Really interesting post. Your question about other justice movements made me think about a slightly different way of framing the welfare/liberation distinction.
I work on animal rights and legal change, and one of the questions I’ve been thinking about in my research is precisely what a transition towards animal rights could look like when full liberation is politically and institutionally out of reach.
I’m increasingly unconvinced that we need to choose neatly between incremental welfare reform and keeping animal liberation as the underlying objective. In other justice movements, substantial change has often been cumulative: institutions, legal categories and social expectations change before the ultimate principle is fully accepted or implemented.
So perhaps one useful question is not simply whether a reform is “welfarist” or “liberationist”, but what it does to the trajectory of the system.
Does it only reduce suffering within an otherwise unchanged model of animal use? Or does it also create precedents, institutions, expectations or legal concepts that make stronger protection easier to achieve later?
Incremental change can cut in both directions. Some reforms may entrench existing systems; others may alter what society and the law regard as acceptable, even if they fall far short of animal liberation themselves.
This is also why I find the justice-movement analogy interesting. “Taking what you can get” and maintaining a more demanding conception of justice are not necessarily competing strategies. The harder question is how to connect the two, e.g., how to make partial gains genuinely transitional rather than simply permanent compromises.
I’d be very interested in seeing EA animal advocacy engage more with that question alongside the empirical question of which interventions produce the largest immediate welfare gains.
Really interesting post. Your question about other justice movements made me think about a slightly different way of framing the welfare/liberation distinction.
I work on animal rights and legal change, and one of the questions I’ve been thinking about in my research is precisely what a transition towards animal rights could look like when full liberation is politically and institutionally out of reach.
I’m increasingly unconvinced that we need to choose neatly between incremental welfare reform and keeping animal liberation as the underlying objective. In other justice movements, substantial change has often been cumulative: institutions, legal categories and social expectations change before the ultimate principle is fully accepted or implemented.
So perhaps one useful question is not simply whether a reform is “welfarist” or “liberationist”, but what it does to the trajectory of the system.
Does it only reduce suffering within an otherwise unchanged model of animal use? Or does it also create precedents, institutions, expectations or legal concepts that make stronger protection easier to achieve later?
Incremental change can cut in both directions. Some reforms may entrench existing systems; others may alter what society and the law regard as acceptable, even if they fall far short of animal liberation themselves.
This is also why I find the justice-movement analogy interesting. “Taking what you can get” and maintaining a more demanding conception of justice are not necessarily competing strategies. The harder question is how to connect the two, e.g., how to make partial gains genuinely transitional rather than simply permanent compromises.
I’d be very interested in seeing EA animal advocacy engage more with that question alongside the empirical question of which interventions produce the largest immediate welfare gains.