Thanks for the post! I was surprised to see how weak the academically-published evidence is regarding shrimp stunning effectiveness, and agree that it would be valuable on current margins for effective animal advocates to invest more in research. 

For what it's worth, I read the Tesco-Hilton case study more optimistically than you do. You quote it as:

The results are a bit vaguely presented, but with at least one machine setting “a significant proportion” of shrimp did not “show signs of recovery” within 10 minutes.

But the full quote is

A significant proportion of prawns were in irrecoverable stun (stun-kill) on exit of the stunner as evidenced by transfer back to a controlled aqueous environment where none showed signs of recovery within the monitoring period (10 minutes plus handling time of 32 seconds)

(emphasis mine). That's not to say that we should rely on a single vague industry report when the academic evidence is conflicting, but I think the report does provide some evidence. 

Thanks for engaging with the post! You made a lot of different points, so I'll do my best to separate them out and consider them one-by-one: 

(1)

• I'm not making an argument for quietism. Saying that we have an obligation to follow the law is compatible with having obligations (even extraordinarily strong ones) to use non-illegal means to combat injustice (e.g. by advocating for changes to laws).
• It's a genuinely interesting point that many of our laws are inherited traditions, rather than the direct product of the democratic process. However, I don't think that's a strong argument in this specific case. The US has had true universal suffrage for more than 60 years, and in that time Congress and state legislative bodies have passed many laws related to the treatment of animals and the criminality of trespassing. Under any reasonable interpretation of democratic legitimacy, a democratically-elected legislative body specifically dealing with an issue and choosing to pass laws that accept the underlying common law principles and add specific penalties, related rules etc., should confer it.
• I don't disagree that a reasonable contractualist would think that there are cases where it would be justified to break an unjust law. The core question is whether the required conditions hold in this case. Democratic legitimacy is one important part of that, since reasonable contractualists generally would give some weight to whether laws resulted from a just process. A point I didn't make in the OP, but I think is relevant here, is that even if you disagree about the democratic legitimacy argument, I think the specific nature of the lawbreaking here falls outside many notions of justifiable civil disobedience. That's because the Ridglan rescues involved breaking a law to achieve a non-symbolic end (rescuing the dogs), not merely symbolically challenging a law by breaking it.

(2)

• I think you're moving between a couple different notions of universalizability here. It's true literally everyone breaking and entering in service of moral aims is a far-fetched idea. But it's still coherent to ask whether a tactic would have positive or negative effects if commonly used across social movements. Democratic societies can and have experienced periods of widespread civil unrest.
• I agree that a similar argument could have been deployed against rebellion by enslaved people, but I think the analogy is weak because of the specifics. Slave rebellions occurred in a society where the affected population was excluded from political participation, and the principles justifying them were self-limiting in the way I described in the OP. The current case is different: the affected parties (animals) can't be enfranchised, but the human population that cares about animal welfare has full political participation, and the legal channels for advancing animal welfare are open and have produced incremental gains over recent decades (most notably the transition of nearly half of the US egg supply to cage free). The bar for lawbreaking is plausibly higher when those channels are more responsive than when they're closed.

(3) 

• I think you're being too quick to dismiss property as being something that can drive moral obligation. There are clearly many cases where we are obligated to not destroy or interfere with others' property, as is obvious in cases where vulnerable groups' property rights are infringed. The way I'd think about this is that obligations to protect property are stronger the more just a society's system of property rights is. In a more just society, property destruction not only weakens otherwise-good norms, but is also more likely to be the result of a miscalculation: if the base rate of unjust property ownership is lower, then any given case of someone believing property destruction is justified is more likely to be wrong. So both the rule-following considerations and the act-utility considerations point toward higher property protection in more just societies.

(4)

• I disagree that the priority should be supporting one another within a social movement; the priority should be trying to do the most good. Donor considerations reasonably impact that calculation, both because money is a necessary ingredient for advocacy and because donor preferences may reflect genuine moral views that are worth considering. But I do also agree that it can be worth trying to convince donors of an approach rather than just deferring to their preexisting preferences.

I see what you're getting at here. But if we agree that the externalities of crime aren't internalized, then I think we're just back in the position of the original post. You think the act utilitarian calculus checks you, I'm both skeptical that it does and think that there are non-act-utilitarian reasons why we ought to avoid lawbreaking. 

On (1): You say: 

Many people believe moral-ish things strongly and don't find property destruction immoral, but far far fewer actually destroy the property of those they think are doing something immoral. This seems like good evidence that the expected punishment (including via informal mechanisms) is not too light.

