“No doubt!”
Thanks for this review, Richard.
In the section titled, "The Bad," you cite a passage from my essay--"Diversifying Effective Altruism's Longshots in Animal Advocacy"--and then go on to say the following:
"Another author tells us (p. 81):
(Of course, no argument is offered in support of this short-sighted thinking. It’s just supposed to be obvious to all right-thinking individuals. This sort of vacuous moralizing, in the total absence of any sort of grappling with—or even recognition of—opposing arguments, is found throughout the volume.)"
It sounds from your framing like you take it that I assert the claim in question, believe that the alleged claim is obvious, and hold this belief "in the total absence of any sort of grappling with--or even recognition of--opposing arguments."
With respect, I don't think your reading is fair on any of these fronts.
First, I don't assert the claim in question. The passage you (partially) cite actually reads "One might object that it is morally ill-advised to invest...", and what I'm trying to do in this context is to get behind why someone skeptical of certain EA cause-prioritizations might be worried that it is morally ill-advised given other considerations that you don't mention in your review. (I recognize that one has limited space in a review and can't get to everything.)
Second, I don't believe that the claim you misattribute to me is "obvious to all right-thinking individuals." Here are two bits of support for my explicit recognition (in the chapter) of my belief that right-thinking people might disagree:
(i) On pages 79-80, the pages immediately before the passage you cite, I consider the hope to "mitigate important but often neglected 'longtermist' concerns about suffering-risk", providing footnotes to an FAQ on s-risk, citations to work by MacAskill, Bostrom, and Ord, and gratitude to Dominic Roser for "helping me to see the complexity of this problem through the lens of intergenerational justice." I go on to say, "Though it is tempting, given the pressing concern of inequitable cause prioritization, to weigh the opportunity costs of funding such tech long shots only in terms of the interests of presently disadvantaged communities, there are also the interests of future disadvantaged communities to consider", citing Roser and Seidel 2017.
(ii) On page 80, about four lines of text before the passage that you cite as an instance of "vacuous moralizing", I say this: "A reasonable person could be forgiven, it seems, for judging the opportunity costs associated with possibly foiling a misaligned AI in fifty years to be too high, and for suspecting that these millions of dollars could be better invested elsewhere. (I should add that the same reasonable person might simultaneously conclude that it is nonetheless wise to devote some resources to mitigating s-risk; my intent here is not to try to minimize these serious risks, but to emphasize that significant investment in their potential mitigation, however important, is nonetheless a long shot with present opportunity costs worth keeping in mind.")
Third, the above two bits also seem to me to sit ill with the framing of my essay as "lacking any sort of grappling with--or even recognition of--opposing arguments." I may still be engaged in "vacuous moralizing" by your lights, and perhaps I've fallen short of your standard for "any sort of grappling". But I hope I've at least succeeded in recognizing the existence of opposing arguments (maybe I cited the wrong people or too few of them?).
On the bright side, those in this thread who are skeptical of steel-manning as a strategy for engaging critics will have no quarrel with you. :)
Thanks again for reading the piece and I'm sorry that it was a dispiriting experience!
Hi Matthew, thanks for clarifying that! I owe you an apology. The quoted passage jumped out at me as illustrating a trend that I was finding irksome about the volume as a whole, but I wasn't careful enough to double-check that my editorializing was a fair representation of your article in particular. I'll update my post with a correction.
Quick follow-up that I hope isn't too pedantic (but maybe is, despite my hope?). I just had a chance to check the correction itself on my computer (my phone wouldn't take me to the link for some odd reason) and noticed that, while the unwarranted criticism has been retracted, the misattribution itself has not. The set-up for the quotation still seems to read, "Another author tells us (p. 81), 'it is morally ill-advised to invest tens of millions...', which isn't technically true. I don't "tell" readers that "it is morally ill-advised..." by observing that "One might object that it is morally ill-advised..." any more than I would have told them "Keith kills it at Scrabble" had I written "One might wonder whether Keith kills it at Scrabble." Maybe that seems like a small quibble, but if my work is going to be used as Exhibit B in a section of a book review titled "The Bad," I want to be guilty of the alleged wrongdoing, ya know? :)
Thanks Matthew for engaging, particularly given that this post may not have been written in the most friendly way!
