A few theses that may turn into a proper post:
 

1. Marginal animal welfare cost effectiveness seems to robustly beat global health interventions. It may look more like 5x or 1000x but it is very hard indeed to get that number below 1 (I do think both are probably in fact good ex ante at least, so think the number is positive).

To quote myself from this comment: 

@Laura Duffy's (for Rethink Priorities) recently published risk aversion analysis basically does a lot of the heavy lifting here (bolding mine):

Spending on corporate cage-free campaigns for egg-laying hens is robustly^[8] cost-effective under nearly all reasonable types and levels of risk aversion considered here. 

1. "Using welfare ranges based roughly on Rethink Priorities’ results, spending on corporate cage-free campaigns averts over an order of magnitude more suffering than the most robust global health and development intervention, Against Malaria Foundation. This result holds for almost any level of risk aversion and under any model of risk aversion."

2. The difference in magnitude of cost effectiveness (under any plausible understanding of what that means) between MakeAWish (or personal consumption spending for that matter) and AMF is smaller than between AMF (or pick your favorite) and The Humane League or AWF. 

So it is more important to convince someone to give to e.g. the EA animal welfare fund if they were previously giving to AMF than to convince a non-donor to give that same amount of money to AMF.

At least to me, this seems counterintuitive, contrary to vibes and social/signaling effects, and also robustly true.

3. What people intuitively think of as the "certainty" that comes along with AMF et al doesn't really exist. To quote my own tweet:

Yes, you can get robust estimates for "E[short run human deaths by malaria prevented per marginal dollar]" but the 2nd, ...,nth order effects don't disappear (or cancel out by default!) just bc u choose not to try to model them

4. The tractability of the two cause areas is similar...

5. But animal welfare receives way less funding. From the same comment as above:

Under standard EA "on the margin" reasoning, this shouldn't really matter, but I analyzed OP's grants data and found that human GCR has been consistently funded 6-7x more than animal welfare (here's my tweet thread this is from)

Disclaimer: I'm funded by EA for animal welfare work.

Some thoughts:

a. So much of the debate feels like a debate on identities and values. I'd really love to see people nitpicking into technical details of cost-effectiveness estimates instead.

b. I think it's worth reminding that animal welfare interventions are less cost-effective than they were when Simcikas conducted his analysis.

c. I generally feel much more comfortable standing behind Givewell's estimates but Givewell doesn't analyse cost-effectiveness of advocacy work. My biggest misgivings about cost-effectiveness estimates are due to the difficulty of assessing advocacy work. I think we should make a lot more progress on this.

d. People seem to keep forgetting that uncertainty cuts both ways. If the moral worth of animals is too uncertain, that is also a reason against confidently dismissing them.

e. I don't think we have made much progress on the question of "How much important is cage to cage-free transition for a chicken in terms of human welfare?". I don't think Rethink Priorities Welfare ranges answer that question. In general I'm confused about the approach of trying to find overall welfare capacities of different species rather than just focusing on comparing specific experiences of different individuals. In RP's report, here's how the question of welfare comparison was addressed:

"I estimated the DALY equivalent of a year spent in each type of pain assessed by the Welfare Footprint Project by looking at the descriptions of and disability weights assigned to various conditions assessed by the Global Burden of Disease Study in 2019 and comparing these to the descriptions of each type of pain tracked by the Welfare Footprint Project."

I think this is the core question on this issue and it merits a much longer and thorough analysis. I would love to see a team of biologists, animal behaviour experts and human health experts coming together to produce a more detailed report on this.

f. I think there should be more concrete examples for PR costs of animal welfare work. Animal welfare has been around for sometime and I don't see that it has created notorious enemies for EA that try to drag down the movement. On the contrary it has even brought in new donors for some of the non-animal welfare parts of the movement(The Navigation Fund). EA-supported interventions on animal welfare are generally pretty moderate and popular. Cage-free referendums were always won by over 60% support(78% support in Massachusetts!). End The Cage Age petition got 1.4 million signatures in the EU. EA-supported Nähtamatud Loomad got the NGO of the year award from Estonian president. Animal welfare work has its enemies, but they don't seem to have affected EA that much.

g. On the contrary I found animal welfare quite useful for EA community building. Open Philanthropy donating an additional 5 million dollars to AMF doesn't create new entry opportunities to EA. Whereas many of the EA organisers in Turkey got involved in the movement through the local EA supported animal advocacy organisation. Animal advocacy offers localised, effective and non-monetary ways to contribute. That is pretty useful in low trust or middle income countries.

But overall I think animal welfare spending should be evaluated primarily according to its impact on animals. If someone thinks that some positive or negative side-effect is significant enough they should concretely show it and provide an estimate for it.

h. I feel similarly about ripple effects. If someone is attempting to maximise that kind of outcome, they should choose an intervention that maximises ripple effects. Otherwise both animal advocacy work and global health work have loads of side effects on people's values, ideas, population growth, economic growth and it's an extremely ambitious effort to sum these all up and have a verdict on the overall direction of them. I'm also surprised that people think animal advocacy's effect is isolated on animals only. It's a mass communications work that leaves an impact on millions of people. That is a whole load of ripples.

In the abstract I think this would be good, but I'm skeptical that there are great opportunities in the animal space that can absorb this much funding right now! This is like, doubling the EA funds going to animal welfare stuff. I think I would strongly agree with claims like:

• Conditional on there being several years of capacity build up, animal welfare would use the funds more effectively.
• From a pure EA lens, some animal welfare spending is many times more cost-effective than the most effect global health interventions.
• The current most effective $100M spent on animal welfare is more cost-effective than the current most effective $100M spend on global health.

I think something that would be closer to 50/50 for me (or I haven't thought about it actually, but on its face seem closer to a midpoint):

• It would be better to invest an extra $100M to spend on animal welfare in the future than spending it on global health now.

I'd strongly disagree with a claim like:

• It would be better to spend an extra $100M in the next two years on animal welfare than on global health

So I listed myself as strongly agreeing, but with all these caveats.

Non-moderator nudge: Given that most of the comments here are created via voting on the banner, I'd like to discourage people from downvoting comments below zero just for being low effort. I think it's still useful to leave a quick note in this case, so people can see them when browsing the banner. Hopefully positive karma will still do the job of sorting really good ones to the top.

The animal welfare side of things feels less truthseeking, more activist, than other parts of EA.  Talk of "speciesim" that implies animals' and humans' lives are of ~equal value, seems farfetched to me.  People frequently do things like taking Rethink's moral weights project (which kinda skips over a lot of hard philosophical problems about measurement and what we can learn from animal behavior, and goes all-in on a simple perspective of total hedonic utilitarianism which I think is useful but not ultimately correct), and just treat the numbers as if they are unvarnished truth.

If I considered only the immediate, direct effects of $100m spent on animal welfare versus global health, I would probably side with animal welfare despite the concerns above.  But I'm also worried about the relative lack of ripple / flow-through effects from animal welfare work versus global health interventions -- both positive longer-term effects on the future of civilization generally, and more near-term effects on the sustainability of the EA movement and social perceptions of EA.  Going all-in on animal welfare at the expense of global development seems bad for the movement.

Despite working in global health myself, I tend to moderately favor devoting additional funding to animal welfare vs. global health. There are two main reasons for this:

1. Neglectedness: global health receives vastly more funding than animal welfare. 

2. Importance: The level of suffering and cruelty that we inflict on non-human animals is simply unfathomable. 

   I think the countervailing reason to instead fund global health is:

3.  Tractability: my sense is that, due in part to the far fewer resources that have gone into investigating animal welfare interventions and policy initiatives, it could be difficult to spend $100m in highly impactful ways. (Whereas in global health, there would be obviously good ways to use this funding.) That said, this perhaps just suggests that a substantial portion of additional funding should go towards research (e.g., creating fellowships to incentivize graduate students to work on animal welfare). 

This is probably going to be downvoted to oblivion, but I feel it's worth stating anyway, if nothing else to express my frustration with and alienation from EA.

On a meta level, I somewhat worry that the degree to which the animal welfare choice is dominating the global health one kinda shows how seemingly out-of-touch many EAs have become from mainstream common sense morality views.

In particular, I'm reminded of that quote from the Analects of Confucius:

When the stables were burnt down, on returning from court Confucius said, "Was anyone hurt?" He did not ask about the horses.

You can counter with a lot of math that checks out and arguments that make logical sense, but the average person on the street is likely to view the idea that you could ever elevate the suffering of any number of chickens above that of even one human child to be abhorrent.

Maybe the EAs are still technically right and other people are just speciesist, but to me this does not bode well for the movement gaining traction or popular support.

Just wanted to get that out of my system.

A couple of survey results which may be interesting in light of this debate:

• When we surveyed the community on what portion of the community's resources they believed should be allocated to these two cause areas, the average allocation to GHD was higher. This was true among both low/high engagement EAs, though the gap was smaller for highly engaged EAs.
• However, if we compare this to actual allocations (in 2019, since these were the most up to date we had at the time), we see that the average preferred allocations are higher for AW and lower for GHD.

This is in line with the debate week results showing a strong preference for an additional $100mn going to AW, but the continued preference for a larger total percentage going to GHD seems worth noting.

I basically endorse this post, as well as the use of the tools created by Rethink Priorities that collectively point to quite strong but not overwhelming confidence in the marginal value of farmed animal welfare.

Some other factors not mentioned here but I sometimes think about:

-PETA used to do welfare campaigns and proudly own up their work on welfare campaigns when they talk about their history. But they stopped doing welfare campaigns around 10 years ago and even published public statements against some of the initiatives. I keep wondering whether that has anything to do with EA entering into space, refusing to fund PETA, and PETA withdrawing from welfare work to differentiate itself from welfare campaigning organisations in response. That would reduce cost-effectiveness of welfare campaigns significantly.

