EA Doesn’t Need Another Debate. It Needs a Win.
For those at the “top” of EA, who are influencing priorities and conversations…
Effective altruism has become a think tank of endless debate—people arguing about which cause deserves the top spot while the world keeps burning. The movement doesn’t need another thought experiment; it needs proof of concept.
We need to align on one clear, shared goal—something tangible that unites the major cause areas and shows what coordinated altruism can actually do. Otherwise, this movement will slip into obscurity. People are becoming interested in EA, as anxiety about the inhumanity increases. But we are leaving them with no clear action item.
I propose that ending factory farming be that project. It advances climate action, global health, poverty reduction, and moral progress all at once. It’s time for EA to stop philosophizing and start building.
Can we agree on a shared mission? At least temporarily?
Argument for focusing on ending factory farming as a first shared goal:
- Moral Core: Factory farming as the largest moral blind spot of our time—tens of billions of sentient beings suffering for profit.
- Climate Connection: Livestock is a top driver of deforestation, methane emissions, and biodiversity loss. Ending it accelerates climate goals faster than most other interventions.
- Human Health: Reduced zoonotic disease risk, antibiotic resistance, and pandemics.
- Global Poverty: Redirecting grain and land used for livestock could feed billions and stabilize food systems.
- Existential Risk Reduction: A civilization that normalizes mass suffering is morally unfit to handle powerful technologies responsibly. Ending factory farming strengthens collective empathy—an overlooked safeguard against extinction-level threats.
- Moral Expansion: History’s moral arc depends on widening empathy. Factory farming is the final frontier before we extend that empathy to all sentient life.
- Pragmatic Leverage: Every dollar toward ending factory farming produces cascading benefits across other EA priorities.
The list of benefits goes on and on. But this is what I have time for today.
thoughts?
I have two tiny kids, and I am thankful for draft amnesty week. Because otherwise, this would’ve never made it out.
This seems quite false to me? My impression is most people are busy working on their specific cause areas. Relatively little time is spent arguing for one major cause area over another. (This post, of course, fits into that category).
This also seems false to me. EA has not had one single object-level objective for the previous 15 years and it does not seem to have caused obscurity slippage thus far, and it's not clear why we should expect this to change.
Yes, people are definitely doing things. But it also seems that there’s this higher level thing that everyone is worried about even if they’re not specifically working on it, and that thing is: that the world is basically set to implode (climate, deadly pandemic, war, etc.). I’m imagining aligning on that higher level goal, even if we’re all still doing other things as well (because if humanity doesn’t survive, then…oops).
Just because EA hasn’t aligned before doesn’t mean it couldn’t be very beneficial! If we could all see that our individual causes are in fact linked by one greater cause, it could be incredibly powerful.
Maybe your belief is that if enough people "at the top" of EA agree to this, they can influence a majority of the EA community to follow. My sense is that EAs are more independent freethinkers than most other groups, so I don't think this scenario is likely.
Given that, what you're proposing is essentially relabeling the current set of "EAs who care about animal welfare" to "EA". A few EAs who aren't already in this camp might follow you over, but on the whole I strongly suspect this would alienate everyone else who doesn't sign up for this worldview, and it would just fracture the community.
It is not just about animal welfare, it is about many causes at once, which is why it feels like it would be a great mission to align on. The words “factory farming” are misleading, because it’s really about the future of humanity. But unfortunately, I think people hear anything about farming and assume that if they don’t want to be vegan, it has nothing to do with them. But factory farming is a huge reason that we’re headed for a cliff.
And yes, just the EA people who are influencing people. I think lots of people come to EA wondering how they can make the most impact. And I think aligning on a cause for newbies is a very effective way to do that.