If ever there were a bias that we evolved not to transcend, it is surely our speciesist bias. After all, we evolved in a context in which our survival depended on our killing and eating non-human beings. For most of our evolutionary history, the questioning of such a practice, and the belief that non-human beings should be taken seriously in moral terms, meant a radically decreased probability of survival and reproduction. And this would likely also apply to one’s entire tribe if one were to start spreading such a sentiment, which might help explain the visceral threat that many people seem to feel upon engaging with supporters of this sentiment today. In other words, having significant moral concern for non-human beings was probably not a recipe for survival in our evolutionary past. It was more like a death sentence. For this reason alone, we should expect to be extremelybiased on this matter.
And yet this evolutionary tale is far from the full story, as there is also a cultural story to be told, which provides even more reasons to expect our outlook to be intensely biased. For on top of our (likely) speciesist biological hardware, we also have the software of cultural programming running, and it runs the ultimate propaganda campaign against concern for non-human beings. Indeed, if we ran just a remotely similar campaign against humans, we would consider the term “propaganda” a gross understatement. Their body parts are for sale at every supermarket and on the menu for virtually every meal; their skin is ripped off their bodies and used for handbags, shoes, and sports equipment; their names are used pejoratively in every other sentence. Why, indeed, would anyone expect this to leave our moral cognition with respect to these beings biased in the least? Or rather, why should we expect to stand any chance whatsoever of having just a single rational thought about the moral status of these beings? Well, we arguably shouldn’t — not without immense amounts of effort spent rebelling against our crude nature and the atrocious culture that it has spawned.
Another bias that is relevant to consider, on top of the preceding considerations, is that human altruism tends to be motivated by a hidden drive to show others how cool and likable we are, and to increase our own social status. To think that we transcend this motive merely by calling ourselves “effective altruists” would be naive. The problem, then, is that rejecting speciesism and taking the implications of such a rejection seriously is, sadly, seen as quite uncool at this point. If one were to do so, one would become more than a little obnoxious and unlikeable in the eyes of most people, and be more like a favorite object of ridicule than of admiration, none of which is enticing for social creatures like us. So even if reason unanimously says that we should reject speciesism, we have a thousand and one social reasons that say just the opposite.
There are also psychological studies that demonstrate the existence of strong biases in our views of non-human individuals, such as that we “value individuals of certain species less than others even when beliefs about intelligence and sentience are accounted for”. More than that, we deny the mental capacities of the kinds of beings whom we consider food — a denial that is increased by “expectations regarding the immediate consumption” of such beings.
These forms of bias should give us pause and should encourage serious reflection. The way forward, it seems, is to admit that we are extremely biased and to commit to doing better.
While there may be strong deontological or virtue-ethical reasons to avoid consuming animal products (“as far as is possible and practicable”), the consequentialist case for such avoidance is quite weak.
Or at least this appears to be a common view in some consequentialist-leaning circles. My aim in this post is to argue against this view. On a closer look, we find many strong consequentialist reasons to avoid the consumption of animal products.
The direct effects on the individuals we eat
99 percent of animals raised for foodin the US, and more than 90 percentglobally, live out their lives on factory farms. These are lives of permanent confinement to very small spaces, often involving severe abuse, as countless undercover investigations have revealed. And their slaughter frequently involves extreme suffering as well — for example, about a million chickens and turkeys are boiled alive in the US every year, and fish, the vast majority of farmed vertebrates, are usually slaughtered without any stunning. They are routinely suffocated to death, frozen to death, and cut in ways that leave them to bleed to death (exsanguination).
Increasing such suffering via one’s marginal consumption is bad on virtually all consequentialist views. And note that, empirically, it turns out that people who aspire to avoid meat from factory farmed animals (“conscientious omnivores”) actually often do not (John & Sebo, 2020, 3.2; Rothgerber, 2015). And an even greater discrepancy between ideals and actuality is found in the behavior of those who believe that the animals they eat are “treated well”, which in the US is around 58 percent of people, despite the fact that over 99 percent of farm animals in the US live on factory farms (Reese, 2017).