I feel confused about what your chapter is asserting then? Your chapter starts off with your two reservations about EA:[1]
These reservations seem pretty clearly consistent with the fragments that Richard excerpted. And in both cases, you go on to give additional argumentation about why these excerpted objections are correct.
For example with the "morally ill-advised" one you go on to say: "To make this worry more concrete in the context of the animal-focused applications of EA discussion in this book, consider the disproportionate toll that the ascendance of industrial animal agriculture has taken on communities of color in the United States, and on Black communities in particular." You then elaborate on these inequalities for several paragraphs, without using the "one might…" voice.
The excerpted fragments are also consistent with what I took the point of your chapter to be (EA should diversify away from food tech into outreach to black vegans, higher ed, and religious people). But maybe I am completely misunderstanding your point?
I am very sympathetic that readers will see meanings that writers didn't intend, but for what it's worth: yes, if you wrote "One might wonder whether Keith kills it at Scrabble", gave many pages of evidence supporting the claim that Keith kills it at Scrabble, and then concluded your chapter with a suggestion that we should send Keith to the Scrabble world championship, I would, in fact, think you are telling me that Keith kills it at Scrabble.
I'm paraphrasing lightly, hopefully this is still accurate
[TL; DR: I'm a little confused too, and this essay was an attempt (maybe a failed one?) to try to work out a "both/and" that would synthesize my fledgling sense that EA has something important to offer in spite of methodological idiosyncrasies, hermeneutic blindspots, and demographic challenges that seem seriously to limit its appeal and reach; and that grassroots advocacy work in various culturally influential communities that seem positioned to do great good (but are often lacking the resources to scale it and viewed with skepticism by some EAs) could benefit from EA-channeled resource-infusions.]
Hi Ben! That you have carried on with the "Keith kills it at Scrabble" thing gives me joy. An occupational hazard of doing philosophy is time sacrificed to fashioning examples calculated to seem like the effortless progeny of a rapier wit when in fact one struggles mightily and usually fails. I confess to lingering over Keith for a minute before I cut him loose, and to witness him flourishing in this comment thread even unto the Scrabble world championships...I am moist-eyed!
Before I go any further, let me confess in humility that I am a relative newcomer to thinking about EA and not very well versed in the lingua franca, so I hope that at least some of what I say is intelligible even if the words "priors", "counterfactual", and "expected value" are nowhere to be found! :)
Truthfully, I'm a little confused myself as to exactly what I'm trying to do in this essay (which is why there's all that hedging language throughout: one might this, one could that, "worries" and "reservations" rather than "objections" and "refutations," etc.). I think it's one of those "both/and" sorts of projects where I'm hoping--maybe too optimistically? maybe in vain?--that if EA diversifies the ol' methodological and cause-prioritization portfolios a bit, the whole movement and the world, too, will get more of what it wants and needs? Something like that? (By "movement" here, I've got animal advocacy in mind (the main focus of the volume), but given that my activist's imagination has been greatly shaped by the work of Carol Adams, Aph and Syl Ko, Christopher Carter and others, it's a holistic pro-flourishing/anti-oppression movement more than just a one-issue focus on animal advocacy).
Here's how I frame this "both/and" gesture in the first few pages:
"In what follows, I'll explain each of these reservations and then suggest some exciting new initiatives--institution-building in Black vegan advocacy, higher education, and religious communities--that could mitigate these reservations, energize and diversify the movement, and remain true to the EA method of supporting underexploited but potentially high-impact causes that produce non fungible goods otherwise unlikely to be funded." (77)
If this conversation is to continue, it might help for me to fess up to a couple of idiosyncrasies in my background that really complicate my outlook on these matters and have prompted me to search for a "both/and" in a situation where some seem to think we must choose between EA and grassroots approaches.