-One part I often see missing from human-animal comparisons is that animal welfare work prevents very extreme types suffering that would be classified as torture in human contexts. If I were to choose between extending a human life for 50 years versus preventing a person from suffering for one full year in a wire coffin, I would choose the latter. Similarly choosing between preventing 20.000 years of non-stop chicken torture vs. saving a human life is a lot different from saving the lives of 20.000 chickens versus saving the life of a human being. I think $5000 is currently able to fund alleviating 40000 years of chicken suffering by about half.

-Animals suffer from acts of deliberate violence. If acts of violence are also axiologically bad in themselves than there are more reasons to prevent violence than prevent deaths due to neglect. I don't endorse this position but I think it is aligned with folk ethics. People are willing to spend much more on preventing murders than preventing deaths due to natural causes.

-In animal welfare CEAs, it's often assumed that advocacy speeds up eventual progress by 10 years. I think that's a bit short. Here's one data point from France:
 

From 1997 to 2017, the number of hens in cages was reduced by 10 million hens in 20 years. In 2017, Open Philanthropy came in. After that, the number of hens in cages was reduced by 20 million hens in 7 years. If the rate of decline had remained constant, that reduction would have happened in 40 years instead.

-If we're in the business of speculating about sociological side effects of interventions, many animal activists like arguing that violence against animals is breeding ground for all kinds of violence. Calling people "cockroaches" or "rats" is an important part of legitimising violence. I don't like this type of arguments as they can be used to justify any type of intervention. But I think at the very least this should serve as an example to be wary of this kind of hardly falsifiable arguments.

I'm a bit of a Benthamite "The question is not, 'Can they reason?' nor, 'Can they talk?' but rather, 'Can they suffer?'"

For any plausible (to me) guess about which non-human animals are capable of suffering, there are far far more non-human animals living in terrible conditions than humans in similarly bad conditions, and there just seems to be so many underfunded and underexplored ways we could help reduce that suffering. I've also seen some cost-effectiveness estimations that indicate you can help thousands of animals a lot for the same cost as helping one person a lot. ("a lot" being very vague!)

The only reason why I'm not at 100% agree is because helping humans become healthier might cause larger positive flow on effects, and this might add up to more impact in the long run. That's super tentative and could go either way - e.g. it seems possible that helping animals now could lead to our species being more ethical towards sentient beings in the long run too.  

1. The basic case for chickens is very strong, even under views that are sceptical of small animals having a high chance/degree of sentience, because it's so easy to affect their lives cheaply compared to humans, and their lives seem v easy to improve by a lot
2. $100m in total is not a huge amount (equiv to $5-10m/yr, against a background of ~$200m). I think concern about scaling spending is a bit of a red herring and this could probably be usefully absorbed just by current interventions

I don't think most animals are moral patients, and so see work on global health as much more valuable. This isn't as deeply a considered view as I'd like (though I think there's an unfortunate pattern where people who think animals are more likely to matter a lot are more likely to go into attempting to weigh the worth of animals) and people shouldn't put as much weight on this as my other EA-related views.

More in this direction: Weighing Animal Worth, Why I'm Not Vegan.

I think the cost-effectiveness of additional spending on animal welfare interventions is much higher than that on global health and development:

• Buying organic instead of barn eggs, which is supposed to be a proxy for an animal welfare intervention with very low cost-effectiveness, is 2.11 times as cost-effective as GiveWell's top charities.
• School Plates, which is a program aiming to increase the consumption of plant-based foods at schools and universities in the United Kingdom, is 60.2 times as cost-effective as GiveWell's top charities.
• Corporate campaigns for chicken welfare are 1.51 k times as cost-effective as GiveWell's top charities.
• Shrimp Welfare Project's Humane Slaughter Initiative is 43.5 k times as cost-effective as GiveWell's top charities.

I believe animals are much more neglected than humans. I calculated the annual philanthropic spending on farmed animals is 0.0514 % of that on animals plus humans, whereas I determined that the annual disability of farmed animals is 97.2 % that of animals plus humans.

You'd have to value animals at ~millionths of humans for scale and neglectedness not to be dispositive. Only countervailing considerations are things around cooperativeness, positive feedback loops, and civilizational stability, all of which are speculative and even sign uncertain

Animal suffering is larger-scale and more neglected. As explained in my post on 'Seeking Ripple Effects', I'm especially moved by the possibility of transformative innovations (e.g. economical lab-grown meat) improving human values at a key juncture in history, even though I think it's very unlikely.

OTOH, I'm a big fan of global health & development on more general and robust 'ripple effect' grounds, which is why I'm close to the center on this one.

1. Causing unnecessary suffering is morally bad. Causing intense unnecessary suffering is morally worse.
2. Non-humans have the capacity to physically and psychologically suffer. The intensity of suffering they can experience is non-negligible, and plausibly, not that far off from that of humans. Non-humans have a dispreference towards being in such states of agony.
3. Non-human individuals are in constant and often intense states of agony in farmed settings. They also live short lives, sometimes less than 1/10th of their natural lifespan, which leads to loss of welfare they would have experienced if they were allowed to live till old age.
4. The scale of farmed animal suffering is enormous beyond comprehension; if we only consider land animals, it is around 100 billion; if crustaceans and fish are included, the number is close to 1000 billion; if insects are accounted for, then the number is in several 1000s of billions. Nearly all of these animals have lives not worth living.
5. The total dollar spent per unit of suffering experienced is arguably more than a thousand times lower for non-humans compared to humans. This seems unreasonable given the vast number of individuals who suffer in farmed settings. Doing a quick and dirty calculation, and only considering OpenPhil funding, we get ~$1 spent per human and ~0.0003 spent per non-human individual. Including non-EA funding into this estimation would make the discrepancy worser.
6. We are nowhere close to reducing the amount of non-humans in farmed settings. Meat consumption is predicted to rise by 50% in the next three decades, which would drastically increase the number of farmed animals living short, agony-filled lives. We also haven't yet had a breakthrough in cultivated meat, and if the Humbird report is to be believed, we should be skeptical of any such breakthroughs in the near future (if anything, we are seeing the first wave of cultivated meat bans, which may delay the transition to animal-free products).
7. Reducing farm animal suffering, via policy, advocacy, and development of alternative proteins, is tractable and solvable (for the last one in the list, we may need moonshot projects, which may imply raising even more funding).
8. Therefore, the additional $100 million is better spent on animal welfare than global health.

I'm philosophically a longtermist, but suspect better evidenced short termist interventions are comparable to if not much greater than 'direct longtermism' in expectation. 

In the long run I think a thriving human descendant-line with better cooperation norms is going to lead to better total phenomenal states than reduced factory farming will.

Animal welfare has much higher EV even under conservative assumptions. IMO only plausible argument against is that the evidence base for animal welfare interventions is much worse, so if you are very skeptical of unproven interventions, you might vote the other way. But you'd have to be very skeptical.

99% yes for me.
This is like 50% of the yearly global budget for farmed animals. A lot can be done with this money, and it's not too outrageous an amount that it wouldn't be absorbed efficiently. Speciecism aside, the bang for these bucks could be incredible. 
Moreover, if among the spillover effects of this was lower consumption of animal products, this would be an additional win for public health (at least in countries where too much animal products are eaten). 

There is the meat eater problem where more animal lives would likely be lost by increasing the human population. It also seems much more cost effective per dollar to suffering spared to help animals and factory farming is spreading rapidly through Asia and Africa, making this a hingey time.

Most serious EA analysis I've seen seems to conclude helping animals is much more effective (i.e. Rethink Priorities work for example), so that's the view I currently weakly hold. Also, helping humans harms animals via the meat eater problem, reducing its value on net, but there is no large effect the other way. Very open to changing my mind.

On a purely ideological basis, I would have placed myself as a "strong agree". However, on a more practical level, I am concerned that the most popular animal welfare interventions (specifically corporate campaigns) may have a risk of actually having a negative impact on animal welfare. For example, if corporation X signs a promise to switch to higher welfare standards, its comms/PR around this switch might be so effective that an individual who could otherwise have been convinced to reduce their meat consumption on animal welfare grounds (or even go vegan, the best possible outcome), actually feels satisfied that their choice to continue consuming meat from corporation X is ethical and therefore continues to consume meat at the same or even greater rate. Maybe this is baseless speculation, but intuitively, this feels like a real risk which hasn't been explored enough. 

Even though the expected value of corporate campaign work is high, I feel instinctively very uncomfortable donating money to an intervention that has what I worry is a real chance of actually making the issue worse. This might just reflect my personal low appetite for risk.

By contrast, I can't think of an equivalent problem for popular GHD interventions - the worst outcome in this context appears to be that money is donated to an intervention that, in reality, isn't as effective as assumed, and the money could therefore have been better spent elsewhere.

As a result of all of this, I have bumped my response down to only a "slightly agree" rather than a "strong agree".

There's not much to add beyond what everyone else has said. I think we would need to be exceedingly confident in particular views about sentience and moral patienthood and capacity for suffering for non-humans to think GHD was better. I very much wish I had written down more of my reasoning from years ago when I was mainly donating to GiveWell, I think I just hadn't thought it over much!

I don't believe in complete impartiality. I think we have a stronger moral obligation to those who are closer to us--be it family, friends, or co-nationals. The vast majority of my donations have gone to global health simply because it is much much more cost-effective to help the poorest in the world. 
 

I also think that a blind push to expand the moral circle is misguided. See: https://gwern.net/narrowing-circle.

Large scale animal funding is in a worse state compared to global health. https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/GFkzLx7uKSK8zaBE3/we-need-more-nuance-regarding-funding-gaps 

I see no legitimate justification for attitudes that would consider humans as important enough that global health interventions would beat out animal welfare, particularly given the sheer number and scale of invertebrate suffering. If invertibrates are sentient, it seem animal welfare definitely could absorb 100m and remain effective on the margin, and probably also if they are not (which seems unlikely). The reasons I am not fully in favour is mostly because the interaction of animal welfare with population ethics is far stronger than the interaction of global health developments, and given the signifciant uncertainties involved with population ethics, I can't be sure these don't at least significant reduce the benefits of AW over GH work

I mostly agree with Open Phil Should Allocate Most Neartermist Funding to Animal Welfare by Ariel Simnegar 🔸, as some others have already referenced. My animal moral weights are probably close to RP's, and so higher than Open Phil's.