I think that this is at best weak evidence. Activists' decisions of whether or not to commit crimes are surely influenced by norms, not just the expected intensity of punishment. The recent history of climate activism in the UK is a good example. As far as I can tell, nothing changed about UK law to cause the rapid rise of high-profile lawbreaking by Extinction Rebellion and then Just Stop Oil in the 2018-2023 timeframe. The UK government did in the end stop the activists through increased legal penalties (going from typically no prison time for nonviolent lawbreaking when motivated by ethical concerns to 4+ year prison sentences becoming common for the more serious cases). But something other than threat of prison time was keeping climate activists from using these tactics in the early-to-mid 2010s. 

On (2): 

I agree that a Pigouvian tax doesn't require restitution (as I indicated with including "improve welfare elsewhere" as something that can be done with the tax revenue). But the classical formulation (in which the optimal tax rate fully eliminates deadweight losses) does require that a dollar of consumer/producer surplus and a dollar of tax revenue produce the same social welfare. If a dollar of tax revenue produces less social welfare, then the deadweight loss cannot be eliminated. 

To make this more concrete, I want to dig into an example based on your comment about driving in a world with a carbon tax. Consider taking a long trip by car rather than train under 3 different taxation schemes. Let's assume you value the convenience of the car over the train at $101, the social cost of your carbon emissions is $100, and that all consumers in this world have identical marginal utilities of money.

World A: No carbon tax. You take the trip, gaining benefits you value at +$101 while causing social costs of -$100. In this world, we might say that you've done the right thing by driving (since this maximizes utility overall), but that for fairness reasons you might be obligated to donate some money to others, since your utility-maximizing decision also acted as a transfer from others to you. 

World B: Carbon tax of $100 on the trip, returned as an equal dividend to all people. You take the trip, gaining net benefits after the tax of $1. The rest of society ends up net neutral (though there might still be particular winners and losers). In this world, you've done the right thing by driving, and have no further obligations. 

World C: Carbon tax of $100 on the trip, which the government will use to buy $100 of consumer goods and dump them down an old mineshaft. You take the trip, gaining net benefits after the tax of $1. The rest of society still experiences the social costs of -$100, which the tax doesn't do anything to reduce. In this world, you've clearly done the wrong thing by driving, since you caused a net utility loss of $99.

My claim is that doing crimes is similar to deciding to drive in World C. The "tax" on crime is imprisoning the criminal, which causes them to pay large costs in terms of their lost freedom and ability to work and doesn't do anything to benefit society. And in fact it's worse than World C, since the rest of society needs to pay the additional costs of arresting, prosecuting, and jailing them. So I think the Pigouvian tax analogy does not hold here, and it's wrong to think that the harms of crime are properly internalized.

Two thoughts:

1. I think we disagree about whether the harms of lawbreaking are mostly internalized. The degradation of social trust in the deliberative process seems bigger to me than the consequences to the individual? As an analogy, shoplifting is an ordinary crime where individuals do face real consequences, but the diffuse harms to consumers and businesses (goods locked up, stores closing) are large and dominate the social calculus.
2. The Pigouvian tax comparison doesn't quite work here because paying a tax contributes to public resources that can directly address the harms of the act or improve welfare elsewhere, making the net outcome neutral. Going to jail doesn't repair damaged property or restore trust in the democratic process.

Taking each of these points in turn: 

On your first question, I think your framing isn't addressing what happens if other people think the same way. The equilibrium where everyone with strong moral convictions feels licensed to break laws doesn't seem to me like it's better for vulnerable groups, just more chaotic. I think that to some extent you're proposing smashing the "defect" button in a prisoner's dilemma and hoping the other side doesn't do the same. 

On your second, I agree that it's not a clear line between flawed democracy and dictatorship, but in the US today this isn't really relevant. 

On your third, I think the Willowbrook example is worth thinking about more carefully. As I understand the history, the binding constraint at Willowbrook wasn't legal. Many parents and guardians retained custody and could have legally removed their children. The constraint was that families without resources didn't have a better option. And in the end, legal activism was able to marshal those resources, albeit much more slowly than I would have wished. 

I agree that there's a sense in which the constraints I'm talking about focus on less fundamental rights. But I think the more important sense is that they focus on preserving a viable process for living together in a society with people of greatly differing moral views. That doesn't mean we have to leave behind other vulnerable groups, just that we have to try and bring about change for them through democratic means. 

Regarding the Mengele example, I think it's disanalogous because it took place in a dictatorship, where the rule utilitarian and contractualist constraints on action look very different.^[1] I'm really probing at what constraints EAs should have when acting in the context of a democracy (including a flawed one), not what behavior would be correct in Nazi Germany. 

1. ^{^}

   Note that the act utilitarian calculus also changes in a dictatorship too. Following the law in a dictatorship is unlikely to be a successful decision procedure for maximizing utility under epistemic uncertainty. 