Furthermore, even in Brian Tomasik’s analyses that factor in the potential of animal agriculture to reduce wild-animal suffering, the consumption of virtually all animal “products” is recommended against — including eggs and meat from fish (farmed and wild-caught), chickens, pigs, and (especially) insects. Brian argues that the impact of not consuming meat is generally positive, both because of the direct marginal impact (“avoiding eating one chicken or fish roughly translates to one less chicken or fish raised and killed”) and because of the broader social effects (more on the latter below).
The above is an important consequentialist consideration against consuming animal products. Yet unfortunately, consequentialist analyses tend to give far too much weight to this consideration alone, and to treat it as the end-all be-all of consequentialist arguments against consuming animal products when, in fact, it is not necessarily even one of the most weighty arguments.
Institutional effects
Another important consideration has to do with the institutional effects of animal consumption. These effects seem superficially similar to those discussed in the previous point, yet they are in fact quite distinct.
Anti-charity
For one, there is the increased financial support to an industry that not only systematically harms currently existing individuals, but which also, perhaps more significantly, actively works to undermine moral concern for future non-human individuals. It does this through influential lobbying activities and by advertising in ways that effectively serve as propaganda against non-human animals (that is certainly what we would call it in the human case if an industry continually worked to legitimize the exploitation and killing of certain human individuals; in fact, “propaganda” may be overly euphemistic).
Supporting this industry can be seen as anti-charity of sorts, as it pushes us away from betterment for non-human animals at the level of our broader institutions. And this effect could well be moresignificant than the direct marginal impact on non-human beings consumed, as such institutional factors may be a greater determinant of how many such beings will suffer in the future.
Not only are these institutional effects negative for future farmed animals, but the resulting reinforcement of speciesism and apathy toward non-human animals in general likely also impedes concern for wild animals in particular. And given the numbers, this effect may be even more important than the negative effect on future farmed animals.
Anti-activism
Another institutional effect is that, when we publicly buy or consume animal products, we signal to other people that non-human individuals can legitimately be viewed as food, and that we approve of the de facto horrific institution of animal agriculture. This signaling effect is difficult to avoid even if we do not in fact condone most of the actual practices involved. After all, virtually nobody condones the standard practices, such as the castration of pigs without anesthetics. And yet virtually all of us still condone these practices behaviorally, and indeed effectively support their continuation.
In this way, publicly buying or consuming animal products can, regardless of one’s intentions, end up serving as miniature anti-activism against the cause of reducing animal suffering — it serves to normalize a collectively perpetrated atrocity — while choosing to forego such products can serve as miniature activism in favor of the cause.
One may object that the signaling effects of such individual actions are insignificant. Yet we are generally not inclined to say the same about the signaling effects of, say, starkly racist remarks, even when the individuals whom the remarks are directed against will never know about them (e.g. when starkly anti-black sentiments are shared in forums with white people only). The reason, I think, is that we realize that such remarks do have negative effects down the line, and we realize that these effects are not minor.
It is widely acknowledged that, to human psychology, racism is a ticking bomb that we should make a consistent effort to steer away from, lest we corrode our collective attitudes and in turn end up systematically exploiting and harming certain groups of individuals. We have yet to realize that the same applies to speciesism.
For a broader analysis of the social effects of the institution of animal exploitation, see (John & Sebo, 2020, 3.3). Though note that I disagree with John and Sebo’s classical utilitarian premise, which would allow us to farm individuals, and even kill them in the most horrible ways, provided that their lives were overall “net positive” (the horrible death included). I think this notion of “net positive” needs to be examinedatlength, especially in the interpersonal context where some beings’ happiness is claimed to outweigh the extreme suffering of others.
Influence on our own perception
The influence on our own attitudes and thinking is another crucial factor. Indeed, for a consequentialist trying to think straight about how to prioritize one’s resources for optimal impact, this may be the most important reason not to consume animal products.
Moral denigration is a well-documented effect
Common sense suggests that we cannot think clearly about the moral status of a given group of individuals as long as we eat them. Our evolutionary history suggests the same: it was plausibly adaptive in our evolutionary past to avoid granting any considerable moral status to individuals categorized as “food animals”.
Psychological studies bear out common sense and evolution-based speculation. In Don’t Mind Meat? The Denial of Mind to Animals Used for Human Consumption, Brock Bastian and colleagues demonstrated that people tend to ascribe diminished mental capacities to “food animals”; that “meat eaters are motivated to deny minds to food animals when they are reminded of the link between meat and animal suffering”; and that such mind denial is increased when people expect to eat meat in the near future.
categorization as food — but not killing or human responsibility — was sufficient to reduce the animal’s perceived capacity to suffer, which in turn restricted moral concern.
