Week 3: Expanding Our Compassion

This week focuses on your own values and the practical implications that these views have. During Week 3 we explore who our moral consideration should expand to, with a particular focus on farmed animals as a case example.

Organisation spotlight: Animal Charity Evaluators

Animal Charity Evaluators (ACE) aims to identify the best ways to help animals as effectively as possible. They strive to identify ways to alleviate suffering and improve the lives of animals on a wide scale, while continuously updating their recommendations based on new evidence.

Based on their current findings, they believe advocating for farmed animals seems to be the most effective way to help animals and prevent the largest amount of suffering.

Their recommended charities use a range of strategies to help animals including corporate outreach, legal work, and developing alternative proteins. Interventions in this area can be surprisingly cost-effective, for example it seems that, even under conservative estimates, tens or hundreds of chickens can be spared from cage confinement per dollar spent (Source). As of January 2020, ACE has influenced over $26 million in donations.

Core materials

Exercise (45 mins)

This week’s exercises are about doing some personal reflection. There are no right or wrong answers here, instead this is an opportunity for you to take some time and think about your ethical values and beliefs.

Part 1 - A letter to the past (10 mins.)

From On “fringe” ideas - Kelsey Piper, edited:

“Imagine effective altruism had existed at a different point in history. Would the movement have been able to do any good, or would it have been too stuck in the assumptions of the time period? 

Would an effective altruist movement in the 1840s U.S. have been abolitionist? If you think such a movement would have failed to stand up against slavery, what do we need to change, now, as a movement, to make sure we’re not getting similarly big things wrong? 

Would an effective altruist movement in the 1920s U.S. have been eugenicist? If you think the movement would have embraced a pseudoscientific and deeply harmful movement like the sterilization campaigns of the Progressive era, what habits of mind and thought would have prevented us from doing that, and are we actively employing them?

Imagine someone walked into that 1840s EA group and said, ‘I think black people are exactly as valuable as white people and it should be illegal to discriminate against them at all,” or someone walked into the 1920s EA group and said, “I think gay rights are really important.” I want us to be a community that wouldn’t have kicked them out.”

Imagine someone from the past who lived at a different time and held views characteristic of that time. Also imagine, for the sake of the exercise, that this person is not too different from you - perhaps you would’ve been friends. Unfortunately, lots of people in the past were complicit in horrible things, such as homophobia, sexism, racism, and slavery, which were even more prevalent in the past than they are now. And, sadly, this historical counterpart is also complicit in some moral tragedy common to their time, perhaps not out of malevolence or ill-will, but merely through indifference or ignorance. 

This exercise is to write a letter to this historical friend arguing that they should expand their compassion to include a specific group that your present self values. Imagine that they are complicit in owning slaves, or in the oppression of women, people of other races, or sexual minorities.

For the sake of this exercise, imagine your historical counterpart is not malevolent or selfish, they think they are living a normal life, but are unaware of where they are going wrong. What could you say to them to make them realise that they’re doing wrong? What evidence are they overlooking that allows them to hold their discriminatory views? You might want to write a few paragraphs or just bullet points, and spend time reflecting on what you write.

Part 2 - A letter from your future self  (15 mins.)

Now imagine one day you get a strange letter; it's a letter from your future counterpart, hundreds of years in the future. In the letter they argue that, just like your past counterpart, you currently are unknowingly and unwittingly committing some moral wrong. 

What do you think the letter might say? What issue might be of great moral importance that you are unaware of today or are not taking into sufficient consideration?

Again, you might want to write a few paragraphs, and spend some time reflecting on what you write. 

[To be done in session] Part 3 - Moral decision making (15 mins.)

From Consciousness and Moral Patienthood, Section 2.1, ‘Why we care about the question of moral patienthood’ by the Open Philanthropy Project, edited:

“How does the question of moral patienthood fit into our framework for thinking about effective giving?

The Open Philanthropy Project focuses on causes that score well on our three criteria — importance, neglectedness, and tractability. Our “importance” criterion is: “How many individuals does this issue affect, and how deeply?” Elaborating on this, we might say our importance criterion is: “How many moral patients does this issue affect, and how much could we benefit them, with respect to appropriate dimensions of moral concern (e.g. pain, pleasure, desire fulfillment, self-actualization)?”

As with many framing choices in this report, this is far from the only way to approach the question, but we find it to be a framing that is pragmatically useful to us as we try to execute our mission to “accomplish as much good as possible with our giving” without waiting to first resolve all major debates in moral philosophy.

In the long run, we’d like to have better-developed views not just about which beings are moral patients, but also about how to weigh the interests of different kinds of moral patients against each other. For example: suppose we conclude that fishes, pigs, and humans are all moral patients, and we estimate that, for a fixed amount of money, we can (in expectation) dramatically improve the welfare of (a) 10,000 rainbow trout, (b) 1,000 pigs, or (c) 100 adult humans. In that situation, how should we compare the different options? This depends (among other things) on how much “moral weight” we give to the well-being of different kinds of moral patients. Or, more granularly, it depends on how much moral weight we give to various “appropriate dimensions of moral concern,” which then collectively determine the moral weight of each particular moral patient.”

Imagine that you're a philanthropic grantmaker, who is looking to donate $10,000. You are presented with two funding opportunities:

  1. Treatments for parasitic worm infections in children

    1. Hundreds of millions of people around the world are infected with parasitic worms, causing illnesses including schistosomiasis and soil-transmitted helminthiasis; potentially leading to them missing out on education and impacts on future earning prospects.

    2. For the sake of the exercise, imagine that donating $10,000 will deworm about 10,000 children, allowing the children to earn an additional $110,000 over the course of their lives. This program is implemented in areas where people on average live on $700 per year.

  2. Corporate lobbying to end the use of gestation crates for pigs

    1. On factory farms in many countries including the UK, pregnant pigs are confined to crates so small they can’t even turn around. Soon after their birth, the piglets are taken away from their mothers, the sows are impregnated again and the cycle continues.

    2. For the sake of the exercise, imagine that donating $10,000 will spare 100,000 pigs a lifetime (assume 10 years) of confinement in these crates by investing in farming methods that provide better animal welfare.

How would you think about comparing these opportunities in order to do the most good? How would your final grant decision change if different numbers of humans and animals were at stake?

Which grant opportunity would you fund?

What if the choice was between 1 human child and 1 million pigs?

How would your answers change it if it was battery-caged hens involved instead of pigs?

How would your answers change for an intervention that could prevent 10,000,000 shrimp from having their eyes cut out?

What about preventing 1 billion shrimp from having their eyes cut out?

How did you arrive at your decision?

Recommended reading 

Podcast episode 

If you'd like to learn more about different ethical theories, see these resources

Other

Criticisms

  • The Narrowing Circle (see here for summary and discussion) - An argument that the “expanding circle” historical thesis ignores all instances in which modern ethics narrowed the set of beings to be morally regarded, often backing its exclusion by asserting their non-existence, and thus assumes its conclusion. (30 mins.)

More to explore