Open Phil spent around $100M on animal welfare in each of 2021 and 2022.

An extra $100M for animal welfare would be best spread across multiple years, given organizational constraints to scaling. I'd mostly have in mind outreach/campaigns/lobbying targeting corporations, certifiers, institutions and governments, and ballot initiatives for animal welfare policy change.

There might be more direct ways to purchase animal welfare that would scale and still beat global health, but we could probably do much better with higher leverage policy interventions.

Some cost-effectiveness analyses here, here and here.

In general, I agree with the position that investing an additional $100m into animal welfare opportunities would be more impactful than global health opportunities even under views that use moral weights on the lower end of the scale for nonhumans, and potentially way more impactful if we use moral weights that grant nonhumans greater capacity for sentience (which I think we probably should).

In short—I think the scale of animal suffering is much larger (even when only considering animal agriculture, and not wild animal welfare); animal welfare is much more neglected (even when only considering Open Phil’s grants, which probably skew towards animal welfare compared to average funding); and I’m less certain about the difference in tractability, but I think it’s reasonable to think that tractability could be comparable for both. If animal welfare work is less tractable for some reason, I think it’s unlikely for the reduced tractability to make up for the large difference in scale and neglectedness.

Other pieces have made a much more in-depth case for this than I will do here, such as Open Phil Should Allocate Most Neartermist Funding to Animal Welfare, The Marginal $100m Would Be Far Better Spent on Animal Welfare Than Global Health, other pieces linked by MichaelStJules before debate week began, and the Rethink Priorities moral weights project. Below, I’ll just add a smattering of points that might be important that I don’t see discussed as frequently.

Neglectedness: Global health seems likely to continue getting more funding than animal welfare due to society prioritizing human interests. Thus, animal welfare will probably continue being more neglected.

Not only does global health get much more funding now than animal welfare, but I imagine this will continue to be the case going forward because humans and human institutions seem to strongly prioritize human welfare over nonhuman welfare.

If that’s true, it would mean that animal welfare is not only much more neglected now, but on the whole it will probably remain that way for many years, if not indefinitely. Thus, marginal dollars will probably be more impactful when allocated to animal welfare.

Scale: Nonhumans may account for the majority of moral value now and indefinitely into the future.

Not only do nonhumans seem to account for the majority of all moral value now, but it seems like they probably always will, unless something drastic happens to change that. One implication of this is explored in the piece Net global welfare may be negative and declining.

I think it’s unlikely that humans are or will be the majority of moral value, given the history of the world so far and some reasonable assumptions about our trajectory into the future. (I think while possible, it’d be much more surprising if humans do end up ever becoming the majority of moral value.)

If that’s true, then animal welfare efforts are important not only in the near-term but also in the long-term, since the moral importance of our decisions will mostly depend on the effects on nonhumans.

Tractability: There seem to be many impactful animal welfare initiatives that could already effectively utilize much more funding, and many more projects could exist if funding were available.

There are great organizations that exist now that I think could easily deploy an additional $1m+, such as The Humane League, the Good Food Institute, Mercy For Animals, etc.

Additionally, there are small / mid-sized impactful organizations that could scale up their work with access to additional funding, such as Aquatic Life Institute, Shrimp Welfare Project, and New Roots Institute.

There are also potentially impactful megaprojects for animals that others have written about (some of which could be promising).

There are whole categories of work that are just getting started that could use a lot more funding to scale. For example, I think plant-based defaults work seems extremely promising, and that work is really just beginning and has not been executed at scale yet. Organizations working on this like Greener By Default are relatively new, but their work seems to already be having a large impact. I think one of the best examples of this is NYC Health + Hospitals switching to plant-based default meals, which over half of patients ended up choosing, leading to millions of plant-based meals being consumed instead of animal-based. Plant-based defaults as a strategy is very new and (in my opinion) could effectively utilize millions of dollars in the coming years. I think we’re still in the early stages of discovering how impactful this strategy could be.

Others have pointed out that public policy / political advocacy is particularly neglected in the animal welfare space and could use more funding, and I think we’ve seen some successes here already with a relatively small amount of funding. (Animal Policy Careers is a new initiative focused on this space, one of the few.)

There’s also the opportunity to grow the animal welfare movement in neglected regions, in particular Asia and Africa, and for neglected species, in particular aquatic animals.

And, as the animal welfare space grows, there are new opportunities for meta / movement building organizations like Connect For Animals and Hive, and for capacity building organizations like Vegan Hacktivists and Animal Defense Partnership, and for additional global conferences like the AVA Summit series.

From my experience as a nonprofit founder in the animal welfare space, many impactful organizations are very funding constrained, and many other impactful organizations do not get started due to lack of funding. Given the scale and neglectedness of animal welfare work, I think that a good number of initiatives would clear the bar for investment.

(And if we needed more research and analysis of the impact of these organizations, then part of the $100m could go towards that.)

Reason why global health may be a more effective use of $100m now than animal welfare: second-order effects for total future well-being.

In general, as mentioned above, I do think there is a very strong case for spending an extra $100m on animal welfare than on global health.

But, I think the strongest argument that might nudge me in the other direction is the idea that second-order effects for global health could result in higher overall future well-being, possibly due to better governance and collaboration by humans in the future that leads to overall reduction in nonhuman suffering as well. In this case, I still think the majority of impact in the long-term would probably come from positive effects on nonhumans.

However, the track record of development in richer countries doesn’t necessarily make me think that a positive trajectory would automatically be the case (i.e. that human development will naturally lead to better overall well-being for nonhumans as well). In fact, increased wealth has seemed to go along with increased meat consumption, with that increased consumption being the fundamental cause of factory farming. Increased development also seems to correlate with increased animal exploitation in other areas, and greater impacts on wild animals (which still seem very difficult to fully account for). So I’m not convinced that human development will naturally lead to greater animal welfare; if current society serves as an example, it seems like the opposite may be true. Thus, heavy investment in animal welfare work still seems extremely necessary if we are going to turn our growing wealth and health into a society that positively affects nonhumans.

I think the money goes a lot further when it comes to helping non human animals then when it comes to helping humans.

I am generally pretty bought into the idea that non human animals also experience pleasure/suffering and I care about helping them.

I think it is probably good for the long term trajectory of society to have better norms around the casual cruelty and torture inflicted on non-human animals.

On the other hand, I do think there are really good arguments for human to human compassion and the elimination of extreme poverty. I am very in favor of that sort of thing too. GiveDirectly in particular is one of my favorite charities just because of the simplicity, compassion, and unpretentiousness of the approach.

Animal welfare wins my vote not because I disfavor human to human welfare, but just because I think that the same amount of resources can go a lot further in helping my non human friends.

Laura Duffy's analyses of this comes close to my view. On the margin, the question between global health charity and animal charity is something like GiveWell top charities *e.g. AMF) vs. ACE top charity (e.g. The Humane League), which is something like "Would you rather save 1 DALY or 40 years of hens from cages to cage-free.

I'm pretty split between the two and my donation habits reflect this; however, I don't think we know how to scale effective animal interventions past the current funding gaps in the low $10ms. For Global health, we do.

Edit: Learned that Laura has posted more on this since we last talked! Her posts seem to use RP's human:animal welfare moral weight comparisons, which place less compariative weight to human suffering than I do!

I don't really know... I'm suspect some kind of first-order utility calculus which tallies up the number of agents which are helped per dollar weighted according to what species they are makes animal welfare look better by large degree. But in terms of getting the world closer on the path of the "good trajectory", for some reason the idea of eliminating serious preventable diseases in humans feels like a more obvious next step along that path?

Humans kill about 1 trillion animals every year. https://sentientmedia.org/how-many-animals-are-killed-for-food-every-day/#:~:text=Chickens:%20206%20million/day,existed%20is%20just%20117%20billion. Many of them lead harsh, painful lives in factory farms and/or die a brutal death. And this doesn't even touch on wild animals suffering from non-human causes. 

To contrast, there are only 8 billion humans on Earth. 

8 billion is less than 1 trillion.

I'm right on the fence here, because although animal welfare is severely neglected and there's a lot of important tractable work on it that could use more money, I'm somewhat unconvinced about the value of animals compared to humans, as I'm not a hedonist and think that human experience might well be richer and more intense than animals by many orders of magnitude.

In this post last year, I describe why I think animal welfare is 100-1000x better than global health on the margin. In this post, I describe why I still think that, and give some responses to objections I didn't discuss in the previous post.

Two important considerations to strongly favor animal welfare 

1. Saving a human life is likely net negative due to increased meat consumption and animal suffering. According to a survey, most people believe the welfare of a farmed chicken is negative and equal in size to the positive welfare of a human. Also most people believe the welfare of birds count almost as much as the welfare of humans (they give animal welfare relative to human welfare an 8 on a scale from 0 to 10). But there are more farmed chickens than humans on earth (3 chickens per human), so total welfare is negative. See also this post: net global welfare is negative and declining. This also means that saving a human (meat eater) most likely negatively contributes to global welfare, as it increases meat consumption and hence farmed animal suffering. This is a strong version of the meat eater problem (strong in the sense that saving humans not only increases animal suffering, but increases it so much that total welfare decreases).
2. Saving a vegetarian human life is likely less cost effective than avoiding farmed animal suffering. There are extremely cost-effective animal welfare interventions. For example development of alternative protein such as cultivated meat saves the suffering of +10 farmed animals per dollar. An average human eats 10 farmed animals per year. So $100 donation to cultivated meat R&D saves the suffering of 1000 farmed animals, which equals the amount of farmed animal suffering caused by 100 years of meat consumption by a human. In size (absolute value), the suffering of 1000 farmed animals is more than a lifetime of human happiness (roughly 3 times as much). In other words: avoiding the suffering of 1000 farmed animals is better than saving a child's life such that the child lives 100 happy years. According to GiveWell's estimate, saving a child's life costs +1000$. Saving 100 healthy human life years easily costs +10.000$. So avoiding farmed animal suffering is +100 times as cost effective as saving a child's life (assuming the child is vegetarian or vegan).

