Home / Political objections / Effective altruism
"Resources for doing good are limited, and should go to humans first."
Effective altruism: the principle
Use evidence and reason to do the most good possible with the resources available.
Why excluding animals contradicts the principle
- Effective altruism's criteria, scale, neglectedness and tractability, favor the animal cause: the number of victims is enormous and the resources devoted to it are small.
- Excluding animals in advance is deciding the result before doing the math, the opposite of what the approach proposes.
- Not eating animals takes no resources from any other cause (J6).
The strongest counter-reply
The most serious version says it is hard to compare well-being across species, and that uncertainty favors the better-known human causes.
The answer
The uncertainty is real, but it cuts both ways, and the scale is so large that the animal cause stays a priority even with heavy discounts on the weight of each animal.
See also
J6 There are more important human problems.K1 One person doesn't make a difference.A22 Humans suffer more than animals