To clarify, I think I'm ok with having a taboo on advocacy against "it is better for the world for innocent group X of people not to exist", since that seems like the kind of naive utilitarianism we should definitely avoid. I'm just against a taboo on asking or trying to better understand whether "it is better for the world for innocent group X of people not to exist" is true or not. I don't think Vasco was engaging in advocacy, my impression was that he was trying to do the latter, while expressing a lot of uncertainty.

Thanks, that is a useful distinction. Although I would guess Vasco would prefer to frame the theory of impact as "find out whether donating to GiveWell is net positive -> help people make donation choices that promote welfare better" or something like that. I buy @Richard Y Chappell🔸's take that it is really bad to discourage others from effective giving (at least when it's done carelessly/negligently), but imo Vasco was not setting out to discourage effective giving, or it doesn't seem like that to me. He is -- I'm guessing -- cooperatively seeking to help effective givers and others make choices that better promote welfare, which they are presumably interested in doing.

There are obviously some cruxes here -- including whether there is a moral difference between actively advocating for others not to hand out bednets vs. passively choosing to donate elsewhere / spend on oneself, and whether there is a moral difference between a bad thing being part of the intended MoA vs. a side effect. I would answer yes to both, but I have lower consequentialist representation in my moral parliament than many people here.

Yes, I personally lean towards thinking the act-omission difference doesn't matter (except maybe as a useful heuristic sometimes).

As for whether the harm to humans is incidental-but-necessary or part-of-the-mechanism-and-necessary, I'm not sure what difference it makes if the outcomes are identical? Maybe the difference is that, when the harm to humans is part-of-the-mechanism-and-necessary, you may suspect that it's indicative of a bad moral attitude. But I think the attitude behind "I won't donate to save lives because I think it creates a lot of animal suffering" is clearly better (since it is concerned with promoting welfare) than the attitude behind "I won't donate to save lives because I prefer to have more income for myself" (which is not).

Even if one would answer no to both cruxes, I submit that "no endorsing MoAs that involve the death of innocent people" is an important set of side rails for the EA movement. I think advocacy that saving the lives of children is net-negative is outside of those rails. For those who might not agree, I'm curious where they would put the rails (or whether they disagree with the idea that there should be rails).

I do not think it is good to create taboos around this question. Like, does that mean we shouldn't post anything that can be construed as concluding that it's net harmful to donate to GiveWell charities? If so, that would make it much harder to criticise GiveWell and find out what the truth is. What if donating to GiveWell charities really is harmful? Shouldn't we want to know and find out?

To me, any moral theory that dictates that innocent children should die is probably breaking apart at that point. Instead he bites the bullet and assumes that the means (preventing suffering) justifies the ends (letting innocent children die). I am sorry to say that I find that morally repugnant. [...] Instead, I have a strong sense that innocent children should not be let die. If my moral theory disagrees with the strong ethical sense, it is the strong ethical sense that should guide the moral theory, and not the other way around.

Hmm, but we are all letting children die all the time from not donating. I am donating just 15% of my income; I could certainly donate 20-30% and save additional lives that way. I think my failing to donate 20-30% is morally imperfect, but I wouldn't call it repugnant. What is it that makes "I won't donate to save lives because I think it creates a lot of animal suffering" repugnant but "I won't donate to save lives because I prefer to have more income for myself" not?

Thanks, that’s encouraging! To clarify, my understanding is that beef cattle are naturally polled much more frequently than dairy cattle, since selectively breeding dairy cattle to be hornless affects dairy production negatively. If I understand correctly, that’s because the horn growing gene is close to genes important for dairy production. And that (the hornless dairy cow problem) seems to be what people are trying to solve with gene editing.

Thanks. I take you to say roughly that you have certain core beliefs that you're unwilling to compromise on, even if you can't justify those beliefs philosophically. And also that you think it's better to be upfront about that than invent justifications that aren't really load-bearing for you. (Let me know if that's a misrepresentation.)