I'll try to write a longer comment later, but right now I'm uncertain but lean towards global health because of some combination of the following:
1. I suspect negative lives are either rare or nonexistent, which makes it harder to avoid logic-of-the-larder-type arguments

2. I'm more uncertain about this, but I lean towards non-hedonic forms of consequentialism (RP parliament tool confirms that this generally lowers returns to animals)

3. Mostly based on the above, I think many moral weights for animals are too high

I'm also not sure if the 100 million would go to my preferred animal welfare causes or the EA community's preferred animal welfare causes or maybe the average person's preferred animal welfare causes. This matters less for my guesses about the impact of health and development funding.

I weigh moral worth by degree of sentience based on neuron count as a rough proxy, which naturally tends to weigh helping an equal number of humans more than an equivalent number of any other currently known species.

• AW seems clearly more neglected in terms of funding inside the effective giving space and on net.
• There is plenty of room for funding in the AW space, I would be surprised if $100M couldn't  be spent down over the next 10 years in the AW space at > 50% of the cost-effectiveness of the current marginal dollar (on average).
• Most of my uncertainty comes from some credence that human lives are vastly more important than non-human animal lives, or medium-term growth being accelerated by GH interventions which could make GH work much more leveraged.

I'm pretty confident (~80-90%?) this is true, for reasons well summarized here.

I'm interested in thoughts on the OOM difference between animal welfare vs GHD (i.e. would $100m to animal welfare be 2x better than GHD, or 2000x?)

• I am directionally sympathetic to the arguments in this post.
• Good Ventures dropping out of some AW focused areas makes me think there might currently be promising gaps to fill (although it sounds like immediate gaps in some shrimp + wild animal orgs might be covered?)
• I'm not marking myself as higher mainly because I don't have good taste on how good the marginal AW focused funding proposals are right now, vs the marginal GH focused ones.

In the interests of furthering the debate, I'll quickly offer several additional arguments that I think can favour global health over animal welfare.

Simulation Argument

The Simulation Argument says that it is very likely we are living in an ancestor simulation rather than base reality. Given that it is likely human ancestors that the simulators are interested in fully simulating, other non-human animals are likely to not be simulated to the same degree of granularity and may not be sentient.

Pinpricks vs. Torture

This is a trolley problem scenario. It's also been discussed by Eliezer Yudkowsky as the Speck of Dust in 3^^^3 People's Eyes vs. One Human Being Tortured For 50 Years case. It's also been analogously made in the famous short story The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas by Ursula LeGuin. The basic idea is to question whether scope sensitivity is justified. 

I'll note that a way to avoid this is to adopt Maximin rather than Expected Value as the decision function, as was suggested by John Rawls in A Theory of Justice.

Incommensurability

In moral philosophy there's a concept called incommensurability, that some things are simply not comparable. Some might argue that human and animal experiences are incommensurable, that we cannot know what it is like to be bat, for instance.

Balance of Categorical Responsibilities

There is in philosophies like Confucianism, notions like Filial Piety that support a kind of hierarchy of moral circles, such that family strictly dominates the state and so on. In the extreme, this leads to a kind of ethical egoism that I don't think any altruist would subscribe to, but which seems a common way of thinking among laypeople and conservatives in particular. I don't suggest this option but I mention it as an extreme case.

Utilitarianism in contrast tends to take the opposite extreme of equalizing moral circles to the point of complete impartiality towards every individual, the greatest good for the greatest number. This creates a kind of demandingness that would require us to sacrifice pretty much everything in service of this, our lives devoted entirely to something like shrimp welfare.

Rather than taking either extreme, it's possible to balance things according to the idea that we have separate, categorical responsibilities to ourselves, to our family, to our nation, to our species, and to everyone else, and to put resources into each category so that none of our responsibilities are neglected in favour of others, a kind of meta or group impartiality rather than individual impartiality.

Slightly leaning towards devoting more funds to GHD, even though I think there's enough likelihood that animals can suffer as intensely as humans.
My main reason for favouring GHD slightly is that improvements in human wellbeing, education and (political) empowerment seem paramount to the goal of increasing animal welfare long-term. 

I think animals are generally more efficient/effective as a way of converting money into short-term (the next 50 years) well-being.

My impression is that the mean global health intervention does not significantly improve the long-term future. However, I could definitely be convinced otherwise, and that would get me to change my answer.

All that said, if one is focused on improving the long-term future, it seems suspicious to focus on global health, as opposed to other interventions that are clearly more focused on that. 

I think of this question mostly in terms of the trajectory I think this nudges us towards. It feels like there's something of a hierarchy of needs for humanity as a whole, and getting out of the zone where we have extreme poverty feels like the right first step, in a way that makes me feel more optimistic about wise decision processes being able to rise to the top thereafter.

I'm not certain what current spending looks like; that might make me change my mind here. (I think it's definitely right to start ramping up spending on animal welfare at some point before poverty is entirely eliminated.)

I support lab grown meat research / production, other interventions seem useless. I support "global health" more broadly and strongly, you have less ways to burn money in ways i find useless

I think "EA orthodoxy" pretty strongly supports this conclusion, so the main question is whether the orthodoxy is trustworthy on this question. One possible concern is that GiveWell's estimates tend to follow a highly skeptical methodology, and I worry that most comparisons with GiveWell aren't comparing apples to apples on that front. I could imagine there being orders of magnitude in this, but from skimming the other comments on the thread I would guess not enough orders of magnitude to bridge all of the gap (i.e. even a GiveWell-skeptical assessment of animal welfare interventions would still put them in the lead, though perhaps much less so). I haven't used any quantitative methodology for this, though, so I don't feel very comfortable with it.

I would be much more skeptical that the gap could be so large if I believed that a lot of quantitative analysis and prioritisation had gone into animal welfare already (like, why is everyone missing this?), but my impression is that really no-one is interested in doing it, so it seems plausible that a huge gap would have gone unnoticed. (This is in contrast to global health where I think it would be suspicious if GiveWell's analysis was totally unlike any of the work done by government global aid departments, consultancies, etc. -- their work was much less unprecedented.)

The vast majority of sentient beings are non-human animals, and the problem of animal suffering is far more neglected compared to global health. I think it's also worth noting that we are probably quite biased against taking animal suffering as seriously as we should (we live in an extremely speciesist culture, we belong to the human species, animal suffering tends to be hidden/out of sight, etc). 

Animal welfare getting so little^[1] EA funding, at present, relative to global health, seems to be an artefact of Open Phil’s ‘worldview diversification,’ which imo is a lacklustre framework for decision-making, both in theory and (especially) in practice: see, e.g., Sempere (2022).

Cost-effectiveness analyses I’ve seen indicate that animal welfare interventions, like cage-free campaigns, are really excellent uses of money—orders of magnitude more effective than leading global health interventions.

Though not central to my argument, there’s also the meat-eater problem, which I think is under-discussed.

1. ^{^}

   Surprisingly (to me), I wasn’t able to quickly find a more up-to-date breakdown of funding by cause area. (There’s this spreadsheet, but the cause areas are broken into sub-areas.)

I think animal welfare is much more cost-effective, my slight skepticism comes from the idea of positive feedback loops and the knock-on effects in other cause areas.

I'd be surprised if there isn't something in the order of at least a 100x to 1000x difference in cost-effectiveness in favour of animal interventions (as suggested here).

Animals are much more numerous, neglected, and have terrible living conditions, so there's simply much more to do. According to FarmKind, $100 donated to the Impact Fund can protect 124 chickens 🐥 from suffering, as well as 61 pigs 🐷, a cow 🐮, 22 fish 🐟, and more than 25 000 shrimps, 𝘢𝘭𝘭 𝘢𝘵 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘴𝘢𝘮𝘦 𝘵𝘪𝘮𝘦. Plus, it offsets ~6.7 tonnes of CO2 🌎. These kinds of numbers would be unthinkable for human-focused charities.

According to the New York Declaration on Animal Consciousness, a significant amount of evidence points to these animals being sentient (able to feel pain and pleasure). As indicated through research on the Moral Weight Project, it's hard to have a high confidence that their moral value and ability to suffer is much lower than that of humans. I would be extremely surprised that individuals with which we share billions of years of evolutionary history are less able to suffer. Why would evolution not implement a tool as useful as suffering in animals? 

I feel like the view that animals do not matter too much morally often does not come from a detailed research, but mostly stems from intuition. We have a natural tendency to prefer those that are more similar to us humans. This is normal and natural, and it feels good to help humans - however, it might not be the optimal choice. 

For instance, Farmkind estimates that less than 10% of the funds raised by effective giving organizations go to factory farming. Even in the context of strategy diversification, it’s weird to allocate such a small amount to trillions of individuals suffering today.

I think not taking enough animals into account is the strongest issue I see in EA - although it fares much better on this point than most other social movements. For instance, the positive expected value of working on longtermism relies on the assumption that the future will likely be positive for all beings. Few people, however, explicitly look into whether the future will be positive or negative for animals - many scenarios include the continuation of factory farming. Right now, if humans and farmed animals are considered together, total global welfare may be declining at increasing speed, and could already be well below zero.

However, EA is already one of the movements with the best track record in the world for helping animals - with thousands of people supporting impactful organisations, so I am confident it can go even further on that path. 

Both are shockingly underfunded. But I think future generations will be even more shocked by how we treated (i.e. actively caused great suffering to) farm animals than by how we failed to help humans in dire need. 

