Weighing Animal Worth

Hi Jeff. Thanks for engaging. Three quick notes. (Edit: I see that Peter has made the first already.)

First, and less importantly, our numbers don't represent the relative value of individuals, but instead the relative possible intensities of valenced states at a single time. If you want the whole animal's capacity for welfare, you have to adjust for lifespan. When you do that, you'll end up with lower numbers for animals---though, of course, not OOMs lower.

Second, I should say that, as people who work on animals go, I'm fairly sympathetic to views that most would regard as animal-unfriendly. I wrote a book criticizing arguments for veganism. I've got another forthcoming that defends hierarchicalism. I've argued for hybrid views in ethics, where different rules apply to humans and animals. Etc. Still, I think that conditional on hedonism it's hard to get MWs for animals that are super low. It's easier, though still not easy, on other views of welfare. But if you think that welfare is all that matters, you're probably going to get pretty animal-friendly numbers. You have to invoke other kinds of reasons to really change the calculus (partiality, rights, whatever).

Third, I've been trying to figure out what it would look like to generate MWs for animals that don't assume welfarism (i.e., the view that welfare is all that matters morally). But then you end up with all the familiar problems of moral uncertainty. I wish I knew how to navigate those, but I don't. However, I also think it's sufficiently important to be transparent about human/animal tradeoffs that I should keep trying. So, I'm going to keep mulling it over.

I want to add that personally before this RP "capacity for welfare" project I started with an intuition that a human year was worth about 100-1000 times more than a chicken year (mean ~300x) conditional on chickens being sentient. But after reading the RP "capacity for welfare" reports thoroughly I have now switched roughly to the RP moral weights valuing a human year at about 3x a chicken year conditional on chickens being sentient (which I think is highly likely but handled in a different calculation). This report conclusion did come at a large surprise to me.

Obviously me changing my views to match RP research is to be expected given that I am the co-CEO of RP. But I want to be clear that contra your suspicions it is not the case at least for me personally that I started out with insanely high moral value on chickens and then helped generate moral weights that maintained my insanely high moral value (though note that my involvement in the project was very minimal and I didn't do any of the actual research). I suspect this is also the case for other RP team members.

That being said, I agree that the tremendous uncertainty involved in these calculations is important to recognize, plus there likely will be some potentially large interpersonal variation based on having different philosophical assumptions (e.g., not hedonism) as well as different fundamental values (given moral anti-realism which I take to be true).

If you somehow could convince a research group, not selected for caring a lot about animals, to pursue this question in isolation, I'd predict they'd end up with far less animal-friendly results.

I think this is a possible outcome, but not guaranteed. Most people have been heavily socialized to not care about most animals, either through active disdain or more mundane cognitive dissonance. Being "forced" to really think about other animals and consider their moral weight may swing researchers who are baseline "animal neutral" or even "anti-animal" more than you'd think. Adjacent evidence might be the history of animal farmers or slaughterhouse workers becoming convinced animal killing is wrong through directly engaging in it.

I also want to note that most people would be less surprised if a heavy moral weight is assigned to the species humans are encouraged to form the closest relationships with (dogs, cats). Our baseline discounting of most species is often born from not having relationships with them, not intuitively understanding how they operate because we don't have those relationships, and/or objectifying them as products. If we lived in a society where beloved companion chickens and carps were the norm, the median moral weight intuition would likely be dramatically different.

What concerns me is that I suspect people rarely get deeply interested in the moral weight of animals unless they come in with an unusually high initial intuitive view.

