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AI Use Note: Main body text entirely human written. Claude (Opus 4.8) helped develop models of animal life histories in the appendix.
Cross-posted from Good Structures.
Executive Summary
* Animal advocates sometimes make claims like “there are X of this animal...
“How long have you been v*g*n?”
This is one of the most common icebreakers at animal protection events. It’s a baseline assumption, and it mostly holds true: if you’re out advocating for animals not to be tortured or abused, realistically these days you are v**n, or close. And it makes for good conversation. It seems fairly safe to assume when you meet strangers.
But this assumption is hurting the movement in a way which we don’t always notice: someone new comes into the sp...
Summary
Back in November 2023 I posted here to launch Spiro and raise our first $198k. Two and a half years later this is an update and a fundraiser for the next step.
The short version: we've now reached over-5,900 people with TB preventive medicine, including over 3,000 children under five years old. Our early results have held up well an...
Recent opportunities to take action
I have been disappointed by the support some EAs have expressed for recent activist actions at Ridglan Farms. I share others’ outrage at the outcome of the state animal cruelty investigation, which found serious animal cruelty law violations but led to a settlement that still permits Ridglan to sell beagles through July and to continue in-house experimentation. But I personally think the tactics used in the recent open rescues, including property damage and forced entry to remove animals, violate reasonable moral bounds on what actions are permissible in response to the belief that a serious harm is occurring. My views here stem from contractualist views of democratic legitimacy and from concerns about the non-universalizability of principles that justify lawbreaking, though I think a purely act utilitarian calculus also supports them.
Regarding universalizability, in a society where many people believe that different forms of irreparable harm are occurring (e.g. viewing abortion as murder, climate change as destroying the sacredness of the natural world, immigration as ending western civilization), I worry that moral principles that allow for significant lawbreaking when one believes that irreparable harm is occurring could easily lead to great damage if broadly followed (consider for example what it would be like to live in a country where hundreds of activists were regularly smashing their way into abortion clinics, energy companies, and refugee assistance nonprofits with sledgehammers and crowbars). Regarding the legitimacy of the law, I think reasonable contractualist views can give us obligations to follow the law when the processes by which the law is determined are legitimate, and that democracies with universal suffrage qualify as such (even granting that certain groups such as animals and future generations are impossible to enfranchise).[1] Therefore, I think that if we are trying to make decisions under moral uncertainty and give meaningful credences to rule utilitarian and contractualist views, we ought to reject the kinds of lawbreaking done by the Ridglan activists.
Moreover, I think that even if one rejects this kind of moral uncertainty-based reasoning and is a pure act utilitarian, rejecting lawbreaking in the western democratic context is still a relatively robust decision procedure under epistemic uncertainty. Broadly-followed norms against lawbreaking would have prevented EA’s worst scandal (FTX) without preventing EA’s most significant successes (cage-free reforms, evidence-based health interventions in LMICs). And while there are historical examples of illegal civil disobedience clearly producing good outcomes, I don’t think these generalize well to the type of lawbreaking under consideration here. The clearest such historical cases are ones where a disenfranchised group of people broke laws that directly enforced their own exclusion from political participation or basic legal personhood. These cases are self-limiting (and thus pass reasonable tests of universalizability) since the principles justifying such lawbreaking achieve their own obsolescence once participation is granted.[2] It's much harder to find historical cases of property-damaging civil disobedience occurring in a democracy with universal suffrage that, in hindsight, appear clearly both effective and in service of a good cause. DxE’s own history is instructive here—their work over the last decade has led to many criminal convictions among its members, as well as several organizational scandals. But their record of concrete wins for animals is at best small-scale and mixed, especially compared to the successes of groups that have purely used lawful tactics like ballot initiatives and corporate campaigns.