A few reasons immediately come to mind for me:

1. There are many more animals in factory farms than humans (scale)
2. The average suffering of these animals is likely worse than the average suffering of humans (because animals are almost uniformly kept in horrendous conditions, while humans are not) (scale)
   1. My intuition is that the "moral multiplier" of human ability to suffer is not much higher than 1, if at all, for many animals. Animals have central nervous systems and nociceptors just like we do. Mammal suffering in particular might be close to par with humans, but I see no obvious reason that birds or fish are somehow less able to suffer. I also think that there's probably some bias due to our culture's philosophical heritage of "rational capability = moral consideration"
   2. Not an expert at this, though, so it's just me freewheeling
3. I don't have exact numbers with me, but I would bet that animal welfare/rights receives much less funding and attention than global health and development (neglectedness)
   1. I've also heard that a dollar could prevent more years of, say, chicken suffering than years of human suffering (tractability)

For me, I think the biggest crux is whether you believe animal suffering is comparable to human suffering. Animal is a broad category, but I think at least for some animals, there is all the reason to think that their suffering is comparable and little reason to think it is not. The only reason I put one notch below the maximum is to signal that I am willing to concede some slight uncertainty about this, but nowhere near enough to persuade me that animal welfare/rights is not a pressing cause.

I'm fairly convinced by the scale arguments for animal welfare, but have a slight hesitation due to worldview diversification considerations, optics, and a possible lack of room for more funding. If I had to irreversibly allocate the $100m in the next ten minutes, however, I would choose animal welfare.

Humans are just more important. If you disagree, how many chickens would you trade your mother's life for?

This feels right to say, but open to arguments against it.

The only context for me where it would make more sense to spend it on AW, would be if somehow the ripple effect from doing so would benefit humans more than investing it directly into global health.

Maybe by improving nutrition, or improving global morals by not allowing other living beings to suffer, or just having a clear conscience.

I'm not saying an animal suffering is right or acceptable, but it comes second, and will always come second to me, at least while human suffering is still so so high.

Low confidence, but my intuition is that animal welfare is more neglected and would have a better ROI in terms of suffering reduced.

I think animal welfare is still very underfunded, and the problem is very bad. My main worry is tractabiilty, and whether we actually have levers to pull on to make a significant difference.

I will comment based on my personal experience as a small-scale poultry farmer. Due to space limitations, I chose to use the battery cage system for egg production. Ideally, I would have preferred a cage-free system, but the cost of building such infrastructure was beyond my reach. While it is unfortunate, this highlights the challenges many farmers face. When advocating for improved animal welfare, it is essential to understand these constraints and provide education, as well as financial support, to help farmers transition to more humane and sustainable practices."

This version clarifies your experience, emphasizes the difficulty of transitioning to better systems, and focuses on the need for both education and funding to drive change.

Positive knock-on effects from funding animal welfare are likely far greater than from funding global health on the present margin. 

Animal welfare does more to push the frontiers of moral circle expansion

Animal welfare is just so much more neglected, relative to the scale.

However, I don't go all the way to a strong agree since I think the evidence base is weaker and am less certain of finding good interventions; along with a stronger sense of moral responsibility towards humans; along with a bigger "sentience discount" than other moral comparisons between humans and non-human animals.

Reading the discussions here I cannot shake the intuition that utilitarianism with very big numbers is once again resulting in weird conclusions. AW advocates are basically describing earth as hell with a tiny sanctuary reserved for humans that are better off than average. I need more convincing. While I cannot disagree with the math or data, I think better theories of animal suffering are needed. At what point is a brain sufficiently developed, for example, to experience suffering in a way that is morally relevant, that we should care about? Are there qualitative differences that override all quantitative ones, and if so which are those? All the same, I do not completely disagree because 1) moral circle widening is very important to me; 2) at the end of the day I would not compare causes, but specific interventions. There could very well be a highly effective intervention in the animal space that is better than anything GiveWell does, but I am unaware of it.

epistemic status: extremely quickly written thoughts, haven't thought these through deeply, these are mostly vibes. i spent 10 minutes writing this out. i do not cite sources.

• seems like non-human animals are suffering much more than humans, both in quantity of beings suffering & extent of suffering per being
  • it might be that non-human animals are less morally valuable than humans — i think i buy into this to some extent, but, like, you'd have to buy into this to a ridiculously extreme extent to think that humans are suffering more than non-human animals in aggregate
• seems like animal welfare has been pretty tractable — in-particular, e.g. shrimp or insect welfare, where magnitudinal differences
• it seems like there's currently substantially more of a global focus (in terms of $ for sure, but also in terms of general vibes) on global health than on animal welfare, even holding suffering between the two groups constant
• i generally feel pretty cautious about expanding into new(er) causes, for epistemic modesty reasons (for both empirical & moral uncertainty reasons)
  • this is particularly true for the sub-cause-areas within animal welfare that seem most promising, like shrimp & insect welfare as well as wild animal welfare
  • this is what's preventing me from moving the dial ~all the way to the right
• some things this question doesn't take into acct:
  • within each of these areas, how is the $100mm being spent?
  • how would other funders react to this? would e.g. some other funder pull out of [cause] because $100mm just appeared?
  • etc — though i don't think that these questions are particularly relevant to the debate
• some cruxes around which i have the most uncertainty:
  • extent to which there continue to be tractable interventions in AW (compared to GH)
  • extent to which i believe that non-human lives have moral significance
  • probably some others that i'm not thinking of

Reading RP's work in the last months and the posts for debate week has made me more inclined towards AW funding. 

How does marginal spending on animal welfare and global health influence the long-term future?

I'd guess that most of the expected impact in both cases comes from the futures in which Earth-originating intelligent life (E-OIL) avoids near-term existential catastrophe and goes on to create a vast amount of value in the universe by creating a much larger economy and colonizing other galaxies and solar systems, and transforming the matter there into stuff that matters a lot more morally than lifeless matter ("big futures").

For animal welfare spending, then, perhaps most of the expected impact come from the spending reducing the amount of animal suffering and suffering of other non-human sentient beings (e.g. future AIs) in the universe compared to the big futures without the late 2020s animal welfare spending. Perhaps the causal pathway for this is affecting what people think about the moral value of animal suffering and that positively affecting what E-OIL does with the reachable universe in big futures (less animal suffering and lower probability of neglecting the importance of sentient AI moral patients).

For global health spending, perhaps most of the expected impact comes from increasing the probability that E-OIL goes on to have a big future. Assuming the big futures are net positive (as I think is likely) this would be a good thing.

I think some global health spending probably has much more of an impact on this than others. For example, $100M would only put a dent in annual malaria deaths (~20,000 fewer deaths, a <5% reduction in annual deaths for 1 year) and it seems like that would have quite a small effect on existential risk. Whereas it seems plausible to me that if the money was spent on reducing the probability of a severe global pandemic in the 2030s (spending which seems like it could qualify as "global health" spending) plausibly could have a much more significant effect. I don't know how much $100M could reduce the odds of a global pandemic in the 2030s, but intuitively I'd guess that it could make enough of a difference to be much more impactful on reducing 21st century existential risk than reducing malaria deaths.

How would the best "global health" spending compare to the "animal welfare" spending? Could it reduce existential risk by enough to do more good than better values achieved via animal welfare spending could do?

I think it plausibly could (i.e. the global health spending plausibly could do much more good), especially in the best futures in which it turns out that AI does our moral philosophy really well such that our current values don't get locked in, but rather we figure out fantastic moral values after e.g. a long reflection and terraform the reachable universe based on those values.

But I think that in expectation, $100M of the global health spending would only reduce existential risk by a small amount, increasing the EV of the future by a small amount (something like <0.001%), and intuitively $100M extra spent on animal welfare (given the relatively small size of current spending on animal welfare), could do a lot more good (to increase the value of the big future by a larger small amount (than the small amount of increased probability of a big future from the global health scenario).

Initially I was answering about halfway toward Agree from Neutral, but after thinking this out, I'm moving further toward Agree.

• Cost-effectiveness estimates generally suggest that, for most reasonable assumptions about the moral weight and degree of suffering of animals, animal welfare interventions are most cost-effective
• Animal welfare is more neglected than global health, but not (again for reasonable assumptions about how much animal wellbeing matters) proportionally less important

I really love the visuals of the voting tool, here's how we could make it even better for future iterations.

The axes currently aren't labeled and, if I'm being really honest I ended up being too lazy to vote as I would have had to count up the notches manually. I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one (see Beware Trivial Inconveniences).

I also suspect that it makes the results less meaningful. Even though people have wildly different views on what 7/10 or strongly agree means, there's still some degree of social consensus that has implicitly formed around these from use. Since this is a relatively novel interface, there's going to be a lot more variation in terms of what three notches means for one person versus another.

Anyway, thanks again to the team for building the tool/running this debate week!

I want to note that this is more consensus than I thought in favour of the proposition. I would have guessed the median was much nearer 50% than it is. 

Unfair to ask people to consider the ethics of their food while their loved ones are dying of malaria and TB.

In terms of EA charities most commonly cited in these areas only, I think global health charities are much more well evidenced.

I think the most effective animal welfare interventions are probably more effective, I'm just much less sure what they are.

Animal welfare is more important and more neglected, although tractability is less clear.

Animal welfare is (even) more neglected than global health. My sense is that $100M being spent in a coordinated manner would have an outsized effect on the field. It would help catalyze future organizations and future funding to a greater extent than it would if spent on global health.

By my count, animal welfare is 100x more neglected than global health (Edit: global development, not global health — my mistake). I'm unsure how much bigger it is in scale (given that making trades between humans and animals is hard) — but I'd guess it's very very much larger in scale.

seems like the marginal value is much higher

I currently agree pretty strongly, because the basic case for the quantity of animal suffering in factory farms is very strong. My uncertainty is over the tractability, and I hope to learn more about that, and adjust my vote, during the week. 

1. Animal welfare is extremely neglected compared to human philanthropy. (However, effective interventions receive only a small fraction of altruistic funding intended to help humans.)
2. I'm highly uncertain about counterfactuals and higher-order effects, such as changes in long-term human population and eating patterns due to accelerated global economic development.