This criticism seems unfair to me:

1. It seems applicable to any type of advocacy. Those who promote global health and poverty are likely biased toward foreign people. Those who promote longtermism are likely biased toward future people. Those who advocate for effective philanthropy are likely biased toward effectiveness and/or philanthropy.
2. There's no effective counter-argument since, almost by definition, any engagement is possibly biased. If one responds with, "I don't think I'm biased because I didn't have these views to begin with," the response can always be, "Well, you engaged in this topic and had a positive response, so surely, you must be biased somehow because most people don't engage at all." It seems then that only criticisms of the field are valid. 
3. This is reminiscent of an ad hominem attack. Instead of engaging in the merits of the argument, the critique tars the person instead. 
4. Even if the criticism is valid, what is to be done? Likely nothing as it's unclear what the extent of the bias would be anyway. Surely, we wouldn't want to silence discussion of the topic. So just as we support free speech regardless of people's intentions and biases, we should support any valid arguments within the EA community. If one is unhappy with the arguments, the response should be to engage with them and make valid counterarguments, not speculate on people's initial intuitions or motivations.

I strongly object to the (Edit: previous) statement that my post "concludes that human extinction would be a very good thing". I do not endorse this claim and think it's a grave misconstrual of my analysis. My findings are highly uncertain, and, as Peter mentions, there are many potential reasons for believing human extinction would be bad even if my conclusions in the post were much more robust (e.g. lock-in effects, to name a particularly salient one). 

EDIT: Looks like Ariel beat me to this point by a few minutes.

(Not speaking on behalf of RP. I don't work there now.)

FWIW, corporate chicken welfare campaigns have looked better than GiveWell recommendations on their direct welfare impacts if you weigh chicken welfare per year up to ~5,000x less than human welfare per year. Quoting Fischer, Shriver and myself, 2022 citing others:

Open Philanthropy once estimated that, “if you value chicken life-years equally to human life-years… [then] corporate campaigns do about 10,000x as much good per dollar as top [global health] charities.” Two more recent estimates—which we haven’t investigated and aren’t necessarily endorsing—agree that corporate campaigns are much better. If we assign equal weights to human and chicken welfare in the model that Grilo, 2022 uses, corporate campaigns are roughly 5,000x better than the best global health charities. If we do the same thing in the model that Clare and Goth, 2020 employ, corporate campaigns are 30,000 to 45,000x better.^[8]

About Open Phil's own estimate in that 2016 piece, Holden wrote in a footnote:

Bayesian adjustments should attenuate this difference to some degree, though it’s unclear how much, if you believe – as I do – that both estimates are fairly informed and reasonable though far from precise or reliable. I will put this consideration aside here.

My understanding is that they've continued to be very cost-effective since then. See this comment by Saulius, who estimated their impact, and this section of Grilo, 2022.

Duffy, 2023 for RP also recently found a handful of US ballot initiatives from 2008-2018 for farm animal welfare to be similarly cost-effective, making, in my view, relatively conservative assumptions.

Remember that these values are conditional on hedonism. If you think that humans can experience greater amounts of value per limit time because of some non-hedonic goods that humans have access to that non-human animals don't, then you can accept everything the RP Moral Weight report says, but still think that human lives are far more valuable relative to non-human animal lives than just plugging in the numbers from the report would suggest. Personally I find the numbers low relative to my intuitions, but not necessarily counterintuitive conditional on hedonism. Most of the reasons I can think of to value humans more than animals don't have anything to do with the (to me, somewhat weird) idea that humans have more intense pleasures and pains than other conscious animals. Hedonism is very much a minority view amongst philosophers, and "objective list" theories that are at least arguably friendly to human specialness (or maybe to human and mammal specialness) are by far the most popular: https://survey2020.philpeople.org/survey/results/5206

 

(Disclaimer: I take RP's moral weights at face value, and am thus inclined to defend what I consider to be their logical implications.)

Specifically with respect to cause prioritization between global heath and animal welfare, do you think the evidence we've seen so far is enough to conclude that animal welfare interventions should most likely be prioritized over global health?

In "Worldview Diversification" (2016), Holden Karnofsky wrote that "If one values humans 10-100x as much [as chickens], this still implies that corporate campaigns are a far better use of funds (100-1,000x) [than AMF]." In 2023, Vasco Grilo replicated this finding by using the RP weighs to find corporate campaigns 1.7k times as effective.