One last point in the utilitarian calculus, this time on the more object-level cost-benefit calculation, is that I think EAs who embrace these kinds of illegal tactics may be underestimating the downside risks of endorsing criminal activity. I think there is a set of donors and volunteers that are happy to contribute to legal activism but who would be concerned about being associated with lawbreaking (at a minimum, I would consider myself to be in this group). If people in leadership roles within the EA/EAA ecosystem endorse illegal action, any foreseen benefits may easily be swamped by the harms of driving away risk-averse donors.
None of this is to say that Ridglan’s treatment of animals is justified, or that the lack of state enforcement against Ridglan for their serious violations of animal cruelty laws is acceptable. However, these harms don’t justify using tactics that are neither clearly effective nor robustly permissible across moral views.
I don’t mean to say that literally all lawbreaking is unjustified in a democracy. In particular, if one thinks that a law in the US is unconstitutional, breaking it may be required to gain standing for a legal challenge. But this implies a narrow exception for doing the minimum amount of lawbreaking required to obtain standing; it doesn’t imply that the tactics in question at Ridglan are permissible.
Note that this self-limiting principle only holds when applied to groups of humans denied suffrage. It doesn't extend to cases like animals, where suffrage isn't possible and there's no natural bound on how many such groups might be invoked to justify lawbreaking.
Great points. Thank you for writing this up. I think it's a strong and fair critique of the strategy of actions like this, and would love to see more discussion at this high level of context and analysis.
(I expect you understand the legal arguments at play, but I do want to reemphasize for other readers that I stand behind the ultimate legality of all actions I took at the first Ridglan rescue in March, using a basic necessity defense argument: "you'd break a window to save a dog stuck in locked car on a hot day", e.g., sometimes property damage is legal to avoid a foreseeable imminent harm. We can argue whether the harms at Ridglan are foreseeable or imminent, but I believe they were and that's the basis for why I chose to do what I did. I wasn't there for the one last weekend in April and don't have a settled opinion about it yet.)
To respond to part of your very good post, I feel that we should be able to discuss and analyze nonviolent direct action and other forms of civil disobedience in EA spaces. I engaged in this action in part because I think EA folks don't think about this kind of thing enough and I want to raise the salience of civil disobedience, at least as at least a secondary or tertiary sort of thing that EA should have as levers. I don't think it is ever likely to be primary and I don't want it to be, but I also don't want it to be ignored and I think it largely has been around here.
A chunk of your argument boils down to what's good for the overall EA brand. I strongly agree that there are bright lines I would not want the community to cross (e.g. endorsing or promoting violence). I think nonviolent direct action falls on the "OK" side of the line for me, but I agree there is probably a useful discussion to be had here, and am open to more arguments on this.
What would you say in response to a conservative abortion clinic protestor who makes the same argument you're making? "It was ethically necessary for me to kidnap the doctor who was about to start their shift at Planned Parenthood. Yes, it's normally illegal to kidnap people, but those babies* were in imminent danger of being killed by the doctor, and it's permissible to break laws to avoid a forseeable imminent harm." (*The conservative protestor believes that fetuses have equal moral status to babies, the same way you and I believe that pigs have equal moral status to dogs.)
Kidnapping somebody would be a violent action.
A better analogy of non violent direct action would be breaking in to disable the clinic's capabilities to provide abortions (without harming anybody).
In this case, the protesters would be subject to the same penalties under the law that the Ridglan protesters are. That being said, there is a case that what is happening to the dogs is illegal (311 counts of animal cruelty documented already). I'm wary of an appeal to authority bias here--just because they are not enforcing the law doesn't mean what Ridglan is doing is legal. As pointed out, the necessity defense is being tested here, and has reason for consideration.
I worry this approach excludes the most vulnerable (those who cannot meaningfully participate in political life, like human babies and animals), and focuses on less fundamental rights: I think protection from torture is more urgent than legal personhood.
Why would women be justified in engaging in civil disobedience to get the vote for themselves, but not be justified in engaging in civil disobedience to rescue babies from Josef Mengele?
I agree that there's a sense in which the constraints I'm talking about focus on less fundamental rights. But I think the more important sense is that they focus on preserving a viable process for living together in a society with people of greatly differing moral views. That doesn't mean we have to leave behind other vulnerable groups, just that we have to try and bring about change for them through democratic means.
