Lecture 10, Feb 5th: Criticisms of EA’s approach to address factory farm animal suffering

Common Ground & Good Impact of EA

• Authors suggest common ground in their critical approach to EA and EA. They also think the movement should maximize its impact by investing the greatest impact per dollar in the cause.

  • “We even share a concern to impact as many animals as possible per dollar.”

• The three authors recognized the positive contribution made by EA. There are three main contributions according to them:

  1) Increased Awareness: Effective Altruism has significantly raised awareness about the plight of farmed animals, bringing attention to a previously neglected issue.

  2) Funding and Resources: EA has directed substantial funding and resources to farmed animal causes. EA has big teams of researchers and many people investing in their projects, so all these resources increased the capacity of the case to have a great impact

  3) Brought Tractability: EA has also brought some intellectual respect to the cause by bringing a tractability framework that shows progress, and the impact that some interventions can have, to parties with which activists engage

EA’s Takeover of the Cause

• Gravitational force (passive impact): The sheer size of EA also “has generated a new gravitational force with troubling consequences.” This gravitational force has a passive effect that uniformized the approach by numerous organizations for two reasons:

• 1) Funding: To be funded, all organizations want to meet EA’s criteria, making the movement less diverse and focusing only on an EA’s approach. Activist groups, in the pursuit of having investment by EA, will pursue specific goals that can have great statistics to show for, and anything that does not have an excellent track record on the metric is pushed to the side:

  • “So eager are activist organizations to generate particular kinds of statistics attended to by donors (like pledges to go cage-free or counts of animals impacted) that, in the service of these aims, everything else is pushed to the sidelines.”

• 2) Narrow Metric: EA’s funding is based on a metric. The higher the expected value of the interventions, the more likely the organization will be funded. This metric is described as helpful but narrow. It can measure some changes but not others, and fits with some types of interventions but not others. We can see the previous effects of the metric and the funding as passive. EA most likely does not intend to have this impact on the movement; it is its size that causes this. However, the authors state that EA actively impose some ‘rules’. Active imposition of ‘rules’: EA pressures the organization to follow its approach by providing guidelines, or, as the authors say, “rules,” to ensure the movement's effectiveness:

  • “These rules of engagement are often functionally enforced by Effective Altruist funders upon activist groups that would never otherwise proceed in this manner.”

  • These rules can be summarized as asking for as little as possible change to have a potential small success instead of a likely refusal. A small gain from a big industry has a great impact. To optimize the metric, EA tends to focus on small changes that are very likely to occur. In other words, they focus on low-hanging fruits. EA’s approach should be part of a package of approaches, and EA’s metric should be a tool to help guide interventions. However, because of the rigidity of EA’s metric and its sheer funding power, the movement is less diverse, and the metric has become an idol rather than a tool. The influence of EA is so great that it even influences the overall strategy of the cause:

  • “But Effective Altruist thinking is also being used to guide strategies within the farmed animal space, and it is in this regard that it has— at least in practice— proven to be a woefully inadequate framework.”

Incremental changes and incremental change interaction

• The authors state that there are two kinds of approaches to making things better for animals: Incremental change: We can reduce suffering by improving conditions with incremental change in the Industry.

• This is an effective way to reduce suffering. Systemic change: We can also reduce the suffering of animals by ending industrial factory farming.

• The authors state that both approaches are necessary. Ending factory farming will likely take a long time, and during this time, trillions of animals would have suffered immensely

• Their suffering should not be forgotten for the end goal.

• The authors then point to a core feature of how these two approaches must interact: Incremental changes can either facilitate systemic change or make it less likely.

• Two ways that incremental changes interact with systemic change

  • Make systemic change more likely:

    • Incremental changes can make systemic change more likely by weakening industrial farming. The authors do not give examples. However, any intervention that would impoverish the Industry (expensive change, additional taxes, reduces the number of people buying meat).

  • Make systemic change less likely:

    • Incremental changes might make systemic change less likely by making industrial farming more appealing, resilient, and shielded from future attacks.