While I deeply value human welfare, I believe the combination of vast scale, neglectedness, and tractability makes a compelling case for prioritizing animal welfare more than we currently do — especially from an impartial, evidence-based perspective. Many on the opposing side mention that they assign more moral worth to humans than non-humans, but I don't think that view is incompatible with allocating more resources towards animal welfare.

Many global health interventions plausibly have negative effects on animal welfare (e.g., increasing factory farming). The inverse doesn't seem as true.

Due to their neglectedness (and the lack of animal participation in markets) animal interventions are also probably more efficient at converting $$ -> utils

No one is purely impartial. Virtually everyone allocates more resources to themselves than a stranger. Almost every parent will allocate more resources to their children than a stranger. Many choose to allocate more resources to a sibling or close friend in need even if a stranger is in “more” need.

Impartiality is a spectrum, and it is driven by personal beliefs and values. I’m more partial towards humans on this spectrum than many other voters on this poll. From a positive utilitarian perspective, a human life that is saved has more potential to make their own positive impact than an animal could. 

I do believe that animal welfare is important, but I also believe that promoting human welfare is significantly more important. I believe that any currently existing moral value comparison that results in the decision to donate significantly more money towards animal welfare than people must be under valuing the welfare of humans.Thus, I believe human health and well-being ought to be prioritized. Perhaps this classifies me as “speciesist”, though I prefer the label humanist.

Ariel Simnegar 🔸 @ 2024-10-10T17:51 (+6)

Hey Josh, just drilling in on the claim that "any currently existing moral value comparison that results in the decision to donate significantly more money towards animal welfare than people must be under valuing the welfare of humans". Do you agree that that basically implies that humans are worth infinitely more than animals? Because if e.g. we can spend a dollar to prevent one person's paper cut, or prevent one trillion dogs from being skinned and boiled alive, this would imply we should prevent the paper cut.

If you're instead saying that you think any value system should assign at least the majority of the global philanthropic budget should go to humans rather than animals, I still think you should be in favor of allocating this marginal $100m to animals, given that this is the current split of spending on humans vs farmed animals:

Josh Piecyk 🔹 @ 2024-10-10T18:48 (+2)

No I don't agree that my claim implies that humans are infinitely more morally valuable than animals, rather they are significantly more valuable. I believe that we are currently allocating too much resources to animal welfare.

I don't think it's productive to think of hypothetical scenarios that are extremely far detached from reality like your paper cut scenario. Instead, I'm imagining a child in sub-saharan Africa going blind due to malnutrition or dying from malaria, and I'm having a hard time imagining prioritizing the welfare of any amount of chickens over that child. I acknowledge that the non-infinite number exists, maybe it's 100,000 or 1,000,000 cage-free chickens in exchange for a human life. However, it seems clear to me that the magnitude of current human suffering deserves every marginal bit of resources it can receive at the cost of helping animals. 

Ariel Simnegar 🔸 @ 2024-10-10T19:12 (+3)

Historically, that number has been 30,000 to 400,000 cage-free chickens in exchange for a human life. (Using $5000 to save a life through the Against Malaria Foundation, compared to moving 9 to 120 years of hens' lives per dollar to a cage-free environment, and a lifespan of 1.5 years per hen.)

So we are currently within the margin of error for the ballpark you quoted. Perhaps, given that you're partial to humans over animals due to our shared species, that's not enough for you to allocate the marginal $100m to animals. But maybe that shifts your degree of certainty that we should allocate it all to humans?

Josh Piecyk 🔹 @ 2024-10-10T19:34 (+3)

Thank you for showing me that calculation. Upon further thought, I think my belief is more along the lines of 1,000,000 to 3,000,000 chickens being equivalent to a single human life. 

Based on suffering reduction alone, my opinion is that the weight of human suffering carries at least 1,000,000 times more weight than a chicken. When also considering the potential indirect positive impacts a human can have, as well as the difference in experience size between humans and animals, the decision to prioritize human welfare over animal welfare becomes even clearer to me. I hope our society reaches a point at which human suffering has been reduced to the point that we can focus on animal welfare, but I think we're likely decades away.

I'd like to caveat this by saying I'm rather new to effective altruism, and I expect my views to evolve the more I learn. I'm curious to gain a deeper understanding of the underlying philosophical premises inherent in some of the views expressed here. 

Animal welfare space needs considerably more rigorous research (which should be done, but will cost much less than $100m) before knowing if it includes better investments than the top ones in global health.

Industrialised animal farming is the single biggest cause of suffering, the most neglected / under-reported and under-funded and therefore deserves all the funding it can possibly source. Moreover, reducing animal agriculture would also reduce risks (zoonoses / pandemics); environmental harms and improve human health outcomes. It would be a win-win for multiple cause areas.

The neglectedness and intensity of animal suffering would, in a triaging scenario, see me prioritizing it over many global health interventions. I am open to the idea that many animals do actually live lives worth living. That said, I suspect I would rather forego living than spend an existence as an industrially farmed broiler chicken or fish. These are the animals I would spend money on at the margin, with research into the welfare of more liminal animals like crustaceans and insects (probably not large increases for wild for now, since tractability may remain a constraint).

I am sensitive to the idea that animal welfare work may not be able to productively absorb $100 million. At the same time, I would like to see more experimentation with campaigns and approaches in the animal advocacy movement.

If it can be spent over any period of time, this removes my biggest concern (that we wouldn't find $100m worth of good opportunities for animals). 

I am voting based on my prior that animal work is more impactful as it is more neglected and there are so many more animals.

Seems likely correct. I'm not fully certain because I wouldn't be that surprised to be wrong. It is much easier to help animals than people on the margin.

I update a bit more because I haven't read good arguments against and have seen some possible arguments debunked.

I recently learned that the animal welfare accounts for only 3% of EA's funding, which seems far from proportional to other causes, taking into account the number of people affected, the degree of certainty that the pain exists (it's not hypothetical) and the intensity of the pain experienced. It therefore seems to me to be too neglected.

(Placement confidence: fairly low) 

I'm envisioning putting the $100MM in a trust and (as an initial strategy) spending ~$15MM extra a year until expended.

I think others have stated the general case for animal welfare as particularly neglected (although I do not agree with many of those posts asserting an astronomical difference for various reasons). So I'll focus this comment on why I didn't initially place further along on the animal-welfare side:

(1) I tentatively think AW work can be particularly high effectiveness because it is often so leveraged; EA dollars serve as a catalyst to ignite the building blocks that were already there (e.g., pre-existing moral sentiment as the fuel that allows corporate campaigns to work). It's unclear to me whether there is enough quality fuel to inject a bolus of catalyst here, which is part of why the gradual spend is important to my vote here.

(2) I give some credence to the possibility of humanewashing. I think I can mitigate that by putting the money in a trust and spending at a moderate clip, which would allow me to avoid (or apply extra scrutiny to) projects with moderate-to-high humanewashing risks.

It's much easier to fundraise for GH&D (less "weird" / more legible)

I support both clauses. I see a moral argument or at least a reasonable justification for favoring humans over animals, holding measured 'ability to feel pain constant'.

However, I'm convinced by the evidence that funding to support programs like corporate campaigns for cage-free eggs are likely to be effective, and have vastly higher welfare gains per dollar, by most reasonable measures of relative chicken/human welfare.

The animal welfare space has very little funding and $100 million is likely to make a substantial positive difference, both directly/immediately, and in shifting cultural and political attitudes.

I don't think animal interventions are worse but I do I think the statement is wild speculation. I don't think EAs can effectively compare interventions between very different cause areas. 

I suspect most EAs don't actually think through their own cause prioritisation, I think they instead defer to others, and thus don't view the consensus as compelling evidence to change my mind.

Evidence that ripple-effects of interventions are negligible would change my mind though. I find the EV calculations for the short-term supremacy of animal welfare interventions compelling but suspect that global health interventions have larger ripple effects throughout time and that ripple effects are likely more important than the immediate effect of the intervention. 

As several posts here have already highlighted, the total suffering endured by animals is far greater than that experienced by humans—unless we consider animal moral weights to be hundreds or thousands of times less important than our own.

Moreover, as shown by the Rethink Priorities researches, the cost-effectiveness of the best animal welfare organizations could be a lot more effective than the best short-term alternatives for humans.

Yet, funding for animal causes represents only a small fraction of Open Philanthropy's budget, which seems inconsistent.

If we follow the data we currently have, it seems to me that these 100 million dollars should be allocated to (at least partially) catch up on the underfunding of animal welfare.

Yes, increasing funding too quickly could potentially reduce the cost-effectiveness of some organizations, but as has been said, this money can be invested over several years if needed.

I am very convinced by the arguments presented in Ariel Simnegar's "Open Phil Should Allocate Most Neartermist Funding to Animal Welfare". I still have uncertainty in moral weights so am not 100% agree

In a nutshell - there is more suffering to address in non-human animals, and it is a more neglected area.

@Toby Tremlett🔹 is there a way to see the final debate week banner? I wanted to include a screenshot in the slides for my local group's next meetup, but can't find a way to access the banner now that debate week is over.

The amount of suffering is orders of magnitudes above in the cause area of animals.

Uncertain of how big of a %-increase a $100m addition is for the animal advocacy movement. But definitely a lot higher than for global health. While animal advocacy is much more neglected I'm wondering how much more funding it can effectively absorb, or how fast the cost-effectiveness would decline. Given the scale of the problem probably not that fast? For global health, I believe this funding wouldn't have substantial decreasing marginal returns. (Some quick thoughts without having read others' comments)

JamesÖz's post explaining that the default trajectory for animal welfare is far worse than the default trajectory for global health.

Each individuals qualia being equal, healthier and happier humans actively improve the future whereas healthier and happier animals do not.  

