EA - Abolitionist in the Streets, Pragmatist in the Sheets: New Ideas for Effective Animal Advocacy by Dhruv Makwana

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Abolitionist in the Streets, Pragmatist in the Sheets: New Ideas for Effective Animal Advocacy, published by Dhruv Makwana on January 11, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.This series of posts is not intended to re-ignite the never-ending philosophical debate about welfarism vs abolitionism. Its main point is simply to point out that (broadly speaking) animal advocacy within Effective Altruism is uniform in its welfarist thinking and approach, and that it has assumed with insufficient reason that all abolitionist thinking and approaches are ineffective. This assumption is partly based on (1) poor evidence (2) a narrow conception of what it means to take an abolitionist approach to animal advocacy (3) with one notable exception, abolitionists’ poor/absent engagement with animal advocacy on pragmatic terms.It is important to note I am not claiming that alternative approaches mentioned are (cost-)effective, though I do state reasons this might be true. In logic terms, I am simply saying that currently, the status quo is,EA Animal Advocacy = Welfarist approaches & not (Abolitionist approaches).What I am proposing is that it should at least beEA Animal Advocacy = Welfarist approaches & unknown(Abolitionist approaches).That is, the community does not have strong enough evidence and arguments to rule out abolitionist thinking and approaches. This opens up new lines of thinking, new questions for research and new advocacy strategies to test and refine. I also suggest how advocates might measure such strategies’ effectiveness, in ways appropriate to abolitionism (Social Change Dynamics).EpistemicsI am a pragmatic, abolitionist-leaning animal advocate and vegan and I wrote this series voluntarily, in rare spare time, with help from three other vegans, all of whom have been familiar with EA for a few years. Two of us have a moderate amount of experience (a few years) volunteering with local abolitionist activism of various sorts, and we recognise this could lead to motivated reasoning. Two of us would identify as EAs, and have attended EA conferences. One of us is studying for a PhD in wild animal suffering; I am studying for a PhD in Computer Science. None of us have any formal training or professional experience in EA-related research, or criticism. Most importantly, this series was written over the course of more than 14 months; the sheer length of time means research moves on - I’ve done my best to keep up, and have even been scooped on multiple points, but I’ve probably missed things.This series is intended to be a big-picture piece, surfacing and investigating common beliefs within EA animal advocacy. It covers a huge amount of ground, more akin to setting a research agenda than answering specific questions: each paragraph could be the subject of an investigation. Necessarily, I deal with generalisations of views, which will not cover all organisations, variations, or advocates. I have made my best efforts to avoid accidentally strawmanning, by, wherever possible, checking my intuition on what the mainstream views are against any available evidence (funding allocations, forum posts, surveys, reports from prominent EA organisations, searches on the EA forum).SummaryA Case for AbolitionI present a short, pragmatic, and EA-targeted case for complete abolition of animal exploitation, and for using abolitionist approaches to achieve this. I show that (1) a longtermist perspective leads one to aim for complete abolition as a goal, and with one key assumption, using abolitionist approaches to get there and (2) contrary to prior work, abolition is helpful to reducing wild animal suffering (and conversely, welfarism could hinder such efforts).Limitations with Current EA Animal AdvocacyI argue that the current major strands of EA Animal Advocacy (corporate welfare ca...