Half the World Is Trying to Promote Democracy; Shouldn't EAs Help Animals?

Dear Kes,

This is a super helpful and illuminating reply! Thank you! I love the idea of EA helping all cause areas to more effectively accomplish their goals.

There are lots of things I care about that fall outside of EA. And, for those things I care about, I often think most of the work being done to achieve that thing seems inefficient. So I love the idea of EAs helping make goals get accomplished. That's super smart.

It just scares me when I hear people encourage EAs to donate to democracy promotion above other, more traditionally EA, causes.

Thank you for your time and explanation!

Sincerely,

Alene

I don't think this quite works as a response to Alene's point. Many things are necessary/valuable preconditions for doing good. We need food, water, functioning infrastructure, preserving democracy, the internet, etc. The fact that something is a precondition for other work doesn't by itself make it a high-priority EA cause area.

If I apply the ITN framework to 'preserving democracy', I get something like:

• Importance: Not losing democracy is very important. But losing it was arguably similarly catastrophic e.g. 10 years ago. The question is how much the probability has actually increased. Even though the probability seems larger right now, I expect it to still be relatively small – but I'm uncertain.
• Neglectedness: Very low. I agree with Alene's core point that it's one of the least neglected causes right now.
• Tractability: I'd argue somewhat low, though I'm highly uncertain. There's little reason to believe there's lots of low-hanging fruit that hasn't been picked over decades and centuries of interest in making democracies stable.
  • It's also worth noting that much of the current concern is specifically about US democracy, which matters a lot (largest economy, major influence on the rest of the world, where AI is mostly going to be built), and tractability is currently plausibly higher but that's a narrower cause than 'preserving democracy' (e.g. by reducing global democratic backsliding) full stop.

Thank you for your comments, Matrice and @Tobias Häberli! 

Matrice, what you're saying about poverty and existential risk makes so much sense to me. You're making a really good point for both of them. The vast majority of humans who are in poverty probably would do just about anything to get out of poverty. And most humans probably would do a bunch of stuff to keep humanity around. So the more rights and power humans have, the more we will achieve our strongly held goals of escaping poverty and preserving our species. For instance, if a person has the ability to move freely to a new city, maybe she will move to a new city where she can get a job. If a person has the ability to vote, maybe she will vote for economic policies that let her afford a line of credit to start a business. So I totally agree with you that democracy promotion seems like a great way to fight poverty and existential risk. 

I am extremely concerned about farmed animal welfare, though. That extreme concern makes me somewhat unique among humans, although somewhat normal among EAs. :-) EAs rock. True, studies show that vast majority of humans would rather farmed animals to have better welfare. But the vast majority of humans would presumably rate farmed animal welfare as a very a low priority compared to all their personal interests that affect them directly, like the economy. EAs are really special and unique in caring so much about farmed animal welfare that EAs would consider donating a significant amount of their time or money to farmed animal welfare work. 

So, sadly, I don't think your logic applies as well to farmed animal welfare. If people have more political rights, they won't necessarily use those rights to improve farmed animal welfare. In fact, as humans in our society have been gaining more and more rights, farmed animal welfare has been getting worse and worse. Factory farming didn't even exist two hundred years ago, when life was much worse for humans and we had fewer rights. So, sadly, history has shown that improvement in human rights and wellbeing and rights doesn't result in improvement in farmed animal wellbeing and rights.

A way to look at it is that humans are the dominant group. Giving more power to the dominant group won't necessarily help the subordinate group. Some members of the dominant group (especially EAs!) care a lot about the oppressed group and will use their additional rights and power to help the oppressed group. But that's not the main thing that members of the dominant group will do with their additional rights and power. In fact, a lot of things that people do with our rights and power hurts animals. For instance, people use our political power to vote for an economy that will allow us to set up foie gras companies. Then we build factory farms, force-feed birds for foie gras, and slaughter them. People use our political power to vote for an economic system that will make it very easy to sell food products, including foie gras. And then we sell the foie gras using the cold supply chain made possible by the roads we voted for the government to build. Since, as a species, we mostly care about our own wellbeing, the more rights and power we have as a species, the more we'll tend to increase our own wellbeing. There's no particular reason to think that our increased rights and power will result in a different species being better off, and history has shown the opposite.