This finding is in line with the prevalence of so-called consistency effects, our psychological tendency to adapt beliefs that support our past and present behavior (see Salamon & Rayhawk’s Cached Selves and Huemer, 2010, “5.d Coherence bias”). For example, “I eat animals, and hence animals don’t suffer so much and don’t deserve great moral consideration”.
And yet another study (Loughnan et al., 2010) found that the moral numbing effects of meat eating applied to other non-human animals as well, suggesting that these numbing effects may extend to wild animals:
Eating meat reduced the perceived obligation to show moral concern for animals in general and the perceived moral status of the [animal being eaten].
These studies confirm a point that a number of philosophers have been trying to convey for a while (see John & Sebo, 2020, 3.2 for a brief review). Here is Peter Singer in Practical Ethics (as quoted in ibid.):
it would be better to reject altogether the killing of animals for food, unless one must do so to survive. Killing animals for food makes us think of them as objects that we can use as we please …
And such objectification, in turn, has horrendous consequences. This is usually quite obvious in the human case: few people are tempted to claim that it would be inconsequential if we began eating a given group of humans, even if we stipulated that these humans had the same mental abilities as, say, pigs. Singer’s point about objectification is obvious to most people in this case, and most consequentialists would probably say that raising, killing, and eating humans could only be recommended by very naive and incomplete consequentialist analyses detached from the real world — not least the realities of human psychology. Yet the same ought to be concluded when the beings in question possess not just the minds but also the bodies of pigs.
Relatedly, in the hypothetical case where systematic exploitation of certain humans is the norm, few consequentialists would be tempted to say that abstention from the consumption of human products (e.g. human body parts or forcefully obtained breast milk) is insignificant, or say that it is not worth sticking with it because other things are more important. For on reflection, when we put on the more sophisticated consequentialist hat, we realize that such abstention probably is an important component of the broader set of actions that constitutes the ethically optimal path forward. The same ought to be concluded, I submit, in the non-human case.
Note, finally, that even if we believed ourselves to be exceptions to all of the psychological tendencies reviewed above — a belief we should be skeptical of given the prevalence of illusory superiority — it would still be hypocritical and a failure of integrity if we ourselves did not follow a norm that we would recommend others to follow. And consequentialists have good reasons to show high integrity.
Self-serving biases
This is more of a meta consideration suggesting that 1) we should be skeptical of convenient conclusions, and 2) we should adhere to stricter principles than a naive consequentialist analysis might imply.
A good reason to adhere to reasonably strict principles is that, if we loosen our principles and leave everything up for case-by-case calculation, we open the door for biases to sneak in.
As Jamie Mayerfeld writes in Suffering and Moral Responsibility (p. 121):
An agent who regarded [sound moral principles] as mere rules of thumb would ignore them whenever she calculated that compliance wasn’t necessary to minimize the cumulative badness of suffering. The problem is that it might also be in her own interest to violate these principles, and self-interest could distort her calculations, even when she calculated sincerely. She could thus acquire a pattern of violating the principles even when compliance with them really was necessary to prevent the worst cumulative suffering. To avoid this, we would want her to feel strongly inhibited from violating the principles. Inhibitions of this kind can insulate agents from the effect of biased calculations.
And there are indeed many reasons to think that our “calculations” are strongly biased against concern for non-human individuals and against the conclusion that we should stop consuming them. For example, there is the fact that people who do not consume animal products face significant stigma — for example, one US study found that people tended to evaluate vegans more negatively than other minority groups, such as atheists and homosexuals; “only drug addicts were evaluated more negatively than vegetarians and vegans”. And a recent study suggested that fear of stigmatization is among the main reasons why people do not want to stop eating animal products. Yet fear of stigmatization is hardly, on reflection, a sound moral reason to eat animal products.
A more elaborate review of relevant biases can be found in (Vinding, 2018, “Bias Alert: We Should Expect to Be Extremely Biased”; Vinding, 2020, 11.5).