Regarding the Mengele example, I think it's disanalogous because it took place in a dictatorship, where the rule utilitarian and contractualist constraints on action look very different.[1] I'm really probing at what constraints EAs should have when acting in the context of a democracy (including a flawed one), not what behavior would be correct in Nazi Germany.
Note that the act utilitarian calculus also changes in a dictatorship too. Following the law in a dictatorship is unlikely to be a successful decision procedure for maximizing utility under epistemic uncertainty.
What if "protecting innocent sentient beings from torture" is a higher moral priority than "living together in a society with people of greatly differing moral views"?
I'm sceptical that the distinction between flawed democracy and dictatorship is clean enough to justify civil disobedience on behalf of others only in the latter (if this is what you're saying). Would you support rescuing American children from deliberate infection with hepatitis at Willowbrook in the 1960s?
Taking each of these points in turn:
On your first question, I think your framing isn't addressing what happens if other people think the same way. The equilibrium where everyone with strong moral convictions feels licensed to break laws doesn't seem to me like it's better for vulnerable groups, just more chaotic. I think that to some extent you're proposing smashing the "defect" button in a prisoner's dilemma and hoping the other side doesn't do the same.
On your second, I agree that it's not a clear line between flawed democracy and dictatorship, but in the US today this isn't really relevant.
On your third, I think the Willowbrook example is worth thinking about more carefully. As I understand the history, the binding constraint at Willowbrook wasn't legal. Many parents and guardians retained custody and could have legally removed their children. The constraint was that families without resources didn't have a better option. And in the end, legal activism was able to marshal those resources, albeit much more slowly than I would have wished.
I've been pondering this. I think your button-smashing characterisation is basically accurate, and it is a leap of faith that those who engage in civil disobedience make: an appeal to the conscience of society, the jury etc..
You're right to say that one way to think about universalisability is "if it's okay for me to break the law to achieve what I consider to be a moral goal here, why can't everyone break the law to achieve their own moral goals?". But another way to think about universalisability is to go "if I were the one in Ridglan / Unit 731 / Willowbrook, what actions would I support to end my suffering?"
I don't know whether it would be illegal for parents to break their children out of Willowbrook, but for the purposes of this question assume it was.
I think this is a good/fine question and the answer is “they’ll go to jail and then stop”. I think maybe you're conflating this question and the following:
Plausibly the morally correct answers are different. If your policy might cause total collapse of social order (irl, not in a nested thought experiment), maybe you shouldn’t do the nonviolent disruptive protest, but if you live in the real US where you largely internalize the negative consequences and others are similarly dissuaded and you still find the ~1st order effect worthwhile, then go right ahead
It’s like a sin tax (not a perfect term here tbc) - you want some amount of Pigouvian tax on the thing that you're worried is not generalizable (or good if it generalizes). If you find that the action is worth it to you tax included, then godspeed. It would be fallacious to say “in addition to the correctly priced carbon tax you'd be paying on the gas, consider your impact on the environment by driving”
Two thoughts:
Ok yeah I was using terms too loosely. But still:
I don't think we should speak of "lawbreaking" as a general case in this context; some argue that shoplifting is too lightly punished/prosecuted (especially in eg liberal US cities), but even assuming that's true, the question remains as to whether the more specific category of say "property damage via protest" is punished too lightly, too harshely, or about right.
My best guess is that it's not "too lightly" from a purely normie "law and order and human welfare right now" perspective. Many people believe moral-ish things strongly and don't find property destruction immoral, but far far fewer actually destroy the property of those they think are doing something immoral. This seems like good evidence that the expected punishment (including via informal mechanisms) is not too light.
I think we are/were both sort failing to decouple Pigouvian taxes and restitution. My understanding about both how the term "Pigouvian tax" is used in econ and about the real world is that even without restitution, you can get to the socially optimal level of some bad with a tax alone and no transfer to victims.
