Thanks Ariel. I agree that uncertainty about animal consciousness doesn't necessarily undermine the case for animal welfare, especially when the potential suffering involved is so large.
But still surprised by the 99% figure, given that beyond Eliezer or Kauffman researchers who study animal consciousness disagree about how conclusive the evidence is. Researchers such as Hakwan Lau and Yoram Gutfreund have questioned whether the available evidence really establishes subjective experience in animals, even mammals and birds. Marian Stamp Dawkins, who has spent decades researching animal welfare, including poultry welfare, published an entire book in 2025 questioning how certain we can be about animal consciousness.
I'm not saying they're right, or even that they represent the majority view. But when people who have spent years working on this question still have serious disagreements about it, I find it hard to see the matter as essentially settled.
And that was really what bothered me about the original post. I understand that the comment about people "waving away" the idea that animals can feel pain may have been aimed at people who simply dismiss the issue without thinking about it. But it can also give the impression that anyone who remains unconvinced must be ignorant or indifferent. I don't think that's fair, especially in a community that values epistemic humility as much as EA does.
Hey Andy. Sorry to bring this up here rather than in one of the many other posts where it could have come up, but there's something that has been bothering me about how animal welfare is discussed in EA.
I often get the impression that animal sentience is treated as an almost indisputable fact. Yet even someone as influential in the broader EA and AI safety world as Eliezer Yudkowsky recently reiterated that his best guess is that chickens aren't sentient. I'm not saying he's right, but surely the fact that someone like him holds this position should give us some reason to be less categorical about the subject?
Given how much emphasis EA places on epistemic integrity and intellectual humility, I find it strange how rarely this uncertainty seems to be acknowledged. Of course, you can believe the evidence strongly favors animal consciousness and advocate for animal welfare accordingly. What bothers me is how often the issue is presented as essentially settled, rather than as a question on which there is still genuine disagreement.
If we're talking about an ASI capable of extraordinary reasoning, why assume it would blindly generalize from human behavior rather than recognize the obvious moral inconsistency and critically evaluate it? Surely an intelligence capable of revolutionizing science and philosophy could identify a contradiction that an undergraduate philosophy student can spot. Of course, understanding morality doesn't guarantee acting morally, but that's a fundamentally different alignment problem.
It got me wondering about a few things though. In the essay you explain that good people heard the argument and didn't change with psychology: biases, evolved drives, etc.. But your mum staying late to help women in labour, your dad working for the community, for most ethical traditions that is a good life, catamaran included. And what is more telling for me, people like Susan Wolf in "Moral Saints", or Bernard Williams in several of his works (or many others really), serious and very intelligent moral philosophers that knew the arguments very well, would have said your parents lived moral lives. They don't say we owe nothing to strangers, and I agree most of us should give more, but they would say the distance between your parents and the argument is not only bias.
So what is your answer to them? Is the explanation that they are less smart, or less educated, or more affected by evolutionary pressures than people in EA? I guess not, and if not, why are they wrong about something that in this text looks so clear and obvious?
Have you read them? And when you were frustrated with your parents, did you ever think they could be partly right? I am not utilitarian so I see this from outside, but I would like to understand how you see it.
Animal advocatestypically focus on sentience in order to base their moral claims. This similarity with humans can easily justify some form of similar (moral) treatment of animals and humans. And under the assumption that pain and pleasure are the sole things that have moral worth, extremely high numbers of sentient animals and their suffering has an overwhelming effect on moral considerations.
As a result, if one only considers the headcounts and the sufferings, the obvious conclusion is: total animal welfare >>> total human welfare.
But one needs to keep in mind that the immediate conclusion of the “unrestricted sentience approach” is not only that animal welfare >>> human welfare. It is rather:
total invertebrate welfare >>>>>>>>>> total rest of the animal welfare >>> human welfare .
This is precisely because of the same reason: total invertebrate welfare is also overwhelming due to their astronomical numbers.