Human externalities
Defenses of the consumption of non-human individuals often rest on strongly anthropocentric values (which cannot be justified). But even on such anthropocentric terms, a surprisingly strong case can in fact be made against animal consumption given the negative effects animal agriculture has on human health — effects that individual consumption will also contribute to on the margin.
First, as is quite salient these days, animal agriculture significantly increases the risk of zoonotic diseases. Many of the most lethal diseases of the last century were zoonotic diseases that spread to humans due to animal agriculture and/or animal consumption, including the 1918 flu (50-100 million deaths), AIDS (30-40 million deaths), the Hong Kong flu (1-4 million deaths), and the 1957-1958 flu (1-4 million deaths). The same is true of the largest epidemics so far in this century, such as SARS, Ebola, COVID-19, and various bird and swine flus.
A remarkable 61 percent of all human pathogens, and 75 percent of new human pathogens, are transmitted by animals, and some of the most lethal bugs affecting humans originate in our domesticated animals.
Antibiotic resistance is another health problem exacerbated by animal agriculture. Each year in the US, more than 35,000 people die from antibiotic-resistant infections, which is more than twice the annual number of US gun homicides. And around 80 percent of all antibiotics used in the US are given to non-human animals — often simply to promote growth rather than to fight infections. In other words, animal agriculture is a key contributor to antibiotic resistance.
The environmental effects of animal agriculture represent another important factor, or rather set of factors. There is pollution — “ammonia pollution linked to U.S. farming may impose human health costs that are greater than the profits earned by agricultural exports”. There are greenhouse gases contributing significantly to climate change. There is nitrate contamination of the groundwater from manure:
The EPA found that nitrates are the most widespread agricultural contaminant in drinking water wells and estimates that 4.5 million people [in the US] are exposed to elevated nitrate levels from drinking water wells. Nitrates, if they find their way into the groundwater, can potentially be fatal to infants.
Beyond the environmental effects, there are also significant health risks associated with the direct consumption of animal products, includingredmeat, chickenmeat, fishmeat, eggs and dairy. Conversely, significant health benefits are associated with alternative sources of protein, such as beans, nuts, and seeds. This is relevant both collectively, for the sake of not supporting industries that activelypromote poor human nutrition in general, as well as individually, to maximize one’s own health so one can be more effectively altruistic.
A more thorough review of the human costs of animal agriculture are found in (Vinding, 2014, ch. 2).
In sum, one could argue that we also have a strong obligation to our fellow humans to avoid contributing to the various human health problems and risks caused by animal agriculture.
Both/And
What I have said above may seem in tension with the common consequentialist critique that says that animal advocates focus too much on individual consumer behavior. Yet in reality, there is no tension. It is both true, I submit, that avoiding the consumption of animal products is important (in purely consequentialist terms) and that most animal advocates focus far too much on individual consumer change compared toinstitutionalchangeandwild-animal suffering. The latter point does not negate the former (the same view is expressed in John & Sebo, 2020, 3.3).
The aim of this essay is to list some of the reasons why animal advocates and aspiring effective altruists may be biased against prioritizing wild-animal suffering. These biasing factors are, I believe, likely to significantly distort the views and priorities of most people who hold impartial moral views concerned about the suffering of all non-human animals.
The animal rights movement has, historically, been almost exclusively concerned with the protection of non-human animals exploited by humans. Very little attention has been devoted to suffering in nature for natural reasons. And to the extent the issue has been mentioned by philosophers in the past, it has rarely been framed as something that we ought to do something about.
Only in recent decades has the view that wild-animal suffering deserves serious attention in our practical deliberations been defended more explicitly. And the people who have defended this view have, of course, still been a tiny minority among activists concerned about animal suffering, and they have so far had little impact on the focus and activism of the animal movement at large.
This historical background matters greatly, since we humans very much have a social epistemology: we tend to pick up the views of our peers. For example, most people adopt the religion that is most popular in theirgeographical region, even if it is not the most rational belief system on reflection. And a similar pattern applies to our views in general. It is truly rare for people to think critically and independently.
Thus, if most people concerned about non-human animals — including our own mentors and personal heroes — have focused almost exclusively on the plight of non-human animals exploited by humans, then we are likely to be strongly inclined to do the same, even if this is not the most rational focus on reflection (in terms of how we can have the best impact on the margin).
