Today I read the recently published Effective Altruism Handbook. I had been looking forward to reading it, hoping to read something that I would both agree with and learn from. Unfortunately, the main lesson I learned was that there is a big problem with the effective altruism movement in its current form.
The problem is actually well exemplified by my personal experience with donating based on GiveWell’s recommendations. I came upon GiveWell and their work about two years ago, and this encounter prompted me to immediately redirect my donations to their three top recommended charities at the time, namely Against Malaria Foundation, Deworm the World Initiative and GiveDirectly.
This made the best sense ethically. Or so I thought. For about a year later, I got an email update from GiveDirectly, which informed me what the money I donated was being spent on: a plurality was being spent on “livestock.” Having just finished writing the essay Why “Happy Meat” Is Always Wrong at the time, I felt that my position on this matter was quite thoroughly considered, and the conclusion was clear: I could not continue supporting GiveDirectly, so I cancelled my donations to them.
One might object that my cancellation was unfair. After all, the goal of GiveDirectly is poverty reduction, not anti-speciesism, so can we not give them a break? The answer is no, and the reason why is captured perfectly in the following nine words from Peter Singer’s piece on speciesism in the EA Handbook: “'speciesism,' by analogy with racism, must also be condemned.”
Unfortunately, my reading of the EA Handbook made it clear to me that this indeed is a big problem in the EA movement today: it is profoundly speciesist. What else can one call it when its evaluations of success and effectiveness almost always focus uniquely on one species, homo sapiens?
Given the ubiquity of speciesism in our world today, this should perhaps not come as a big surprise, yet the EA movement really should do better. After all, the EA Handbook itself contains a chapter on speciesism that soundly argues for its rejection, yet unfortunately the book, including that chapter itself, fails completely to make explicit the most basic of implications of such a rejection, even though the main implications of rejecting speciesism could in my view have been listed fairly shortly: endorse veganism, end the property status of non-human animals, and take the suffering of non-human beings in nature seriously.
I have tried to elaborate on all these points in my recent book on the subject, yet the following conveys some of my reasoning in brief:
1) We do not find it justifiable to buy products that result from deliberately enslaving and killing humans, so upon rejecting speciesism, we should not find it justifiable to buy products that result from deliberately enslaving and killing non-human beings.
2) We rightly reject the property status of human individuals, no matter what cognitive abilities they may have, and so upon rejecting speciesism, we should also reject the property status of non-human individuals.
3) We do not disregard human beings just because they find themselves in “nature” or otherwise outside of any human society, and upon rejecting speciesism, we cannot disregard non-human beings on those grounds either.
These are all rather relevant points, and the failure to include any of these in the EA Handbook must be considered a serious omission, especially when one considers the enormous numbers of individuals involved. As Luke Muehlhauser recognizes in one of his two chapters in the book, the vast majority of sentient beings on the planet are of non-human rather than human kind, and the vast majority of these, more than 99.9 percent, live in nature. Who speaks for them? Fortunately, there is a growing number of people in the wider effective altruism community who do, and thankfully, Muehlhauser mentions two of the most vocal such advocates: David Pearce and Brian Tomasik.
Hopefully, the EA movement will keep on advancing and eventually live up to its dedication to the well-being of all sentient beings. Unfortunately, today, the bulk of the movement appears to greatly underestimate the moral importance of non-human beings and our strong reasons to help them.