I don’t think most people realise this or really adjust their actions/positions accordingly. If your main starting point is exclusively sentience and hedonism, your vote in the debate should not be only “%100 agree with 100 million dollars spent on animal welfare”, it should also be “%99.99 agree with 100 million dollars spent on invertebrate welfare”.
One might reasonably think that this moral weight framework should be wrong. “Unless you have confidence in the ruler's reliability, if you use a ruler to measure a table, you may also use the table to measure the ruler”.
There might be other goods that cannot be adequately reduced to pain and pleasure: like friendship, knowledge, play, reason, etc. And these may have even more moral weight than mere pleasure and pain. Humans might have much higher capacity to actualize these different goods and therefore have higher status due to their nature. Some animals can also actualize these goods in their own limited capacities which can also justify some form of moral hierarchy between mammals, birds and invertebrates. This can then justify more (at least some) attention to non-invertabrate welfare as well. This can then also justify more (or at least some) attention to human welfare, despite overwhelming numbers of animals.
Thanks for your honesty Engin. This section truly reflects my doubts about animal welfare, which I guess has little to do with cost effectiveness or monitorability.. but more about the shadow of the the repugnant conclusion. The fear that we could end up prioritizing moths over humans simply because we keep insisting that the only thing that reflects value in the world is doing arithmetics with pain and pleasure.
Good luck with your plans for quantifying our consciences so that they could be used in a quantitative decision making process , thou I'm afraid that anything close to that is going to be very hard until we somehow solve the "easy problem" of consciousness, (and not sure even if then..).
Thanks @Richard Y Chappell🔸 , I truly enjoyed that one (you’re right that all this leans more towards ethical theory or normative ethics than metaethics; my apologies for the slip. I particularly resonated with:
That said, I do think the view contains someunder-appreciated insights that are worth taking on board, at least under the remit of “moral uncertainty”. For those concerned about the Repugnant Conclusion, I think perfectionism at least offers a better alternative than bleak “negative” views that deny any positive value to our existence.
Moreover, I find the implicit critique of hedonism extremely compelling, and find that reflecting on Nietzschean perfectionism moves me more strongly towards some form of objective list theory of well-being. I think welfare objectivism is a view that EAs ought to take very seriously, and it especially ought to lead us to want to (i) rule out wireheading and other “cheap” hedonistic futures as involving unacceptable axiological risk, given how poorly such futures score on plausible non-hedonistic views
I completely agree that moving towards an objective list theory may not only be plausible but crucial, given the risks of overlooking the possibility that it may be closer to the truth.
In any case, this is precisely the type of topic and nuance that I find lacking in most EA discussions, I find it surprising that considering such important questions is often not even seen as a possibility.
Are posts like this, then, a rarity within the EA context? Are there any sub-communities, study groups, or institutions that focus seriously on these types of issues? (I assume there aren’t, as you likely would have mentioned them, but I remain surprised)
Additionally, if you have any other references to essays or articles that explore different types of perfectionism as a potential solution to some of the challenges posed by the repugnant conclusion, I would greatly appreciate it .
Thanks Ariel. I agree that uncertainty about animal consciousness doesn't necessarily undermine the case for animal welfare, especially when the potential suffering involved is so large.
But still surprised by the 99% figure, given that beyond Eliezer or Kauffman researchers who study animal consciousness disagree about how conclusive the evidence is. Researchers such as Hakwan Lau and Yoram Gutfreund have questioned whether the available evidence really establishes subjective experience in animals, even mammals and birds. Marian Stamp Dawkins, who has spent decades researching animal welfare, including poultry welfare, published an entire book in 2025 questioning how certain we can be about animal consciousness.
I'm not saying they're right, or even that they represent the majority view. But when people who have spent years working on this question still have serious disagreements about it, I find it hard to see the matter as essentially settled.
And that was really what bothered me about the original post. I understand that the comment about people "waving away" the idea that animals can feel pain may have been aimed at people who simply dismiss the issue without thinking about it. But it can also give the impression that anyone who remains unconvinced must be ignorant or indifferent. I don't think that's fair, especially in a community that values epistemic humility as much as EA does.