2. Emotionally salient footage
Closely related to the point above is the fact that footage of suffering farmed animals constitutes almost all of the disturbing footage we see of animal suffering. Whether on social media or in documentary movies about animal rights, the vast majority of the content encountered by the average animal activist shows cows, pigs, and chickens who are suffering at human hands.
Note how unrepresentative this picture is: a great majority of the animal suffering we observe occurs at human hands, although the vast majority of all suffering beings on the planet are found in nature. It is difficult to see how this can give us anything but a skewed sense of what is actually happening on our planet.
Yet not only will most of us have been exposed to far more suffering occurring at human hands, but we probably also tend to see the victims of such suffering with very different eyes compared to how we see the victims of natural processes. When we, as animal activists, see pigs and chickens suffer at human hands, we look at these beings with sympathy. We feel moral outrage. But when we see a being suffer in nature for natural reasons — for example, a baby elephant getting eaten alive — we are probably more hesitant about activating this same sympathy. Sure, we may lament the suffering and feel bad for the victim. But we do not truly see ourselves in the victim’s place. We do not look at the situation with the same moral eyes that cry “this is unacceptable”.
It is difficult to overstate the significance of this point. For while we may like to think of our activism and moral priorities as being animated chiefly by reasoned arguments, the truth is that salient experiences tend to matter just as much, if not more, for our moral motivation. It is one thing to think that wild-animal suffering is important, but it is quite another to feel it. The latter renders action less optional.
If we had only seenmorefootageofwild-animalsuffering, and — most crucially — dared to behold such footage with truly sympathetic eyes, we would probably feel its moral gravity much more clearly, and in turn feel more motivated to address the problem. It seems unlikely that the priorities of the animal movement would be largely the same if more than 99 percent of the horrible footage encountered by animal activists had displayed the suffering of wild animals (which would be roughly representative of the number of wild animals relative to farmed animals).
3. Perpetrator bias
Another relevant bias to control for is the perpetrator bias: we seem to care more about suffering when it is caused by a moral agent who has brought it about by intentional action (Vinding, 2020, 7.7). By extension, we tend to neglect suffering when it is not caused by intentional actions, such as when it occurs in nature for natural reasons. This bias, and its relevance to our appraisals of wild-animal suffering, has been explored in (Tomasik, 2013; Davidow, 2013).
As both Tomasik and Davidow argue, this bias could well be among the main reasons why most people, and indeed most animal advocates, tend to neglect the problem of wild-animal suffering. Our moral psychology is very much set up to track the transgressions of perpetrators, which can leave us relatively unmoved by suffering that involves no perpetrators, even if our reflected view is that all suffering should matter equally. After all, the core programming of our moral cognition does not change instantly just because a few of the modules in our minds have come to endorse a more advanced, impartial view.
4. Omission bias
Some version of theomissionbias— our tendency to judge harmful acts of omission more leniently than harmful acts of commission, even when the consequences are the same —may be another reason why people with impartial views give less priority to wild-animal suffering than they ideally should. Our moral psychology is plausibly often motivated to focus on wrongs that we can be perceived to be responsible for, and for which we may be blamed.
Suffering caused by humans is in some sense done by “us”, and hence we may instinctively feel that we are more blameworthy for allowing such suffering to occur compared to allowing the suffering of wild animals. This might in turn incline us toward focusing on the former rather than the latter. Yet from an impartial perspective, this is not a sound reason for prioritizing human-caused suffering over “natural” suffering.
5. Scope neglect
Numbers are commonly invoked as one of the main reasons for focusing on farmed animals. For example, there are about a hundred times as many non-human animals used and killed for food as there are companion animals, and hence we should generally spend our limited resources on helping the former rather than the latter. What is less commonly acknowledged, however, is that a similar thing can be said about wild animals, who, even if we only count vertebrates, outnumber vertebrates used and killed for food at least a thousand times (and perhaps more than 100,000 times).
Such numbers are notoriouslydifficult for us to internalize in our moral outlook. Our minds were simply not built to feel the significance of several orders of magnitude. Consequently, we have to make an arduous effort to really appreciate the force of this consideration.