I think the motivating intuition is that the tax is affecting the amount of eg "social disorder" supplied, but the tax revenue is just a transfer of economic power from one party to another - it's not creating real wealth that can then be given to the victims. So the same amount of real wealth exists before and after the transfer and a separate question is what to do with that wealth given the state of the world (eg you might think that the very well-off who are harmed slightly by some negative externality, say ambient noise, should not be given restitution and a tax on decibels should really flow to some other party like the very poor)
On (1): You say:
I think that this is at best weak evidence. Activists' decisions of whether or not to commit crimes are surely influenced by norms, not just the expected intensity of punishment. The recent history of climate activism in the UK is a good example. As far as I can tell, nothing changed about UK law to cause the rapid rise of high-profile lawbreaking by Extinction Rebellion and then Just Stop Oil in the 2018-2023 timeframe. The UK government did in the end stop the activists through increased legal penalties (going from typically no prison time for nonviolent lawbreaking when motivated by ethical concerns to 4+ year prison sentences becoming common for the more serious cases). But something other than threat of prison time was keeping climate activists from using these tactics in the early-to-mid 2010s.
On (2):
I agree that a Pigouvian tax doesn't require restitution (as I indicated with including "improve welfare elsewhere" as something that can be done with the tax revenue). But the classical formulation (in which the optimal tax rate fully eliminates deadweight losses) does require that a dollar of consumer/producer surplus and a dollar of tax revenue produce the same social welfare. If a dollar of tax revenue produces less social welfare, then the deadweight loss cannot be eliminated.
To make this more concrete, I want to dig into an example based on your comment about driving in a world with a carbon tax. Consider taking a long trip by car rather than train under 3 different taxation schemes. Let's assume you value the convenience of the car over the train at $101, the social cost of your carbon emissions is $100, and that all consumers in this world have identical marginal utilities of money.
World A: No carbon tax. You take the trip, gaining benefits you value at +$101 while causing social costs of -$100. In this world, we might say that you've done the right thing by driving (since this maximizes utility overall), but that for fairness reasons you might be obligated to donate some money to others, since your utility-maximizing decision also acted as a transfer from others to you.
World B: Carbon tax of $100 on the trip, returned as an equal dividend to all people. You take the trip, gaining net benefits after the tax of $1. The rest of society ends up net neutral (though there might still be particular winners and losers). In this world, you've done the right thing by driving, and have no further obligations.
World C: Carbon tax of $100 on the trip, which the government will use to buy $100 of consumer goods and dump them down an old mineshaft. You take the trip, gaining net benefits after the tax of $1. The rest of society still experiences the social costs of -$100, which the tax doesn't do anything to reduce. In this world, you've clearly done the wrong thing by driving, since you caused a net utility loss of $99.
My claim is that doing crimes is similar to deciding to drive in World C. The "tax" on crime is imprisoning the criminal, which causes them to pay large costs in terms of their lost freedom and ability to work and doesn't do anything to benefit society. And in fact it's worse than World C, since the rest of society needs to pay the additional costs of arresting, prosecuting, and jailing them. So I think the Pigouvian tax analogy does not hold here, and it's wrong to think that the harms of crime are properly internalized.
Not addressing every point but I think in some respects I agree that crime is C but then how much benefit the criminal gets/values is a case-by-case question, and we can’t just assume that in the irl case at hand that the benefit is (in the analogy) $101 instead of $1000
There’s real deadweight loss from the mineshaft drop/spending money on prisons, but also potentially real value to be gained from the crime itself (canonical case = speeding bc wife is going in to labor)
Remember, property damage as activism isn’t like simple theft - the property damage can cost society amount $X and benefits of activism feature can separately benefit society or be valued by the perpetrator at any other number $Y
I see what you're getting at here. But if we agree that the externalities of crime aren't internalized, then I think we're just back in the position of the original post. You think the act utilitarian calculus checks you, I'm both skeptical that it does and think that there are non-act-utilitarian reasons why we ought to avoid lawbreaking.
