Your essay makes me think of a system where you have three things: a human welfare "bucket," values that control how much flows from human to animal welfare at a given time, and another animal welfare "bucket." And human welfare and values are long-term things, which at any given time feed into animal welfare. And you're saying that expanding the animal welfare bucket is not the best long-term intervention for the ultimate purpose of, say, maximizing the combined human and animal welfare. Given that we assume influencing the far future is possible, I don't see any flaw there.

but do you see practical differences between promoting animal causes in the short term and changing values to prioritize animal welfare?

Owen,

Thanks for the two pieces.

I'd be interested to know: do you think your view would be different if you saw the past few hundred years as a period when one group of animals gained a great deal of power, which they used (1) to make their own lives much better and (2) to subject a much larger number of other animals to a great deal of suffering, mainly in order to be able to eat them?

I'm not making an argument that this is the right way of seeing things, though it doesn't seem crazy to me. I'm also not arguing that, if this view is accurate, it's sensible just to project it into the future (ie improvements in human lives will be accompanied by ever-greater suffering of other animals). I'm just drawing attention to the way that, in what you write, you focus on the ways that human lives have improved recently, and that we might expect this to continue, given the ways human societies work, with things being passed on to future generations (knowledge, habits, organisations, material goods); without paying any attention to how this process has also involved inflicting a great deal of suffering on other animals.

It might be that including other animals in the picture makes one feel more ambivalent about the process of development in human societies which we have benefited so richly from, and more wary about what supporting and accelerating this process will bring (the 'human lives getting better' strand which you seem to value highly for benefits long into the future). Or it might be that the suffering of animals is seen as a separate, contingent fact about a narrow period which doesn't have any lessons for what we should expect in the future. Do you have a sense one way or the other? (Perhaps you can't answer if you don't share the premise that lots of animals have suffered as humans have become more powerful, and that this matters.)

I don't think that this necessarily affects the argument that targeting changes in how humans act now is likely to be more important than targeting changes in how animals live now, since the human changes are more likely to be passed on long into the future in some form, and good changes might well have good effects long into the future. But when you write 'I do think that optimising for long-term animal welfare is not the best place to stop in picking an instrumental goal, because it's quite hard to see how things affect it.', you seem to be saying that it's hard to know what would affect the well-being of non-human animals in the long term, in contrast to things that would affect the well-being of humans in the long term. Having a sense of the mixture of gain and suffering across all animals from recent human development might

(1) draw attention to the importance of asking about the long-run well-being of all animals, human and not

(2) make one wonder about whether the future well-being of human and non-human animals are completely independent (thus, better to focus on humans since one can be more confident in the long-run effects) or if there might be an enduring negative relationship

(3) make it less difficult to see what might affect long-term animal welfare (eg more empathy for non-human animals among humans in the short term)

My boyfriend Ben told me that this article is better understood after reading your previous article. Could you include a link to the previous article in the text of this one?

That's a wonderful idea -- researching how to increase empathy. Just as important, though, is how to actually get people to ACT on their caring feelings. I think that there's a lot of 'empty empathy': people feel bad for others yet don't act on their feelings. I guess this is the field of behavioural economics. It's importance and EFFICIENCY cannot be underestimated. One behavioural economist suggested that getting people to stop acting against their own self-interest is by far the most cost effective global health care intervention (ie. many parents in India let their children die by refusing to give them oral rehydration salts despite being begged to by health care professionals). But there is also far too little empathy in the world, so that also needs to be developed, certainly. Another point to keep in mind is that no virtue has absolute value, it only has relative value compared to competing values. For instance, it would be hard to donate a lot to a charity no matter how much you care about its cause if you are simultaneously trying very hard to keep up with the Jones.

Hi Owen :)

Animal welfare can be about more than promoting empathy. For one thing, it's about promoting empathy for nonhumans, which is somewhat different thing from promoting empathy wholesale (which usually means being nicer to other people). Secondly, animal welfare as a case study can raise a number of important ethical issues, such as naturalistic fallacies, welfare- vs. rights-based empathy, how far we think sentience extends, how to weigh minds of different complexities, population ethics, and lots more.

Also, animal welfare is quite sticky, which means it could be a good way to draw people in to these issues and get them excited about them.

I agree that, e.g., veg outreach is not the very best way to help animals. I think talking explicitly about things like wild-animal suffering and digital sentients in the future can be better, which is why I focus on those. But veg outreach is probably not vastly worse, and it can be a good donation suggestion for mainstream donors who are weirded out by far-future ideas.