The following illustration from Animal Charity Evaluators shows the relative proportion of wild vertebrates to domesticated vertebrates:
6. Invertebrate neglect
Related to, and amplifying, the scope-neglect consideration is our neglect of invertebratesuffering. Not only are domesticated vertebrates outnumbered by wild vertebrates by at least a thousand times, but wild vertebrates are, in turn, outnumbered by wild invertebrates by at least ten thousand times (and perhaps by more than ten million times). .
Put differently, more than 99.99 percent of all animals are invertebrates, and virtually all of them live in the wild. Taking the suffering of invertebrates into account thus gives us another strong — and widely ignored — reason in favor of prioritizing wild-animal suffering. And in line with the point about the significance of emotionally salient footage, it may be that we need to watch footage of harmedinvertebrates in order for us to fully appreciate the weight of this consideration.
7. Thinking we can have no impact
A common objection against focusing on wild-animal suffering is that the problem is intractable — if we could do anything about it, then we should prioritize it, but there just isn’t anything we can do at this point.
This is false in two principal ways. First, we humans already make countless decisions that influence animals in the wild (and we will surely make even more significant such decisions in the future). For example, the environmental policies adopted by our societies already influence large numbers of non-human animals in significant ways, and it would be false to claim that such policies are impossible to influence. After all, environmental groups have already been able to influence such policies to a considerable extent. Sadly, such groups have routinely pushed for policies that are profoundly speciesist and harmful for non-human animals — often with support from animal advocates, which shows how important it is that animal activists do not blindly endorse environmentalist policies, and how important it is that we reflect on the relationship between environmentalist ethics and animal ethics. And, of course, beyond influencing large-scale policy decisions, there are also many interventions we can make on a smaller scale that still help non-human animals in significant ways.
Second, we can help wild animals in indirect ways: by arguing against speciesism and for the importance of taking wild-animal suffering into consideration, as well as by establishing a research field focused on how we can best help wild animals on a large scale. Such indirect work, i.e. work that does not lead to direct interventions in the near term, may be the most important thing we can do at this point, even as our current wildlife policies and direct interventions are already hugely consequential.
There are reasons to think that animal advocates strongly underestimate public receptivity to the idea that wild-animal suffering matters and is worth reducing (see also what I have writtenelsewhere concerning the broader public’s receptivity to antispeciesist advocacy).
One reason could be that animal advocates themselves tend to find the idea controversial, and they realize that veganism is already quite controversial to most people. Hence, they reason, if they, as animal advocates, find the idea so controversial, and if most people find mere veganism to be highly controversial, then surely the broader public must find concern for wild-animal suffering extremely controversial.
Yet such an expectation is heavily distorted by the idiosyncratic position in which vegans find themselves. The truth is that most people may well view things the opposite way: veganism is controversial to them because they are currently heavily invested — socially and habit-wise — in non-veganism. By contrast, most people are not heavily invested in non-intervention with respect to wild animals, and thus have little incentive to oppose it.
The following is a relevant quote fromOscar Horta that summarizes his experience of giving talks about the issues of speciesism and wild-animal suffering at various high schools (my own software-assisted translation):
Intervention to help animals is easily accepted There are many antispeciesist activists who are afraid to defend the idea of helping animals in the wild. Even if these activists totally agree with the idea, they believe that most people will reject it completely, and even consider the idea absurd. However, among the people attending the talks there was a very wide acceptance of the idea. Radical cases of intervention were not raised in the talks, but all the examples presented were well accepted. These included cases of injured, sick or trapped animals being rescued; orphan animal shelters; medical assistance to sick or injured animals; vaccination of wild animals; and provision of food for animals at risk of starvation. In sum, there does not seem to be any reason to be afraid of conveying this idea in talks of this type.
Of course, the claim here is not that everybody, or even most people, will readily agree with the idea of helping wild animals — many will surely resist it strongly. But the same holds true of all advocacy on behalf of non-human animals, and the point is that, contrary to our intuitive expectations, public receptivity to helping non-human animals in nature may in many ways be greater than their receptivity to helping farmed animals (although receptivity toward the latter also appears reasonably highwhen the issue is framed in terms of institutionalchangerather thanindividual consumer change).