I have been disappointed by the support some EAs have expressed for recent activist actions at Ridglan Farms. I share others’ outrage at the outcome of the state animal cruelty investigation, which found serious animal cruelty law violations but led to a settlement that still permits Ridglan to sell beagles through July and to continue in-house experimentation. But I personally think the tactics used in the recent open rescues, including property damage and forced entry to remove animals, violate reasonable moral bounds on what actions are permissible in response to the belief that a serious harm is occurring. My views here stem from contractualist views of democratic legitimacy and from concerns about the non-universalizability of principles that justify lawbreaking, though I think a purely act utilitarian calculus also supports them.

Regarding universalizability, in a society where many people believe that different forms of irreparable harm are occurring (e.g. viewing abortion as murder, climate change as destroying the sacredness of the natural world, immigration as ending western civilization), I worry that moral principles that allow for significant lawbreaking when one believes that irreparable harm is occurring could easily lead to great damage if broadly followed (consider for example what it would be like to live in a country where hundreds of activists were regularly smashing their way into abortion clinics, energy companies, and refugee assistance nonprofits with sledgehammers and crowbars). Regarding the legitimacy of the law, I think reasonable contractualist views can give us obligations to follow the law when the processes by which the law is determined are legitimate, and that democracies with universal suffrage qualify as such (even granting that certain groups such as animals and future generations are impossible to enfranchise).^[1] Therefore, I think that if we are trying to make decisions under moral uncertainty and give meaningful credences to rule utilitarian and contractualist views, we ought to reject the kinds of lawbreaking done by the Ridglan activists.

Moreover, I think that even if one rejects this kind of moral uncertainty-based reasoning and is a pure act utilitarian, rejecting lawbreaking in the western democratic context is still a relatively robust decision procedure under epistemic uncertainty. Broadly-followed norms against lawbreaking would have prevented EA’s worst scandal (FTX) without preventing EA’s most significant successes (cage-free reforms, evidence-based health interventions in LMICs). And while there are historical examples of illegal civil disobedience clearly producing good outcomes, I don’t think these generalize well to the type of lawbreaking under consideration here. The clearest such historical cases are ones where a disenfranchised group of people broke laws that directly enforced their own exclusion from political participation or basic legal personhood. These cases are self-limiting (and thus pass reasonable tests of universalizability) since the principles justifying such lawbreaking achieve their own obsolescence once participation is granted.^[2] It's much harder to find historical cases of property-damaging civil disobedience occurring in a democracy with universal suffrage that, in hindsight, appear clearly both effective and in service of a good cause. DxE’s own history is instructive here—their work over the last decade has led to many criminal convictions among its members, as well as several organizational scandals. But their record of concrete wins for animals is at best small-scale and mixed, especially compared to the successes of groups that have purely used lawful tactics like ballot initiatives and corporate campaigns.

One last point in the utilitarian calculus, this time on the more object-level cost-benefit calculation, is that I think EAs who embrace these kinds of illegal tactics may be underestimating the downside risks of endorsing criminal activity. I think there is a set of donors and volunteers that are happy to contribute to legal activism but who would be concerned about being associated with lawbreaking (at a minimum, I would consider myself to be in this group). If people in leadership roles within the EA/EAA ecosystem endorse illegal action, any foreseen benefits may easily be swamped by the harms of driving away risk-averse donors.

None of this is to say that Ridglan’s treatment of animals is justified, or that the lack of state enforcement against Ridglan for their serious violations of animal cruelty laws is acceptable. However, these harms don’t justify using tactics that are neither clearly effective nor robustly permissible across moral views. 

1. ^{^}

    I don’t mean to say that literally all lawbreaking is unjustified in a democracy. In particular, if one thinks that a law in the US is unconstitutional, breaking it may be required to gain standing for a legal challenge. But this implies a narrow exception for doing the minimum amount of lawbreaking required to obtain standing; it doesn’t imply that the tactics in question at Ridglan are permissible. 

2. ^{^}

   Note that this self-limiting principle only holds when applied to groups of humans denied suffrage. It doesn't extend to cases like animals, where suffrage isn't possible and there's no natural bound on how many such groups might be invoked to justify lawbreaking.

You mentioned that public awareness of broiler welfare, especially the impacts of fast-growing breeds, is very limited, and that raising salience is now a priority. I'd be curious to hear more about what you've tried so far and what's in the pipeline.

I recently heard Toby Schiønning from Anima International credit catchy naming ("turbochickens")  as important to their campaign success in Denmark and Norway. THL UK has been using "Frankenchicken" for a while, so the naming lever has been pulled, but it doesn't seem to have achieved comparable cut-through with UK audiences. Do you have a sense of why, and does your strategy going forward involve testing other framings, or is the bet more that the existing framing just needs more media muscle behind it? If you have any other takeaways from the success of ECC campaigning in Norway, I'd also be super curious to hear those as well.

One note that I don't think anyone has brought up (though I might have missed something): I think each person reached would mostly get either the health benefits or the cost benefits, not both, since people currently buying pads are already using a sanitary option and people using rags/cloths aren't spending money on products.