My methodological worries about EA are largely rooted in my training as a hermeneutic phenomenologist. Though I studied analytic philosophy in both undergrad and graduate school, I ended up doing some coursework in both places that raised serious concerns about Enlightenment approaches to method in the humanities and social sciences, especially in cases where science-envy in these fields generates overconfident appeals to objectivity and fixation on measurement as ways to try to corral the unpredictable vicissitudes of human history (or, worse, to dominate and exploit others (e.g., colonization (society/reason vs. nature/savagery), eugenics, etc.). Hans-Georg Gadamer's Truth and Method convinced me that there are many pre-reflective and ultimately immeasurable forces at play in the interpretive contexts that are always already shaping our understanding of things, and that--as a result--staying in touch with reality requires ongoing dialogue with others whose different hermeneutic situations and life experiences offer us a clearer vantage point than even the most rigorous self- or communal reflection could leverage on the hidden blindspots and unwitting exclusions of our own limited perspectives. After reading thinkers in the hermeneutic phenomenological tradition (like Beauvoir and Fanon) who extended these insights into their implications for matters of gender, race, and systemic/institutional injustice, I became a lot more sensitive than I had been before to the risks associated with methodologically and demographically homogenous communities (not just the risks of exclusion and oppression, but the risks of falsely presumed supremacy, impoverished thinking, and cultural stagnation and decline into which homogenous cultures can unwittingly descend--maybe some of the recent events around SBF could be viewed as cautionary tales in this register?).
One might think, given all of this, that I'd be an anti-capitalist. But it turns out my Dad is an economics professor who devoted his career to arguing that capitalism, while woefully imperfect, is the best approach we've found so far to meeting human needs and curbing human suffering in a world of scarcity (he did a lot of advisory work in the former Soviet Union and had a front row seat to some of the other approaches on offer in contrast to which capitalism, warts and all, looked much better to him). Dad was always beating the drum that the problem isn't capitalism per se, but the fact that--as a citizenry--we've failed to develop and evolve the moral sentiments and fellow feeling that would enable us to demand the proper things and create markets that deliver on those demands. He always said that the invisible hand would do a very bad job without a very good citizenry to set the parameters of its field of play, citing Adam Smith's claims that one could not understand The Wealth of Nations or pull off the project described therein without enacting the world of The Theory of Moral Sentiments first as the foundation.
So, despite having read a bunch of stuff (and having a bunch of corroborating experiences of those insights in the philosophical, religious, and advocacy communities of which I am a part) that inclines me to think we're all doomed if we don't become significantly more methodologically and demographically diverse in our approaches to social problem solving, I've also been heavily shaped by the beliefs that capitalism is the best we human beings have done so far in terms of providing systemic solutions to scarcity and that capitalism might be able to do much, much better if our methodological and demographic diversification efforts expand our consciousness and our problem solving skills so that we can demand better things from new and better markets. These experiences are obviously in some tension with one another, and I guess the cageyness of my paper is rooted in that tension. That tension also explains why I'm excited about organizations like Afro-Vegan Society, CreatureKind, and GFI, even though they're doing very different sorts of things.
Gosh. That was way, way too long and rambling. Better add a TL;DR before I sign off. Thanks again, Ben, for getting me to think harder about what's going on here! I hope it's a little clearer what I was trying to carry off.
Understandable! I've cut the passage entirely, since as you say it isn't really fair to exhibit your work in that section of the review.
Thanks, Richard! I appreciate your posting a correction.
Just wanted to say that I appreciate you taking the time to respond so politely to quite a critical review.
