Part 3 and 4

Week 3: Expanding Our Compassion

“The question is not, Can they reason?, nor Can they talk? but, Can they suffer? Why should the law refuse its protection to any sensitive being?”  – Jeremy Bentham (1789) 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.

Required Materials

• Radical Empathy – Open Philanthropy Project (10 mins.)
• Moral Progress and Cause X (5 mins.)
• All Animals Are Equal – The opening chapter of Animal Liberation (1975), widely regarded as the founding text of the animal rights movement. (25 mins.)

Recommended reading 

• The Case Against Speciesism – Centre for Reducing Suffering (10 mins.)
• Animal Welfare (20 mins.) 
• The Possibility of an Ongoing Moral Catastrophe (30 mins.)  
• Should animals, plants, and robots have the same rights as you? – Vox  (20 mins.) 
• Expanding the moral circle – Sentience Institute (25 mins.)
• Animal Liberation, Chapter 3 – Down on the factory farm (60 mins.)
• The Expanding Circle pg. 111-124 ‘Expanding the Circle of Ethics’ section (20 mins.)
• Suffering in Animals vs. Humans (13 mins.)
• On “fringe” ideas – What does it take to keep ourselves open to new possibilities in what the most important problems in the world are? (10 mins.)
• A New Agricultural Revolution (~11 min – 2x speed and transcript available; Q&A after Friedrich’s talk is optional)
  • Demand for meat is projected to double by 2050. Bruce Friedrich, Executive Director of the Good Food Institute, believes we can meet that demand without massively scaling conventional animal agriculture (and its adverse impacts). In this talk, he explains how our ability to produce meat directly from plants, or from animal cells, could lead to a new agricultural revolution. Why is clean meat such a priority for some people? What are some reasons to be optimistic about the clean meat revolution? What are reasons for pessimism?

More to explore

• • Our descendants will probably see us as moral monsters. What should we do about that? – 80,000 Hours – A podcast featuring Professor Will MacAskill about what we should do if we are making major moral mistakes today. (Podcast – 1h 50m)
  • Practical ethics given moral uncertainty – Will MacAskill presents a framework for making decisions under moral uncertainty, and offers some implications of this (5 mins.)
  • The Drowning Child and the Expanding Circle – Philosopher Peter Singer’s famous drowning child thought experiment, which asks us to develop global empathy. (15 mins) 

• Dominion – Dominion uses drones, hidden and handheld cameras to expose the dark side of modern animal agriculture. (Film – 2 hours)

• • Social Movement Lessons From the British Antislavery Movement – Sentience Institute – This report aims to assess (1) what factors led the British government to abolish the transatlantic Slave trade in 1807 and then human chattel slavery in 1833, and (2) what those findings suggest about how modern social movements should strategize. (2.5 hours)
  • The Importance of Wild-Animal Suffering – Centre on Long-Term Risk – An argument for us to take into account the wellbeing of animals that live in the wild. (40 mins.)
  • 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.)
  • 2017 Report on Consciousness and Moral Patienthood – An investigation into what types of beings merit moral concern. (6 hours, skimmable)
  • The Subjection of Women – An essay published in 1869 by John Stuart Mill, with ideas he developed with his wife Harriet Taylor Mill arguing for the emancipation of women (10 mins.)
  • Loving-Kindness and Compassion Meditation: Potential for Psychological Interventions – A widely cited study into meditation based psychological practices to increase kindness and compassion. (40 mins.)

• The Better Angels of Our Nature –  Illustrates why we live in the most peaceful time ever in history, by looking at what motivates us to behave violently, how these motivators are outweighed by our tendencies towards a peaceful life and which major shifts in history caused this global reduction in violence. (Book)

• Ethical.diet – A tool that explains which diet changes have the biggest effects on animal welfare.

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.)

“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.”

– On “fringe” ideas – Kelsey Piper, edited

 

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, most people in the past were complicit in horrible things, such as slavery, sexism, racism, and homophobia, 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 moral circle 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 moral 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?

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