Veganism is rising, and there are considerable incentives entirely separate from concern for nonhuman animals to move away from the production of animal “products”. In economic terms, it is inefficient to sustain an animal in order to use her flesh and skin rather than togrow meatand other animal-derived products directly, or replace them with plant-based alternatives. Similarly strong incentives exist in the realm of public health, which animal agriculture threatens byincreasing the risksof zoonotic diseases, antibiotic resistant bacteria like MRSA, and cardiovascular disease. These incentives, none of which have anything to do with concern for nonhuman animals per se, could well be pushing humanity toward veganism more powerfully than anything else.
So despite the bleakness of the current situation, there are many incentives that appear to push humanity toward the abolition of animal exploitation, and we may even be moving in that direction faster than most of us expect (this is not, of course, a reason to be complacent about the unspeakable moral atrocity of “animal farming”, but it is something to take into account in our approach to helping future beings as much as we can).
In contrast, there are no corresponding incentives that lead us to help non-human animals in nature, and thus no strong reasons to think that humanity (including environmentalists, sadly) will take the interests of wild animals sufficiently into account if we do not advocate on their behalf.
Advocacy focused on wild animals is already vastly neglected in the animal movement today, and when we consider what the future is likely to look like, the level of priority animal advocates currently devote to the problem of wild-animal suffering seems even more disproportionate still.
10. Long-term nebulousness bias
This last bias is a bit more exotic and applies mostly to so-called longtermist effective altruists. People who focus on improving the long-term future can risk ending up with a rather nebulous sense of how to act and what to prioritize: there are so many hypothetical cause areas to consider, and it is often difficult to find tractable ways to further a given cause. Moreover, since there tends to be little real-world data that can help us make progress on these issues, longtermists are often forced to rely mostly on speculation — which in turn opens the floodgates for overconfidence in such speculations. In other words, focusing on the long-term future can easily lead us to rely far too strongly on untested abstractions, and to pay insufficient attention to real-world data and existing problems.
In this way, a (naive) longtermist focus may lead us to neglect concrete problems that evidently do have long-term relevance, and which we can take clear steps toward addressing today. We neglect such problems not only because most of our attention is devoted to more speculative things, but also because these concrete problems do not seem to resemble the “ultimate thing” that clearly improves the long-term future far better than other, merely decent focus areas. Unfortunately, such an “ultimate thing” is, I would argue, unlikely to ever be found. (And if one thinks one has found it, therearereasonsto beskeptical.)
In effect, a naive longtermist focus can lead us to overlook just how promising work to reduce wild-animal suffering in fact is, and how long a list of compelling reasons one can give in its favor: in terms of scale, it vastly dominates all other sources of currently existing suffering; it is, as argued above, a tractable problem where there are fairly concrete and robust ways to make progress; and the problem is likely to exist and be dominant in scale for a long time — centuries, at least.
More than that, work to reduce wild-animal suffering is also likely to have many good flow-through effects. For example, such work is probably among the most promising actions we can take to prevent the spread of animal suffering tospace to space, which is one of the least speculative s-risks (i.e. risks of astronomical future suffering). Indeed, there are already people who activelyadvocate that humanity should spread nature to space, and concreteproposals for how it could be accomplished already exist.
The risk of spreading wild-animal suffering to space appears greater than the risk of spreading factory farming to space, not least in light of the point made in the previous section concerning the incentives and future technologies that are likely to render factory farming obsolete. One may, of course, object that the risks of astronomical future suffering we reduce by addressing factory farming today do not involve factory farming itself but rather future analogs of it. This is a fair point, and such risks of future analogs to factory farming should indeed be taken seriously. However, by the same token, one can argue that we also address future analogs to wild-animal suffering by working on that problem today, and indeed further argue that this would be a superior focus.
After all, work to address wild-animal suffering appears more wide-ranging and inclusive than does work to address factory farming — for example, it is difficult to imagine a future where we address wild-animal suffering (and analog problems) yet fail to address factory farming (and analog problems). Future scenarios where we address the latter yet fail to address the former seem more plausible, since addressing wild-animal suffering takes a greater level of moral sophistication: it not only requires that we avoid directly harming other beings, but also that we actively help them.
Which brings us to another positive secondary effect of focusing on wild-animal suffering: such a focus embodies and reinforces the virtue of factoring in numbers in our moral deliberations, as well as the virtue of extending our circle of moral concern — and responsibility — to even include beings who suffer for reasons we ourselves had no hand in. It is a focus that reflects a truly universal view of our moral obligations, and it does this to a significantly greater extent than a mere opposition to factory farming or (anthropogenic) animal exploitation in general.