Hey Andy. Sorry to bring this up here rather than in one of the many other posts where it could have come up, but there's something that has been bothering me about how animal welfare is discussed in EA.
I often get the impression that animal sentience is treated as an almost indisputable fact. Yet even someone as influential in the broader EA and AI safety world as Eliezer Yudkowsky recently reiterated that his best guess is that chickens aren't sentient. I'm not saying he's right, but surely the fact that someone like him holds this position should give us some reason to be less categorical about the subject?
Given how much emphasis EA places on epistemic integrity and intellectual humility, I find it strange how rarely this uncertainty seems to be acknowledged. Of course, you can believe the evidence strongly favors animal consciousness and advocate for animal welfare accordingly. What bothers me is how often the issue is presented as essentially settled, rather than as a question on which there is still genuine disagreement.
If we're talking about an ASI capable of extraordinary reasoning, why assume it would blindly generalize from human behavior rather than recognize the obvious moral inconsistency and critically evaluate it? Surely an intelligence capable of revolutionizing science and philosophy could identify a contradiction that an undergraduate philosophy student can spot. Of course, understanding morality doesn't guarantee acting morally, but that's a fundamentally different alignment problem.
Hi Bren, thanks for this.
It got me wondering about a few things though. In the essay you explain that good people heard the argument and didn't change with psychology: biases, evolved drives, etc.. But your mum staying late to help women in labour, your dad working for the community, for most ethical traditions that is a good life, catamaran included. And what is more telling for me, people like Susan Wolf in "Moral Saints", or Bernard Williams in several of his works (or many others really), serious and very intelligent moral philosophers that knew the arguments very well, would have said your parents lived moral lives. They don't say we owe nothing to strangers, and I agree most of us should give more, but they would say the distance between your parents and the argument is not only bias.
So what is your answer to them? Is the explanation that they are less smart, or less educated, or more affected by evolutionary pressures than people in EA? I guess not, and if not, why are they wrong about something that in this text looks so clear and obvious?
Have you read them? And when you were frustrated with your parents, did you ever think they could be partly right? I am not utilitarian so I see this from outside, but I would like to understand how you see it.
Maybe I'm reading it wrong but, isn't the current table in "Counting the number of neurons" wrong?
Thanks for your honesty Engin. This section truly reflects my doubts about animal welfare, which I guess has little to do with cost effectiveness or monitorability.. but more about the shadow of the the repugnant conclusion. The fear that we could end up prioritizing moths over humans simply because we keep insisting that the only thing that reflects value in the world is doing arithmetics with pain and pleasure.
I tried to express some of these fears in https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/QFh6kiwv36mR8QSiE/are-we-as-rigorous-in-addressing-utilitarianism-s
Thank you very much Sean for your response, specially I found Minimalist extended very repugnant conclusions are the least repugnant interesting, thou I feel that still kind of misses the broader point (or bite the wrong bullet) about how you can't really do "arithmetics with phenomenology" to begin with, in this way in which I think Parfit makes apparent in Overpopulation and The Quality of Life.
Good luck with your plans for quantifying our consciences so that they could be used in a quantitative decision making process , thou I'm afraid that anything close to that is going to be very hard until we somehow solve the "easy problem" of consciousness, (and not sure even if then..).
Thanks @Richard Y Chappell🔸 , I truly enjoyed that one (you’re right that all this leans more towards ethical theory or normative ethics than metaethics; my apologies for the slip. I particularly resonated with:
I completely agree that moving towards an objective list theory may not only be plausible but crucial, given the risks of overlooking the possibility that it may be closer to the truth.
In any case, this is precisely the type of topic and nuance that I find lacking in most EA discussions, I find it surprising that considering such important questions is often not even seen as a possibility.
Are posts like this, then, a rarity within the EA context? Are there any sub-communities, study groups, or institutions that focus seriously on these types of issues? (I assume there aren’t, as you likely would have mentioned them, but I remain surprised)
Additionally, if you have any other references to essays or articles that explore different types of perfectionism as a potential solution to some of the challenges posed by the repugnant conclusion, I would greatly appreciate it .
Thanks again!