New Article on "The Repugnant Conclusion of Effective Animal Altruism"

Hi Vera, kind of you to thank me in the acknowledgements and I appreciate your thinking on this problem. I'll flag for readers that I'm on the board of Animal Charity Evaluators, which is discussed in the article, but I'm not speaking for the organization.

As you know, I'm no professional philosopher, but I thought I'd share a few thoughts:

1. Your central argument feels structurally very close to the logic of the larder—the classic position that we do animals a favor by bringing them into existence for consumption, provided their lives have net positive welfare. Do you distinguish between your position and this logic of the larder?

2. The discussion of the Cumulative Pain Framework is valuable, but whether a cage-free hen's life clears the threshold of "net positive welfare" is generally a normative judgment, not an empirical finding. Even hedonic welfare theories still have to make a normative call on how to balance pleasures and pains. Similarly, calling the threshold "a very low bar" is itself a normative stance. I'm sympathetic to Tännsjö and others who argue the conclusion isn't actually repugnant once you think carefully about what "barely worth living" means: if a life is by definition net positive, it's worth having.

3. I'm not familiar with Frick (2022), but my sense is it still proposes an axiology? To the extent that it does, it still needs to face Arrhenius's impossibility results, so it's not clear to me this actually provides an escape from the RC, unless it gives up some other desiderata.

4. Negative utilitarianism is dismissed because the surest way to minimize suffering would be to eliminate all sentient life—you call this "not an option I can take seriously," which is fair. But Frick's Procreation Asymmetry holds that there is no moral reason to create a life just because it would be net positive. Taken strictly, wouldn't this imply a world with no sentient beings is not axiologically worse than a world full of flourishing ones, ~the conclusion you aimed to avoid? (I know Frick responds to this elsewhere, but I'm curious if that coincides with your view.)

5. I fear there's some conflation between the philosophical sense of welfarism ("what is good for someone or what makes a life worth living, is the only thing that has intrinsic value") and the sense in animal advocacy of "favoring tactics and strategies that lead to on-farm improvements in the welfare of animals." It seems possible to accept many of your arguments against philosophical welfarism, while still endorsing animal advocacy welfarism. In the same vein, I think the reccommendation of turning to reducetarianism/abolitionism similarly relies on empirical facts that aren't covered: what are these (cost-)effective reducetarian/abolitionist interventions?

Thanks for the opportunity to spend some time thinking about these issues.

I think your reductio is standing on the big if that animals in CAFOs have a net positive existence, and the abstract / post skips that.

Thank you for sharing your paper, Vera! I have been trying to discuss and understand a lot of adjacent themes around foundational philosophical assumptions, ad absurdum arguments, and moral intuitions vs. strict theory. Since you're asking how this will land with the audience here, I'd like to offer my personal account based on engaging with many EA(A)s. This is very much my subjective impression, not endorsed by any one person I discussed this with in particular. Also, I say a lot of "they" here - to be transparent, I endorse most, but not all, of these stances myself. 

1. My impression is that EAs are largely aware of the counterintuitive implications their theory of choice faces. This has broadly been my experience with consequentialist-leaning people: they rarely claim, or even want to claim, that their ethical theory is perfect or aligned with all intuitions. They just believe the counterintuitive implications of their theory are less counterintuitive than those of other theories, and/or find other theories either inconsistent or arbitrary.
2. Underlying this is a general desire to reason through ethics, and underlying that is a general skepticism toward moral intuition as a definitive argument. My impression is that EAs are very analytical in their approach to philosophy, and as a result, they often don't consider their own moral intuitions particularly trustworthy — to varying degrees; some might want to abandon them altogether, others simply don't weigh them heavily.

I think these two points are why many EAs would read the paper and think something like: "Yes, I know. This isn't surprising. And also, show me a theory that doesn't run into such issues."

1. However, most EAs don't fundamentally start from a purely philosophical stance on what is true in ethics and try to apply it to all their actions. They "first" want to do good and almost instrumentally try to figure out what that means. I think most EAs are "quasi-consequentialist": when pressed, or when wanting to defend their views in a theoretical discussion, they consider consequentialism the strongest perspective to take — perhaps because they find it least counterintuitive, or closest to explaining how they conceptualize ethics.
2. When put into practice, this stance becomes largely action-guiding. It acts as a first proxy for identifying what to do or which choice is better. But unlike in theoretical discussions, a reductio ad absurdum isn't just a "bullet to bite" where one can rest calmly on knowing that others have "bigger bullets to bite" — it's a practical blocker that is rarely broken through. I think that's why everyone is "leaning utilitarian" or "leaning consequentialist": the theory acts as a guide and pushes the limits of one's otherwise-unquestioned moral intuitions to some degree, but not far beyond what one would consider generally reasonable. This is also exemplified by how often I hear things like "I know that X is probably right, but I just don't feel comfortable doing that." Strict theory comes a close second, but almost no one completely abandons their moral intuitions in favour of it.
3. I think a neat resolution to all of this is the concept of moral uncertainty. I wouldn't confidently claim that the people I describe above are likely to explicitly endorse this framing, but I think it explains much of the friction between theory and intuition. Under moral uncertainty, one doesn't simply act on one's best-guess ethical theory; one hedges across plausible theories, weighted by credence. That naturally prevents the kind of single-theory extremes that generate repugnant/counterintuitive conclusions in practice, even while allowing consequentialism to carry significant weight. This sort of uncertainty, I think, is very much in line with typical EAs' general way of thinking.

I think that's why most EAs won't feel particularly "addressed" by this or similar arguments — and why they'll likely end up with something like: "Yeah, I know this could be an issue, but I wouldn't do this anyway." I also think this explains why many will first try to argue based on empirical assumptions (e.g., can CAFO's even be net-positive).

Hope this makes sense, curious to hear whether this has mirrored your experience discussing this piece :)

Effective altruists subscribe to a version of utilitarianism according to which actions are to be judged by their consequences.

While many EAs subscribe to utilitarianism, many others don't. Andreas Mogensen is just one example. The movement doesn't officially endorse utilitarianism either, as you can see in the objections here. 

I know it's standard in the literature to consider scenarios with a binary option, but I don't see why we should, even within maximizing utilitarianism. In any real-life situation, you always have more options. This is especially true if we consider different time horizions. 

In the situation you're focusing on, CAFOS might have higher aggregate welfare than whatever would replace them right now. But what about in 20 years? What about in 100? Suppose we don't just improve animal welfare slightly, but create the ideal future where animals are cared for. If total utilitarianism is correct, then what's to stop us from creating a world where there are even more animals alive than today, but most are living genuinely good lives? Perhaps that's thinking a bit far ahead, but I just see no reason to think that CAFOS are the best we can get and we shouldn't aim for something else, when applying maximizing utilitarianism.