Thanks for this expression of gratitude, Chris! For better or worse, with an average philosophy paper getting a readership of like 8-12 people (including sympathy reads from family members?), I tend to view even the most scathing criticism in the frame of “SOMEBODY READ IT! Victory is mine!” 🤣👍🏻
I think it is great that you, one of the authors of The Good it Promises, the Harm it Does, have taken the time to engage in constructive discussion with effective altruists.
Here are a few thoughts I had after reading your essay. The advantage of focusing on students in higher education might be that they are more likely to sympathize with veganism and thus more likely to actually become vegan than people from other groups are. On the other hand, the impact of additional resources in this area might be lower because students are probably more likely to already be aware of the arguments in favor of veganism, and might already have more knowledge about healthy, tasty plant-based food, and thus a lot of students might have become vegan anyway, even without reaching out to them. Conversely, getting people from religious and/or Black communities to go vegan might be more challenging, but the impact might be very high because, as you rightly point out in your essay, financial support for animal advocacy outreach to religious and/or Black communities is neglected.
Overall I think your essay raises great questions and I really hope that effective altruists will engage with them.
Hi again, Maxim! Thanks for your patience.
Your point is well taken about the risk that additional resources in higher education settings might be redundant given that college students are perhaps more likely than the general population already to be "aware of the arguments in favor of veganism." I think that this would be a serious concern if "awareness of the arguments in favor of veganism" alone were sufficient to support behavioral change over the long-term.
In my experience, however--and I think the most recent social scientific evidence supports this observation, too--"awareness of the arguments" is generally not enough for many even to motivate serious experimentation toward behavioral change much less to support it over time. For many people, indeed, exposure to the arguments can have a counterproductive effect, in that data and argumentative support for positions they find threatening trigger identity-protective cognition that leads to a doubling-down on the attitudes and actions perceived as under threat (Ezra Klein's Why We're Polarized has some really helpful, accessible discussions of this phenomenon and its effects on people's ability to process data and arguments).
How do we mitigate the serious threat to cultural change posed by identity-protective cognition? I'm intrigued by the strategy of implementing slow-releasing changes in the epistemic atmosphere that collectively serve to defang and normalize the data and supporting arguments so that they can be received without triggering identity-protective cognition. In other words, by creating environments that help people both pre-reflectively and communally to take the data and supporting arguments in stride and maybe even find them intriguing or inspiring, we can circumvent the threat-detection response that closes many people off to attitudinal and behavioral change.
By pre-reflective environmental conditioning, I have in mind giving people lots of opportunities pre-reflectively to intuit that something is non-threatening, credible, and maybe even cool without having to engage in an argumentative way that threatens one's identity. By communal environmental conditioning, I have in mind giving people lots of opportunities to get social and cultural support from similarly interested people and organizations in the event that their interest is piqued.
I'm hard-pressed to think of a better place to cultivate both pre-reflective and communal environmental conditioning than the hallowed halls of institutions of higher learning. Anyone who is paying attention to the higher ed culture wars in American institutions likely already understands the ripeness of this environment for shaping people's values and behaviors over the long term. Students come in chomping at the bit to get out from under their parents' influence and values, so they're highly open to suggestion. For 4+ years, they are surrounded on all sides by opportunities to expand their consciousness and expertise--not just explicitly by going to classes and talks and lectures, but pre-reflectively by breathing in an atmosphere that normalizes all kinds of differences that may have seemed anything but normal in one's previous day-to-day life. There are charismatic professors, compelling student leaders, amazing vocational training and networking opportunities. Unsurprisingly, the well-funded programs that institutions innovate, support, and proudly advertise are the ones that often generate the most interest, excitement, and participation.