For what it's worth, I'm surprised that people who think abortion is murder aren't doing more illegal stuff to destroy clinics.
Also for what it's worth, I think factory farming is so bad that it's by far the greatest injustice caused by humans in history. Justifiable wars have been fought for orders of magnitude less important things.
I’ve been somewhat disappointed in reading this post. But as I know some folks I like are reading it, I feel the need to share a few thoughts as a legal scholar and theorist. Your post I think demonstrates some misunderstandings about the nature of law.
1. You seem to misunderstand contractarianism, by making it an argument for quietism, as well as the nature of law in a democracy. We don’t agree to many laws as a society; most extant laws are conditions that no one ever agrees on. They are traditions. Take property law — no one ever voted to make animals property. That’s an inherited concept. There is a difference between a law that is democratically enacted, and a vestige of the English common law. The same goes for trespass, a common law principle. Moreover, no contractarian worth her salt is going to claim you can never break an unjust law. Going back to Aquinas, there is broad agreement that sometimes breaking an unjust law is morally appropriate, or at least defensible.
2. No one could reasonably argue this tactic is universalizable. It is strategic — it is a non-universalizable tactic meant to create significant attention and pressure for change toward universalizable norms. And more — the argument that if they do it, everyone will, can be a dangerous slippery slope. It’s infeasible for everyone to do this: they have jobs. More important, I would very much caution against that kind of thinking. It has been used to justify atrocities in the past. Take slaveholders: they used that kind of argument to push back against slave rebellions—it would destroy the antebellum south, socially and economically. That is not an argument worth keeping. I am not defending the Ridglan approach, but I am cautioning against these types dismissals of what they are doing.
3. Historically, you seem to again misunderstand the nature of law. Slaves were considered property, and their rebellions certainly damaged their property status. They also moved the north toward abolitionism. Elements of the civil rights movement and the labor movement in the United States engaged in tactics that damaged property and yet ultimately won reforms. Property is a convention—it should not interfere with moral obligation and serious moral intervention.
I’ll just mention one thing about donors. Doing what is right sometimes risks making certain people unhappy. That’s why social movements shouldn’t rely on the whims of wealthy individuals. The right donors will see the right priorities for what they are. The priority should be supporting one another within a social movement.
Thanks for engaging with the post! You made a lot of different points, so I'll do my best to separate them out and consider them one-by-one:
(1)
(2)
(3)
(4)
State laws are path dependent, and rely very often on common law principles and concepts uncritically applied. That does not equate to democratic legitimacy for every codified version of property and criminal law.
I think we have fundamentally incompatible views on the appropriate frame to apply to balancing questions—I am not at all a utilitarian, and I don’t think you should be either. But I’ll set that aside.
You again seem to conflate lawbreaking with immorality. Please don’t do that. Rosa Parks broke the law. So did the Ridglan rescuers. That doesn’t make what they did wrong. That’s a separate question. The symbolic/non-symbolic distinction is not one I find compelling.
You seem to see humans and animals as categorically different from a legal perspective. Humans care for animal welfare but animals have no voice. I fundamentally disagree — animals should have rights, including a right to a voice. That means they should have institutions that represent their interests. So there is no fundamental difference between the slave revolts and what people are trying to do here for animals in terms of voice, as their representatives. I suggest Zoopolis on this point.
Your articulation of the EA bias toward donors is particularly problematic. Successful social movements historically have not relied on extremely wealthy individuals for funding. Your concern to persuade donors is troubling. You should be worried about persuading people, not persuading donors. Lots of people are going to be needed to change social perspectives and institutions around animals. A social narrative that focuses on “earning to give” or major donors is likely to be unmoored from a durable movement.
Thank you for the quick post.
Since you still state that in some instances, some careful lawbreaking can be justified in the pursuit of a just outcome, perhaps you could spend more of the post detailing why you thought lawbreaking was a bad call in this specific instance? This is not clear to me from reading your note.