      • “Such incremental efforts are of at least two kinds: suffering reduction that entrenches the status quo, and suffering reduction that makes industrial farming more vulnerable to challenge (changes that produce more changes)— but, in fact, our movement often supports the former (changes that make later changes harder to produce)”

      • The authors' core criticism is that EA's metric overwhelmingly favours investing in short-term effective suffering reduction, making systemic change less likely. Short-term gains reducing long-term gains seem effective, but are not. However, for EA’s metric, interventions with the highest short-term gain are the best interventions. The optimization for EA’s metric favours some kinds of demands to the Industry that make the end of factory farming less likely.

How does EA make systemic changes less likely?

• The authors argue that EA focuses on changes that the Industry might be ready to agree on from the outset. Less friction makes small victories more likely.

  • “Oppressors will always be willing to reduce suffering, even by reducing profits, to secure a greater victory: the right to endlessly exploit

  • In this way, a narrow focus on suffering reduction can open one to manipulation by industry.”

  • These small victories are not just small gains; they also slow down and make it less likely that the Industry will stop the exploitation for at least three reasons:

    1) Granting the smallest changes: The industry knows that if they do not give in to some demands, they will be purchased by activist groups, which is bad publicity. Thus, they choose the least demanding request and eventually grant it. Thus, there is competition for the smallest request to be the organization making the gain. This focus on the smallest gains might slow down the process of ending factory farming.

    • “In practice, this has meant corporate refusal to negotiate with nonprofits for changing practices unless these negotiations essentially guarantee no disruption to their exploitative business model.”

    2) Industry’s demands after granting a small change:

  • The industry adapts to the demands and becomes better at negotiating the demands made of them. Some of the main strategies are 1) asking for an extended time to make the requested changes, 2) demanding some public praise

    3) keeping the subsequent demands low. This protection makes systemic changes less likely:

  • “they have asked for unprecedentedly long timetables for change; they have demanded our public praise for even the smallest and least costly changes; and, above all, they have asked that we, advocates, keep focused on the next “low hanging fruit” and not focus our campaigns on more systemic problems.”

  • Industry ethical washing: The Industry then uses this reduction in animal suffering as a selling point to increase its sales, making the average buyer think that they are engaging in ethical behaviour. This comforts them that a systemic change is unnecessary and that we are progressing toward more ethical food consumption.

    • “Instead, we have, for example, cage-free campaigns that achieve suffering reduction in a way that turns “cage-free” into a value-added marketing term and creates the public appearance of an industry undertaking serious reform.”

    • In this context, the EA’s incremental approach to animal advocacy is kind of helping the industry by giving them the option of granting small demands, adapting slowly, and giving the industry some ethical selling points, turning animal advocates into allies of the Industry: “groups that begin by attacking them are quickly turned into unwitting allies that bizarrely function to improve the reputation of factory farming.”

EA and the Diversity of Approaches

• EA’s approach has an essential impact on what kind of organizations are supported. Many types of interventions are challenging to track

• This does not mean that they are ineffective; it is just challenging to calculate their impact in numbers

• The authors give the example of Community organizing fighting factory farming, and building alternative foodways.

  • “Baltimore […] has been the site of the most extraordinary local community organizing outcomes by vegan activists we have Ever seen— particularly the work being led by activists Brenda Sanders and Naijha Wright-Brown to address community health and justice issues through vegan nonprofit and for-profit entities like Baltimore’s Vegan Soulfest, Thrive, Black Vegetarian Society of Maryland, A Greener Kitchen, Land of Kush, and the Afro-Vegan Society

  • These entities have each impacted the diets of tens of thousands of Baltimore residents directly, and for a pittance compared to what is spent annually on corporate animal welfare campaigns.”

  • Community organizing involves local groups aiming to have an impact on their community. The authors argue that “Effective Altruists have more or less decided that community organizing is ‘not effective’, and that has put a chill on support for certain organizations even when they could, if given the right opportunity, empirically demonstrate high levels of effectiveness. […] And how on earth would one measure its effectiveness?”.

  • The argument is that there is no more data to support corporate pledges. The core idea to speculate is probably that all types of interventions should be supported, the most effective for each type of intervention, and that we should have different metrics for different types of interventions.