So imagine what could happen if we got serious about accelerating and scaling the vegan-friendly cultures that are already seeded in higher education. Generally speaking, the faculty presence and student clubs and extracurricular opportunities in many places are already there on the ground, but are both decentralized and underfunded. In a lot of cases, scaling these cultures (or at least nudging them in the direction of scalability) could be as easy as giving a substantial lead gift for an institute or center--let the university decide how to mission-fit and brand it for galvanizing its alumni and current students (sustainability? creation care? human/animal studies? food systems? green economy?). The director(s) of the center and key faculty and administrators, then, audit everything that is going on around and tangent to these issues, build a central institutional hub to connect and empower the different intermeshed programs and opportunities, and then help faculty to build out curricular programs (majors, minors, certificate programs, themed dorms and cohorts, honors programs, etc.) and student life to build out supporting extra-curricular and cultural programs, using funding opportunities and internal grant-making programs to nudge everyone who's got anything going that is tangent to food-systems stuff (which is almost everyone, in the end) to ramp up the facets of their work that feed into creating ferment around changing our food system. Over time, there will be lots of vegan-friendly people, classes, clubs, receptions, student groups, educational and extracurricular programs, even restaurants and businesses in the town that support the ever-growing populations of students who come to do this work. People who come to the university thinking that going vegan is silly or threatening will see how exciting and transformative it is, both individually and culturally and will be much more receptive to the arguments (if indeed they even need to hear them at all; once the atmosphere is where it needs to be, the arguments themselves become redundant, which is probably better anyway given how post-hoc the average human being's relationship to "the arguments" is anyway).
If it seems far-fetched that such a thing could happen, consider how quickly (in the grand scheme of things, at least) universities have shifted the national and international narratives around many other cultural and political topics and movements. And of course, the history of the agriculture industry's involvement in the shape of higher education gives us a compelling case study that the university has already been used in precisely this way to shape and change the cultural and political landscape that has allowed the current food system to deflect criticism and put off urgently needed change.
Two exciting non-profits that are pioneering this sort of holistic approach to engaging the whole human being and providing support that goes beyond just "exposure to the arguments" toward life- and institution-building are Afro-Vegan Society ( https://www.afrovegansociety.org/copy-of-about-avs ) and CreatureKind*( https://www.becreaturekind.org) . These orgs primary constituencies are Black and Christian audiences, respectively, but their holistic approaches to creating atmospheric shifts in the culture and building positive supporting institutions (rather than just handing out pamphlets with all the bad news) are valuable models that could be replicated in lots of different contexts. Also, the Good Food Institute** is engaging higher ed directly with its "Research Centers of Excellence" program: https://gfi.org/solutions/building-interdisciplinary-university-research-centers-of-excellence/.
*I am on the board of directors for CreatureKind.
**I have a family member who works at The Good Food Institute.
Thank you, Matthew, for writing this fantastic comment. The arguments from your essay seem a lot stronger to me now that I take your comment into consideration. It is true that higher education can be a great force for positive social change. As far as I know, many of those involved in emancipatory social movements were educated at university, and this can be no coincidence. And I wholeheartedly agree that getting people to go vegan is not a matter of telling them the arguments in favor of veganism, even if they are not aware of these arguments yet. We may indeed be far more successful if we can first get people to experience how vegan food can be just as delicious and healthy (if not more) than non-vegan food, and then get them to go vegan themselves. This is, in any case, how it worked for me: I was already a vegetarian, so I knew that you could eat great food without eating meat, and after recently discovering tofu, vegan mayonaise, coconut-based dairy yoghurt replacement and vegan chocolate desserts (all of which I had almost never eaten before), it became clear to me that I could eat great food without dairy and eggs too, and so I became a vegan too. Of course, I had already been (vaguely) aware of the arguments in favor of veganism for quite some time, but back then, I just couldn't picture myself enjoying vegan food. Indeed, we need to get people to experience how great vegan food is, and the proposals you discuss in your comment can definitely contribute to that.
Thanks so much for this positive feedback, Maxim, and for the reflections on potential impact! I really appreciate your taking the time to share them!
I have some additional thoughts, but no time at the moment to share them! So, gratitude for now and a promise to circle back when time permits! :)