I think it's virtuous that you're honest about why you disagree ("I place much lower weight on animals") and I think that's valuable for discourse in that it shows where the disagreement lies. I don't have any objection to that. But I also think that saying you just believe that and can't/won't justify it ("I cannot give a tight philosophical defence of that view, but I am more committed to it than I am to giving tight philosophical defences of views") is not particularly valuable for discourse. It doesn't create any opening for productive engagement or movement toward consensus. I don't think it's harmful exactly, I just think more openness to examining whether the intuition withstands scrutiny would be more valuable.

(That is a question about discourse. I think there's also a separate question about the soundness of the decision procedure you described in your original comment. I think it's unsound, and therefore instrumentally irrational, but I'm not the rationality police so I won't get into that.)

Thanks, I fixed the link. And the rest of your comment seems right to me.

My actual reason to disagree is that I place much lower weight on animals than you, and I would axiomatically reject any moral weight on animals that implied saving kids from dying was net negative. I cannot give a tight philosophical defence of that view, but I am more committed to it than I am to giving tight philosophical defences of views. I suspect that if GiveWell were to publish a transparent argument as to why they ignore those effects, it would look similar to my argument - short and unsatisfactory to you. (Note; I work at GiveWell but this is my own view.)

I upvoted this comment for honesty, but this passage reads to me like committing to a conclusion ("saving kids from dying cannot be net negative") and then working its way backward to reject the premise ("animals matter morally", "saving kids from dying causes more (animal) suffering than it creates (human) welfare") that leads to a contradictory conclusion. That seems like textbook motivated reasoning to me? It doesn't seem like a good way of doing moral reasoning. I think it would be better to either reject the premise or to argue that the desired conclusion can follow from the premise after all.

Personally I think it's very much not obvious whether the meat eating problem is genuine. But given that the goodness of a very large part of the EA project so far hinges on it not being real, and given that it's far from obvious whether it's real, I think it would be useful to make progress on that question. So I'm glad that @Vasco Grilo🔸 and others are trying to make progress on it and a little discouraged to see some pushback (from several commenters) that doesn't really engage with Vasco's arguments/calculations.

(It does seem like, as @Ben Millwood🔸 has commented, any harm caused to animals by donating to global health charities is much smaller than the harm of not giving to animal charities. So maybe a better and more palatable framing for the meat eating problem is not, "Is giving to global health charities net negative/positive?" but "Is giving to global health charities more/less cost-effective than giving to animal charities?")

Karthik could also believe that any attempt to persuade someone to do what Karthik believes is best, would backfire, or that it is intrinsically wrong to persuade another person to do what Karthik believes is good, if they do not already believe the thing is good anyway. Though I agree with the general thrust of your comment.

Would it be feasible/useful to accelerate the adoption of hornless ("naturally polled") cattle, to remove the need for painful dehorning?

There are around 88M farmed cattle in the US at any point in time, and I'm guessing about an OOM more globally. These cattle are for various reasons frequently dehorned -- about 80% of dairy calves and 25% of beef cattle are dehorned annually in the US, meaning roughly 13-14M procedures.

Dehorning is often done without anaesthesia or painkillers and is likely extremely painful, both immediately and for some time afterwards. Cattle horns are filled with blood vessels and nerves, so it's not like cutting nails. It might feel something like having your teeth amputated at the root.

Some breeds of cows are "naturally polled", meaning they don't grow horns. There have been efforts to develop hornless cattle via selective breeding, and some breeds (e.g., Angus) are entirely hornless. So there is already some incentive to move towards hornless cattle, but probably a weak incentive as dehorning is pretty cheap and infrequent. In cattle, there's a gene that regulates horn growth, with the hornless allele being dominant. So you can gene edit cattle to be naturally hornless. This seems to be an area of active research (e.g.).

So now I'm wondering, are there ways of speeding up the adoption of hornless cattle? If all US cattle were hornless, >10M of these painful procedures would be avoided annually. For example, perhaps you could fund relevant gene editing research, advocate to remove regulatory hurdles, or incentivize farmers to adopt hornless cattle breeds? Caveat: I only thought and read about all this for 15 minutes.

Yeah, but as you point out below, that simple model makes some unrealistic assumptions (e.g., that a solution will definitely be found that fully eliminates farmed animal suffering, and that a person starts contributing, in expectation, to solving meat eating at age 0). So it still seems to me that a better argument is needed to shift the prior.