Let's say RP's moral weights are wrong by an order of magnitude, and chickens' experiences actually only have 3% of the moral weight of human experiences. Let's say further that some remarkably non-hedonic preference view is true, where hedonic goods/bads only account for 10% of welfare. Still, corporate campaigns would be an order of magnitude more effective than the best global health interventions.

While I agree with you that it would be premature to conclude with high confidence that global welfare is negative, I think the conclusions of RP's research with respect to cause prioritization still hold up after incorporating the arguments you've enumerated in your post.

Some (small-sample) data on public opinion:

1. Scott Alexander did a survey on moral weights: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/03/26/cortical-neuron-number-matches-intuitive-perceptions-of-moral-value-across-animals/
2. SlateStarCodex commenter Tibbar's Mechanical Turk survey on moral weights: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/05/01/update-to-partial-retraction-of-animal-value-and-neuron-number/

These surveys suggest that the average person gives considerably less moral weight to non-human animals than the RP moral weight estimates, although still enough weight that animal welfare interventions look better than GiveWell top charities (and the two surveys differed considerably from each other, with the MTurk survey giving much higher weight to animals across the board).

Thank you for the post!

What concerns me is that I suspect people rarely get deeply interested in the moral weight of animals unless they come in with an unusually high initial intuitive view.

I also suspect this, and have concerns about it, but in a very different way than you I speculate. More particularly, I am concerned by the "people rarely get deeply interested in the moral weight of animals " part. This is problematic because for many actions humans do, there are consequences to animals (in many cases, huge consequences), and to act ethically, even for some non-conseuquentialists, it is essential to at least have some views about moral weights of animals.

But the issue isn't only most people not being interested in investigating "moral weights" of animals, but that for people who don't even bother to investigate, they don't use the acknowledgement of uncertainty (and tools for dealing with uncertainty) to guide their actions - they assign, with complete confidence, 1 to each human and 0 to almost everyone else. 

The above analysis, if I am only roughly correct, is crucial to our thinking about which direction to move people's view is a correct one. If most people are already assigning animals with virtual 0s, where else can we go? Presumably moral weights can't go negative, animals' moral weights only have one place to go, unless most people were right - that all animals have moral weights of virtually 0.

"I would expect working as a junior person in a community of people who value animals highly would exert a large influence in that direction regardless of what the underlying truth."

For the reasons above, I am extremely skeptical this is worthy of worry. I think unless it happens to be true that all animals have moral weights of virtually 0, it seems to me that "a community of people who value animals highly exerting a large influence in that direction regardless of what the underlying truth" is something that we should exactly hope for, rationally and ethically speaking. (emphasis on "regardless of what the underlying truth" is mine)

P.S. A potential pushback is that a very significant number of people clearly care about some animals, such as their companion animals. But I think we have to also look at actions with larger stakes. Most people, and even more so for a collection of people (such as famailies, companies, governments, charities, and movements), judging from their actions (eating animals, driving, animal experiments, large scale constructions) and reluctance to adjust their view regarding these actions, clearly assign a virtual 0 to the moral weights of most animals - they just chose a few species, maybe just a few individual animals, to rise to within one order of magnitude of difference in moral weight with humans. Also, even for common companion animals such as cats and dogs, many people are shown to assign much less moral weight to them when they are put into situations where they have to choose these animals against (sometimes trivial) human interests. 

Two nitpicks:

Here's a selection from their bottom-line point estimates for how many animals of a given species are morally equivalent to one human:

The chart is actually estimates for how many animal life years of a given species are morally equivalent to one human life year. Though you do get the comparison correct in the paragraph after the table.

~

The post weighs the increasing welfare of humanity over time against the increasing suffering of livestock, and concludes that human extinction would be a very good thing.

You'd have to ask Kyle Fish but it's not necessarily the case that he endorses this conclusion about human extinction and he certainly didn't actually say that (note if you CTRL+F for "extinction" it is nowhere to be found in the report). I think there's lots of reasons to think that human extinction is very bad even given our hellish perpetuation of factory farming.

Do people here think there is a correct answer to this question?