To be clear, as a human, I do, selfishly, want us humans to have lots of power, freedom, and democracy! I love Democracy. 🇺🇸 (That's an American flag because I'm American, and I love America and the U.S. Constitution so much. And I want our Constitution to survive.) But I just don't think that protecting Democracy will help animals.

Another way to look at it is: Imagine we were having this conversation back during the Middle Ages. We might dream of a brighter future where there's a Democracy so that we can vote and own land. We might see a person slaughtering his chicken with an insufficiently sharp blade and think that in that future, when humans like us have more rights, animals will also be treated better. But we would be extremely wrong. 2026 is that brighter future for humans. There is way more Democracy in the world than there was in the Middle Ages. And farmed animal suffering is way worse now than in the Middle Ages. The typical way chickens are slaughtered in the U.S. today is now via a long, dangerous trip to slaughter (which many don't survive), followed by a shackle-and-hoist live-hang system that is even crueler than someone using an insufficiently sharp blade. And it happens to an unprecedented number of birds (several tens of billions per year worldwide, and 9.5 billion per year in the US alone—way more than the number of birds killed per year in the Middle Ages). So more Democracy, or preserving the current level of Democracy, won't protect animals.  

I think the only way to protect animals is by affirmatively working to protect animals.

Thank you so much for explaining this, Evelyn! It is really interesting to hear your perspective as an advocate for democracy who cares deeply about animal welfare! And thank you for your important work.

As an American animal advocate myself, I definitely agree that I value my free speech because I use it for animals! And I love the way the U.S. Constitution helps me advocate for animals. 

But that still doesn’t lead me to conclude that overall, the best way to help animals is through democracy promotion. 

(First, as a probably irrelevant aside, Americans like me actually got our freedom of speech through a couple wars and the creation of a new Constitution with a bill of rights, not through democracy. I see through your profile that you’re German so I don’t know how free speech works in Germany or if it’s something voters decided on. In the United States, though, freedom of speech is actually one of the things that makes our country less than a complete democracy. The US Constitution says that the people can’t pass a law to abridge of the freedom of speech—even if a majority of people vote that they would like to pass the law. That is why undercover investigations of factory farms are currently allowed in every state in the United States. Various democratically elected state governments keep passing ag-gag laws to ban these investigations, and the undemocratic court system keeps striking them down because of  first amendment. But I think this is just a technicality because I assume the pro-democracy movement is actually a pro-good-governance movement that also includes stuff like free speech as a limitation on democracy?)
 

More importantly:

My assumption would be that there is way more farmed animal suffering in the United States, where I live and where we have excellent free speech, than in Uganda. I know that the Uganda human population is lower than the United States human population, but my assumption would be that even per capita, there is way more farmed animal suffering in the United States than in Uganda. For instance, I get the impression that the meat industry uses much fewer animals per capita in Uganda than in the United States.

I agree that it would be better for animals if Ugandan animal rights activist had the right to advocate for them. 

But sadly, in the United States, where we all have the right to advocate for farmed animals, only a tiny portion of the population does so. And a much larger portion of the population uses their rights and power to do things that are bad for animals like operating live-hang poultry slaughterhouses. 

That said, considering that you are in Germany puts your opinion in a new light for me. My understanding is that Germany is an extremely democratic country where people have lots of rights. And I also understand that it is a country that it’s done more than perhaps any other country to pass laws in the last 10 years to improve farmed animal welfare! 🇩🇪 I know you have banned battery cages and chick culling for example! 🐥 So Germany is a really good illustration of your point about how people who are free may use their freedom to stand up for animals. 

I just wish that is what all free people would do everywhere. And in my experience, it sadly isn’t. Maybe the issue is that animal suffering is usually an externality of things people want, rather than people focusing on the animals directly in making their decisions.  

In any case, thank you for your important work to promote democracy, Evelyn. I obviously agree democracy is a very good thing even as I think people should continue doing animal welfare work.