As far as: "I do think that optimising for long-term animal welfare is not the best place to stop in picking an instrumental goal, because it's quite hard to see how things affect it." I don't agree with this, depending how broadly we define "animal." It seems likely to me that most of the sentience of the far future will reside in non-human-like creatures (robots, sentient subroutines, simulated insects, etc.), and most of the far-future-related things I write about are relevant to improving long-term "animal" welfare in that sense.

The question of whether "sub-goal" x is the "simplest" or best "proxy" for our more ultimate goals doesn't seem particularly useful and can be highly misleading, as in the example you chose. You conclude that promoting animal welfare is very probably not the best cause (because promoting empathy probably dominates it as a proxy), whereas we can't say the same for promoting human welfare. But it could still be the case that promoting animal welfare is a better proxy than human welfare for far future flourishing, even though there's a yet better intermediary in the case of animal welfare. The problem is that multiple descriptions of causes can be described, and we can generate multiple conflicting but practically uninformative statements about proxies and causes.

I am glad you are considering far-future effects in terms of proxies like "increase empathy." I think this is a useful method. Also, I commend you for considering far-future impacts in general, as increasing our confidence in effecting them seems to have high potential upside for EA decision-making.

On the specifics of this post, I am unsure exactly what your claim is now - whether it's (i) that a happier non-human farm animal, all else equal, seems "extremely unlikely" to meet the goal of making the long-term future flourish, or (ii) that improving animal welfare with interventions like vegan leafleting, public demonstrations, antispeciesism essays, or lobbying for farm animals seems "extremely unlikely" to meet the goal of making the long-term future flourish.

(i) seems clearly true, but if you mean (ii), I think that's debatable and am unsure how you arrive at "extremely unlikely." Most non-human animal activists see great value in helping farm animals now as well as potential impact on the far future. I think strong evidence is required to reject their claims with such confidence.

For example, even Vegan Outreach, arguably the most short-run impact focused organization in the field, considers its impact in both ways: "In addition to influencing the diets of individuals, VO wants to change the ways that people view farm animals and teach people that farm animals are capable of suffering. VO aims to influence public opinion to affect long-term public policy." (http://files.givewell.org/files/conversations/Jack%20Norris%205-20-14%20(public).pdf)

Some organizations are much more explicit about their goals for promoting general antispeciesism sentiment and helping animals in the long-run, like Direct Action Everywhere (http://directactioneverywhere.com), and concern themselves very little (if at all) with individual dietary changes.

Now, this isn't clearly the best route to improving the long-term future, but I think it would take very strong evidence to say it is "extremely unlikely" and the point merits further consideration. I know my personal decisions could change with new information on these potential far-future effects.

"In that post, I contrasted human welfare improvements, which have many significant indirect and long-run effects, with animal welfare improvements, which appear not to. That is not to say that interventions which improve animal welfare do not have these large long-run effects, but that the long-run effects of such interventions are enacted via shifts in the views of humans rather than directly via the welfare improvement."

I think I can offer even more insight on what you're saying and why people are confused.

What I believe you're saying, and correct me if I'm wrong, but "work focused primarially on improving the lives of animals today (e.g., THL's talk of 'animals spared') is unlikely to be as high-impact as work focused primarially on improving the lives of humans today (though that also might not be the best cause overall) because humans today have various flow-through effects (e.g., economic development) and animals do not."

I think this is an important conclusion that appears accepted but not widely internalized by many nonhuman-animal-focused EAs.

However, what you actually say are things like "I contrasted human welfare improvements, which have many significant indirect and long-run effects, with nonhuman animal welfare improvements, which appear not to". The term "animal welfare improvements" is ambiguous, though, and does not necessarily refer solely to targeting nonhuman animals in the present.

For example, it's possible that by producing enough vegetarians (e.g., through leafleting) we get a large impact not from sparing nonhuman animals alive today, but produce enough of an anti-speciesist shift to prevent large quantities of nonhuman animal suffering in the far future (c.f., Brian Tomasik's thesis). I don't necessarily agree (or disagree) with this thesis, but you have not yet refuted it.

So when an nonhuman-animal-focused EA comes along and reads this, they conflate their focus on long-run animal goals with your crtique of short-run animal goals and think you're making claims that you're not, and then argue against you for things you may not have said.

Given this, perhaps more clarity could be introduced by clarifying the short-run nature of what you're discussing, by explicitly using the term "short-run" and/or providing concrete examples?