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MichaelStJules

10872 karmaJoined

Sequences
3

Radical empathy
Human impacts on animals
Welfare and moral weights

Comments
2365

Topic contributions
12

Various animal groups target these dining services to switch to cage-free eggs and add more plant-based options. Some also push for meatless days.

Ya, I'm not totally sold on the Platinum Rule itself. I think I'm gesturing at one of the most important things to get right (to me), but I don’t mean it's specifically the Platinum rule. I'm trying to develop this further in some other pieces for this sequence.

That being said, I think adding preferences (or allowing new preferences to be added) is importantly different from other tradeoffs, as I discuss in "People aren’t always right about what’s best for themselves".

We can come up with an example with a similarly important moral loss, but without apparently complete identity change. I don't think giving up your most important preference completely changes who you are. You don't become a completely different person when you come to love someone, or stop loving them, even though this is a very important part of you. It still may be an important partial identity change, though, so kind of partial replacement.

Furthermore, we can change your most important preferences without changing all your dispositions. Not just your memories, we can keep your personality traits and intelligence, too, say.

Some other potentially useful references for this debate:

  1. Emily Oehlsen's/Open Phil's response to Open Phil Should Allocate Most Neartermist Funding to Animal Welfare, and the thread that follows, (EDIT) and other comments there.
  2. How good is The Humane League compared to the Against Malaria Foundation? by Stephen Clare and AidanGoth for Founders Pledge (using old cost-effectiveness estimates).
  3. Discussion of the two envelopes problem for moral weights (can get pretty technical):
    1. Tomasik, 2013-2018
    2. Karnofsky, 2018, section 1.1
    3. St. Jules, 2024 (that's me!)
  4. GiveWell's marginal cost-effectiveness estimates for their top charities, of course
  5. Some recent-ish (mostly) animal welfare intervention cost-effectiveness estimates:
    1. Track records of Charity Entrepreneurship-incubated charities (animal and global health)
    2. Charity Entrepreneurship prospective animal welfare reports and global health reports
    3. Charity Entrepreneurship Research Training Program (2023) prospective reports
      1.  on animal welfare with cost-effectiveness estimates: Intervention Report: Ballot initiatives to improve broiler welfare in the US by Aashish K and Exploring Corporate Campaigns Against Silk Retailers by Zuzana Sperlova and Moritz Stumpe
    4. Electric Shrimp Stunning: a Potential High-Impact Donation Opportunity by MHR
    5. Prospective cost-effectiveness of farmed fish stunning corporate commitments in Europe by Sagar K Shah for Rethink Priorities
    6. Estimates for some Healthier Hens interventions ideas (and a comment thread)[1]
    7. Emily Oehlsen's/Open Phil's response above
  6. Animal welfare cost-effectiveness estimates based on older intervention work:
    1. Corporate campaigns affect 9 to 120 years of chicken life per dollar spent by saulius for Rethink Priorities
    2. A Cost-Effectiveness Analysis of Historical Farmed Animal Welfare Ballot Initiatives by Laura Duffy for Rethink Priorities
  7. Megaprojects for animals by JamesÖz and Neil_Dullaghan🔹
  8. Meat-eater problem and related posts
  9. Wild animal effects of human population and diet change:
    1. How Does Vegetarianism Impact Wild-Animal Suffering? by Brian Tomasik and his related posts
    2. Does the Against Malaria Foundation Reduce Invertebrate Suffering? by Brian Tomasik
    3. Finding bugs in GiveWell's top charities by Vasco Grilo🔸
    4. My recent posts on fishing: Sustainable fishing policy increases fishing, and demand reductions might, too and The moral ambiguity of fishing on wild aquatic animal populations.
  1. ^

    Healthier Hens is shutting down or has already shut down, according to the Charity Entrepreneurship Newsletter. Their website is also down.

Looks like a great opportunity! :)

Is there a deadline for this fundraising?

Will there be any updates on how much room is left as you receive donations?

Or, if we go past, how will the additional money be used? According to your priorities?

I try to brush them off gently or blow or push them away, but often kill them reflexively. I guess I sometimes feel mildly disappointed when I kill them.

It might be good for mosquitoes for them to be killed and have their populations reduced (if their lives are net negative overall or on suffering-focused views), but that doesn't mean the death itself or any potential pain we cause isn't regrettable. That individual mosquito had her own interests (assuming she was a moral patient at all). But those interests could be outweighed by others.

Should EAs feel bad? I don't know. I think the main effects of EAs feeling bad will be indirect, through our work and donations, not through the effects on mosquitoes. Maybe getting us to care about mosquitoes will make us more inclined to care about invertebrate welfare more generally, which Open Phil has decided to stop supporting with grants.

Also actually giving the fish food could reduce the unpleasantness+give them pleasure when caught.

But there's probably still some risk of longer term injury and pain. And it might condition them to be less risk-averse, and make them more prone to being caught by less humane fishers.

Or, you could add in large print that they would get more to their Favorite Charity if they just donated the same amount to it directly, not through FarmKind. That should totally dispel any misconception otherwise, if they actually read, understand and believe it.

(b) Causes: The regular donor gets to pick any Favorite Charity, from any cause, and their donation will cause money from the Bonus Fund to go to it. Unless by some miracle, the Bonus Fund supporters would otherwise have collectively donated to the same causes as the regular donors in the same proportions, then regular donations do have direct counterfactual impact on how much money goes to different causes ✅ direct counterfactual impact on donations to different causes ✅ 

The money moved to their Favorite Charity isn't positive counterfactually if their Favorite Charity gets less than the donor would have otherwise donated to their Favorite Charity on their own without FarmKind. I expect, more often than not, it will mean less to their Favorite Charity, so the counterfactual is actually negative for their Favorite Charity.

My guess for the (more direct) counterfactual effects of FarmKind on where money goes is:

  1. Shift some money from Favorite Charities to EAA charities.
  2. Separately increase funding for EAA charities by incentivizing further (EAA) donation overall. (Shift more money from donors to EAA charities.)

It is possible FarmKind will incentivize enough further overall donation from donors to get even more to their Favorite Charities than otherwise, but that's not my best guess.

FWIW, I agree with point (c) Charities, and I think that's a way this is counterfactual that's positive from the perspective of donors: they get to decide to which EAA charities the bonus funding goes.

But something like DoubleUpDrive would be the clearest and simplest way to do this without potentially confusing or (unintentionally) misleading people about whether their Favourite Charity will get more than it would have otherwise. You'd cut everything about their Favorite Charities and donating to them, and just let them pick among a set of EAA charities to donate to and match those donations to whichever they choose.

I agree that anyone seeing how the system works could see that if they give $150 directly to their Favorite Charity, more will go to their Favorite Charity than if they gave that $150 through FarmKind and split it. But they might not realize it, because FarmKind also giving to their Favorite Charity confuses them.

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