 

1. It's almost impossible to predict the long term effect.

   Humans are the only actors that can produce moral force. But the problem is, how much AW will change indirectly by spending on GH? I have neither evidence nor instict to guide me on this.

2. This question lacks the context of how we use money, so our answers would vary a lot without a consensus.

   ”It would be better for EA practitioners to spend ..." is different from "It would be better for existing major organizations to spend ..." in terms of cost effectiveness.

   My feeling is slanted towards disagree, but I'm sure it's biased. I simply don't know much about AW, so I choose neutral.

The default trajectory for animal welfare looks grim, extremely grim, and does not seem about to reach a tipping point anytime soon. I do believe that a pig that shrieks is in pain, and that inflicting this pain is immoral.

I am more uncertain when it comes to tractability. I also favor pluralism and tend to view things with an inner preferential voting system to adjudicate my moral uncertainties.

Not high confidence. I'm guessing 100m is tiny for global health and large for animal welfare. Still, I value human well-being over animal well-being, other things equal.

One point that I think does not get discussed enough (though I will be happy to be corrected on this) is that animal welfare work in many cases is going up against resistance from some of the biggest and most politically powerful industries in the world. I did see a reference to animal welfare being more politicized in this post, but I think it needs to be emphasized more that it's not just "politicized" but in fact is in opposition to the political power of huge corporate entities like Tyson Foods, JBS, Smithfield, etc. who from what I can tell have just as much political power as oil, coal, and tobacco industries but without an opposition that is as strong as the global environmental movement (in the case of coal and oil) or public health advocates (in the case of tobacco). These companies often stand to lose money from various animal welfare improvements and therefore are willing to spend money to defeat efforts to make those improvements. 

This leads to the problem that there is not as likely to be a linear relationship between spending money on many animal welfare reforms and making actual improvements, because countervailing forces with more money to spend can respond to efforts for animal welfare improvements. In other words, we can't be sure if spending $100 million to convince the public to care more about animal welfare will be effective, because it might trigger a $200 million dollar advertising campaign that says things like "real mean eat beef" that unfortunately appear to be relatively effective despite being incredibly dumb. 

While there may be a few ideologues out there that oppose certain EA global health interventions, in general I don't think these interventions are going up against the same kind of organized political opposition. 

Both suggested animal welfare improvements (cage free, slower growth, etc) within the current system and alternative proteins threaten current entrenched interests and so run into this problem.  However, I will shamelessly use this opportunity to point out the still fairly neglected approach of using gene-editing to reduce suffering in modern agriculture. This is something that can be done without threatening the current business model of powerful companies. It does run into opposition along the lines of people having an initial very negative reaction to the idea of gene editing animals (particularly consuming genetically modified animals). However, crucially (imo), these attitudes are very likely shaped by culture and context and I think could be overcome by the same powerful industries that somehow managed to get our current atrocious factory farming systems implemented with fairly minimal public outcry.

There are more sentient beings affected by factory farming and the problem is more neglected.

Animal welfare is much more neglected than global human health. Even if there were strong arguments on scale and solvability in the opposite direction, I don't believe they can tip the scale.

Mostly the meat-eater problem, also cost-effectiveness analyses. Also higher neglectedness on priors.

Their suffering is worse when considering amount of suffering x amount of people. Animal welfare work could include expanding the moral circle, which could end up benefiting global health, but I don't expect the reverse to be true.

I'm very unsure, but slightly lean towards animal welfare due to the heuristic that the further outside typical moral circles the more neglected are the opportunities

Human welfare seems much less neglected than the welfare of factory farm animals. Even just an egg may represent many hours of suffering to produce. If insects are not so much less sentient than humans, their welfare could be a huge deal too.

So I favor animal welfare. But it's even better when it's backed by strategic thinking and a clear theory of impact. The total number of future sentient beings could be many orders of magnitude greater than the number of existing ones. We are unable to "feel how big" those numbers are, but it matters a lot, and it's not virtuous to ignore it. Setting aside uncertainty, it doesn't really make a moral difference whether we're preventing the same amount of suffering in 10 years or in 10 billion years. So, grantors should think deep about how donations could, even indirectly, affect these. Likewise, we can't just assume that AI progress will suddenly stop indefinitely and that society will be the same in 50 years. AI will impact animal advocacy. There may also be some overlap in the coming years between animal welfare and AI welfare advocacy that could be leveraged.

The main reasons for going as far to the animal welfare side as I did:
-I suspect there are more unexplored opportunities to have an outsized impact on the animal welfare side due to neglectedness.
-The scale of the problem is very larger (~100 billion lives a year in meat production, and that's not even the entire problem).
-The meat eater problem plays a part as well. If you save someone and they go on eating meat, that could have a negative impact as well. However, this line of argumentation might be a can of worms.

Global health still has some weight due to:
-Global health is targeted at poorer populations who generally consume less meat.
-The reduction of disease/poverty can have some instrumental value (cynical, people not dying => ++productivity => better lives in the future)
-Of course, reduction in poverty/disease is good in itself too.

Animal welfare is much more neglected than global health (though maybe a bit less tractable).

It seems plausible animals have moral patienthood and so the scale of the problem is larger for animals whilst also having higher tractability. At the same time, you have cascading effects of economic development into better decision making. As a longtermist, this makes me very uncertain on where to focus resources. I will therefore put myself centrally to signal my high uncertainty.

My soft sense is that great opportunities in the animal space face greater funding constraints than in the global health space. 

I think most of my reservations are mostly deontological, plus a few fringe possibilities

I am quite receptive to caveats about how easy it is so scale current orgs and interventions, but that seems more of a practical issue (than can partially be solved through more money?).

Other than that, I just think it's a crazy scale of very neglected suffering and the sooner we figure out how to make significant changes to the system the better.

I tend to agree with Ariel Simnegar's "Open Phil Should Allocate Most Neartermist Funding to Animal Welfare", however I still have some uncertainty in moral weights.

Animal welfare seems likely more tractable, substantially more important, and vastly more neglected. 

No clue, tough question

Several factors make me confident regarding the importance of this choice : the sheer scale and intensity of the suffering involved, the lower cost of helping nonhuman individuals in farms compared to humans, and the comparative small size of the aniimal welfare / advocacy movement giving $100m a potentially more important long-term impact.

I based my vote on the fact that I have close to 0 doubt about the fact that antispecism is true (the fact that you can't discriminate someone on the base of his specie). 
If you consider antispecism true, you have to take in consideration that humanity is a really small part of all animals living. Moreover, we have pretty good reasons to think that animals are living in worse conditions than humans (pretty obvious for farm animals that live in industrial farms, more challenging intuitively for wild animals but many studies make us things that suffering in wild animal is even a more important subect than farm animals). 
Therefore, if you accept these three premices: 
1- Antispecism is true. (consensus in moral philosophy)
2- Other animals are in greater number than humans. (fact)
3- Other animals live in worse conditions than humans. (fact)

You arrive to the conclusion that it is more valuable to give to animal welfare funding than global health. 
The only argument I can see that can make change the balance is the fact that it is not possible/really hard to improve animal welfare but it looks like it is not the case.

I read somewhere that around 2% of EA donations are allocated towards animal welfare. I don't know what an ideal world's split would be, but it would have AW funding at a lot higher than 2%. 

Will there be any follow-up survey on this? I'd be interesting in knowing what people learned and changed their minds about, and how people's views changed on animal welfare vs global health overall.

I assume that the primary goal is to reduce extreme suffering or negative experiences. Based on the evidence I've reviewed, efforts to alleviate suffering in factory farming appear to be far more cost-effective in achieving this goal.

I don't see compelling evidence that improvements in global health significantly enhance worldwide peace and security, which could potentially reduce existential risks from advanced AI. This connection would have been, in my view, the strongest argument for prioritizing global health interventions.

While I believe global health initiatives should never be completely abandoned—as they demonstrate tangible success—I generally consider existential risk mitigation and reducing extreme animal suffering to be significantly higher priorities. In my assessment, these areas are at least 10 times more promising than global health interventions, and potentially far greater.

Roughly 60% of all mammals are raised for food globally and over 85% of the world eats or seeks a diet consisting of animal meat and a larger percent for animal based foods. Assuming this investment produces healthier animals that do not require antibiotics or other mass livestock farming practices that negatively impact humans, the investment is a net positive long-term. Healthier food could lead to a healthier society which improves economies in various ways. 

The question is too vague to agree with to the nth degree. However, global health is heavily funded, more than animal welfare for sure, and global health would dilute any any net positive impact the investment would have due to the sheer cost per person and general short lived outcome (e.g., x-ray machine will break, medicine effectiveness will dwindle, medical needs will change overtime by community)

I believe that I, like many visitors on the Forum, would usually be very careful to vote on either end of an extreme. The reason I opted to move all in into animal welfare is that, while I acknowledge and put some credence on views around ripple effects and moral uncertainty (in the sense of placing some weight on societal consensus views), these views primarily have an influence on my view of how global philanthropic spending should be allocated. 

However, when it comes to an additional $100m, the (difference of) neglectedness completely wipes out these considerations for me. It appears, that there are $290 Million going into FAW^[1] vs. $70 Billion into GHD; pouring another $100m into FAW would effectively grow FAW from 0.41% of global philanthropic (neartermist) funding to 0.55%. I am not sure if this is the ideal way to frame the debate question (I use it really more as a proxy), but I have close to 0 credence that less than 0.55% of global philanthropic (neartermist) spending should be spent on farmed animal welfare.

1. ^{^}

   I focus on farmed animal welfare as opposed to including wild animals, because it seems that that's what many debate readers have in mind and are discussing here.

The scale of animal suffering and exploitation is vast, yet it remains one of the most neglected moral crises of our time. Beyond its ethical implications, animal farming is a key driver of some of the most pressing global public health challenges, including antibiotic resistance, zoonotic pandemics, and the rise of chronic diseases. Heart disease, the leading cause of death globally, is closely linked to the consumption of animal products—meat, eggs, and dairy—laden with saturated fat, endotoxins, and inflammatory compounds. By shifting away from animal farming, we not only alleviate immense animal suffering but also target systemic issues that exacerbate global public health risks. This transition addresses interconnected challenges such as global malnutrition, climate change, and the fragility of food systems, offering a high-impact solution with profound ethical, environmental, and health benefits.

I know this is a debate, but one thing I want to touch on is that animal welfare and human welfare are not necessarily in conflict. I think initiatives like preventing the rise of factory farming in the developing world could be really great for both animals and humans. Animals wouldn't have to exist in horrible conditions, and humans could (as far as I know; don't have sources with me right now) have greater food, water, and resource security, reduced ecological/climate devastation, and reduced risk of disease, to name a few things. I think it's important to think about ways in which we can jointly improve animal welfare and global health, because we all ultimately want to create a better world.

I haven't seen any convincing and coherent framework that can analytically equate animal lives to human lives, but I am open to having my mind changed. My current position is informed mostly by my (flawed) intuition

1. I feel like animal welfare is based on incorrect philosophical arguments. I do not think that animals (sentient) suffer in the same sense that humans (sapient) suffer. I do not believe that any amount of the qualitatively different animal suffering adds up to any amount of human suffering. They are non-commensurate. For more detail, see here: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Htu55gzoiYHS6TREB/sentience-matters?commentId=wusCgxN9qK8HzLAiw  In accordance with this view, I argue that not a single dollar should be spent on animal suffering while there is still a single human at risk of dying from malnourishment or preventable disease.
2. Aside from this argument, I believe there is a separate argument from urgency. I think that the immediate concerns of AI outweigh any possible impact from any spending on animal suffering. The continued existence of humanity and the prevention of suffering of sapient digital beings are both at a hinge in history, where the effort put into these causes now matters far more than the non-urgent cause of animal suffering. Animal suffering is increasing only relatively slowly, whereas these other causes may explode in importance in a matter of a few months. No sense in reupholstering the backseat of your car while your car is speeding down a steep mountain road with no one at the wheel...

Last time I checked, improving the lives of animals was much cheaper than improving human lives; and I don't think that arguments saying that humans have more moral weight are enough to compensate.

under neartermism, which is not my view but which may be the spirit of the question, animal welfare seems obviously better because non-human animals are extremely neglected by human civilization, either left to die in the wild or cut up in mechanized torture facilities.

under longtermism, it's basically a question of which could positively effect the values of the first agent superintelligence. probably neither would have a strong effect, but conditional on an effect being had, i'd guess it would route through the increased moral progress caused by animal welfare advocacy, somehow leading to a less human-centric forever-value.

(100% under neartermism, ~80% under longtermism in recognition of uncertainty)

Many individuals and organizations are already concerned with global health and actively working to improve it. However, animal welfare requires a significant initial effort to elevate this pressing ethical issue in the public's priorities.

Another meta thing about the visuals is that I don't like the +[number] feature that makes it so can't tell, at a glance, that the voting is becoming very tilted towards the right side

Somewhat neutral, though I concur that animal welfare is more neglected and that a straightforward shortterm calculation is on the animal welfare side. However:

With AI, ensuring longevity for many people may be a better use, though I'm uncertain about the exact costs. Animals are more interchangeable than humans, and will die within not that long regardless, which means that ensuring more humans live longer lives is more valuable. The more people that live longer, the more that are able to participate in a possible longevity escape velocity.  (Theoretically one could argue for lengthening the lives of many animals, but most animals are unlikely to live for long enough and will take longer to be given life extending medications)

This makes me view the calculus as significantly more balanced, or potentially weighted on global health significantly. If we can ensure that more people survive, then that ensures a lot of positive utility.  

Animals win on scale & neglectedness while humans win on my (and maybe God's) speciesism bias (but if God exists I think He would appreciate us trying to help out animals i.e. His creations).

Interesting to note that, as it stands, there isn't a single comment on the debate week banner in favor of Global Health. There are votes for global health (13 in total at time of writing), but no comments backing up the votes. I'm sure this will change, but I still find it interesting.

One possible reason is that the arguments for global health > animal welfare are often speciesist and people don't really want to admit that they are speciesist - but I'm admittedly not certain of this.

The $100m is much more likely to make irreversible progress on solving animal welfare issues than it is on global health, because the latter is way less neglected.

99 % of sentience is non human animals + the worst suffering in the world are the animal ones.

Being the executive director of ACE, I'm obviously quite biased. Then again, I joined ACE because I was convinced of the need for more funding for animal health and wellbeing.

At ACE, once our current busy period has ended, we'll dive into the perspectives and arguments presented in this debate week as a team and likely post here and on our blog our reflection.

After just skimming this week's content, the arguments that I personally find most convincing come down to (1) scale and extent of suffering, (2) how little money effective animal advocacy is currently receiving both in relative terms compared to other cause areas and considering the amount of work that needs to and can get done, (3) that animal suffering is a growing but solvable problem.

The reason I'm not 100% agreeing is that I just do not know the global health space well enough. In the animal welfare sector, we're regularly confronted with outdated or uninformed opinions on tractability, context of the movement, complexity of issues, capacity for subjective experiences, etc. I am likely uninformed of the current opportunities and issues facing human GHW work.

With the current state of things, I do not believe that 100m will produce as much positive outcomes in specific areas of animal welfare, (say, sensitization, cash incentives for cage-free farming) compared to specific areas of global health, (say, maternal health, finding solutions to AMR, malaria prevention, NTD's).

Through the ancient art of "multiplication" we can see how important it is to stop the current situation where trillions are being tortured to death.

Animal welfare has been neglected by governments and funding and yet with every growth in the human population, there is an increase in the compromise of the welfare of animals. 

The scale of animal suffering is much greater than global health crisis and receives comparatively less attention.

the scale/degree of suffering is much higher

I have a strong prior for people being much, much more important than animals.

Rethink Priorities moral weights

Human life is more valuable to me than that of an animal

healthy humans take care of their animals

Spending money on animal welfare (specifically veganism) will automatically benefit the global health of humans, and will spare the horrible lives of millions of animals

Yet another thing to mention, although not directly related to human welfare vs non-human animal welfare... What about the moral value of AI, of digital entities? They are already far more complex and human-like than shrimp. When do they reach non-zero value?
 

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ZcJDL4nCruPjLMgxm/ae-studio-sxsw-we-need-more-ai-consciousness-research-and 

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/pieSxdmjqrKwqa2tR/avoiding-the-bog-of-moral-hazard-for-ai 

I consider AI safety to be the primary overwhelming cause area in Global Health and Animal Welfare. But I think that even considering saving the lives of all human and animals doesn't begin to recognize the scope of the issue. This is about extinction. So you must also consider the moral weight of all the future lives lost. I think also that considering life from a hedonistic standpoint of enjoyment/suffering, as if it could sum to a total and thus judge the life worthwhile or not by the total is fundamentally incorrect. I think it's super weird that so many people commenting here are taking that assumption seemingly for granted without even acknowledging the assumption. Is not a life which has a few moments of glory, perhaps leaves some lasting creative achievement, but has a sum of negative hedonistic experiences, a life worth living? Would you say to someone experiencing chronic pain that you were going to murder them because you believed their life was net negative since they were experiencing more suffering than pleasure? This seems nonsensical to me.

Furthermore, extinction brings up an additional moral point. I place fundamental moral weight on diversity. Loosing an endangered species seems worse to me than loosing a similar number of individuals from a very populous species. Every extinction event seems far worse to me than the suffering of individual animals of the same type. If I had to agree that every elephant would live a net hedonistic-negative life for the next three generations of elephants (and that after that they'd still have to take their chances of leading hedonistic-negative or hedonistic-positive lives), but that this was the only way that elephants would get to continue to exist as a species... I'd absolutely choose for elephants to keep existing. This is separate from issues of hedonistic valence.  I don't value a plant species less or more because it can't feel pain through animal nerve cells. This is a separate issue entirely!

Furthermore, I place value on another separate concept: complex intelligent perception of the universe and the related qualia/ experience. To me, the Universe would seem a much poorer place with no human left to observe it. I'd rather have humans exist, in net negative lives according to their selfish perception of suffering, than for no humans to exist. Animal species and plant species too, bring some value.

Furthermore, there is additionally the concept of future potential species which don't yet exist. Uplifted animals. Digital persons. All these things add to both the fundamental values of Diversity and Experiencing the Universe. If all multicellular life on Earth were wiped out, but single celled organisms remained, I'd take value in that beyond the value I place in the lives of those single celled organisms and also beyond the value I place in the existence of their species. My additional type of value would be related to hope that someday multicellular life would evolve again.

The marginal effect of increased spending (say $1 billion) on animal welfare is likely to be far greater than the marginal impact of an extra $1 billion on global health. Granted that public health challenges in low and middle-income countries can at times be substantially lessened with relatively small inputs (e.g., niacin enrichment of corn meal), overall, the impact of relatively small amounts of strategically invested money can have a significant impact on the animal space. For example, I believe the support ($1-2 million) Open Philanthropy has provided to Compassion in World Farming to support Compassion's End the Cage Age" citizen's initiative in Europe is going to have substantial global ramifications for how farmed animals are raised and treated down the road. The EU has temporarily stepped back on its commitment to end caged animal farming. Still, the recent Strategic Dialogue on Agriculture in Europe has again emphasized the importance of ending farmed animal cages. I would also refer readers to the recent papers on the impact of the vulture decline in India. The bat decline in the USA (look for documents by Eyal Frank and colleagues), which concluded that the loss of those wild animals has led to substantial increases in all cause human mortality in India and infant mortality in the USA. Calculating the economic impact of biodiversity decline is a significant challenge, but Frank has provided two fascinating and valuable examples of how animal welfare, human welfare and planetary well-being are connected!

Since animal welfare is highly related to the reality of human health like that of diet and pathogenic diseases, animal welfare is an important issue to tackle with.