To be clear, I am not claiming that wild-animal suffering is necessarily the best thing to focus on for people trying to reduce suffering in the long-term future (I myself happen to think suffering-focused research of a more general nature is somewhat better). But I do claim that it is a decent candidate, and a better candidate than one is likely to realize when caught up in speculative far-modesequence thinking.
Either/Or: A false choice
To say that most of us likely have strong biases against prioritizing wild-animal suffering, and that we should give it much greater priority, is not to say that we cannot still support efforts to abolish animal exploitation, and indeed do effective work toward this end.
As I have argued elsewhere, one of the many advantages of antispeciesist advocacy is that it encompasses all non-human animals and all the suffering they endure — anthropogenic as well as naturogenic.
Addendum: An important bias I left out above is the “proportion bias” (Vinding, 2020, 7.6), also known as “proportiondominance“: our tendency to care more about helping 10 out of 10 individuals than we care about helping 10 out of 100, even though the impact is the same. This bias is especially relevant in the context of wild-animal suffering given the enormous scale at which it continually occurs as a backdrop to any altruistic effort we may pursue.
Expanding humanity’s moral circle such that it includes all sentient beings seems among the most urgent and important missions before us. And yet there is a significant risk that such greater moral inclusion might in fact end up increasing future suffering. As Brian Tomasiknotes:
One might ask, “Why not just promote broader circles of compassion, without a focus on suffering?” The answer is that more compassion by itself could increase suffering. For example,most peoplewho care about wild animals in a general sense conclude that wildlife habitats should be preserved, in part because these people aren’t focused enough on the suffering that wild animals endure. Likewise, generically caring about future digital sentience might encourage people to create as many happy digital minds as possible, even if this means also increasing the risk of digital suffering due to colonizing space. Placing special emphasis on reducing suffering is crucial for taking the right stance on many of these issues.
Indeed, many classical utilitarians do include non-human animals in their moral circle, yet they still consider it permissible, indeed in some sense morally good, that we bring individuals into existence so that they can live “net positive lives” and we can eat them (I have argued that this view is mistaken, almost regardless of what kind of consequentialist view one assumes). And some even seem to think that most lives on factory farms might plausibly be such “net positive lives”. A wide circle of moral consideration clearly does not guarantee an unwillingness to allow large amounts of suffering to be brought into the world.
More generally, there is a considerable number of widely endorsed ethical positions that favor bringing about larger rather than smaller populations of the beings who belong to our moral circle, at least provided that certain conditions are met in the lives of these beings. And many of these ethical positions have quite loose such conditions, which implies that these views can easily permit, and even demand, the creation of a lot of suffering for the sake of some (supposedly) greater good.
Indeed, the truth is that even a view that requires an enormous amount of happiness to outweigh a given amount of suffering might still easily permit the creation of large amounts of suffering, as illustrated by the following consideration (quoted from the penultimate chapter of my book on effective altruism):
consider the practical implications of the following two moral principles: 1) we will not allow the creation of a single instance of the worst forms of suffering […] for any amount of happiness, and 2) we will allow one day of such suffering for ten years of the most sublime happiness. What kind of future would we accept with these respective principles? Imagine a future in which we colonize space and maximize the number of sentient beings that the accessible universe can sustain over the entire course of the future, which is probably more than 10^30. Given this number of beings, and assuming that these beings each live a hundred years, principle 2) above would appear to permit a space colonization that all in all creates more than 10^28 years of [the worst forms of suffering], provided that the other states of experience are sublimely happy. This is how extreme the difference can be between principles like 1) and 2); between whether we consider suffering irredeemable or not. And notice that even if we altered the exchange rate by orders of magnitude — say, by requiring 10^15 times more sublime happiness per unit of extreme suffering than we did in principle 2) above — we would still allow an enormous amount of extreme suffering to be created; in the concrete case of requiring 10^15 times more happiness, we would allow more than 10,000 billion years of [the worst forms of suffering].
This highlights the importance of thinking deeply about which trade-offs, if any, we find acceptable with respect to the creation of suffering, including extreme suffering.
The considerations above concerning popular ethical positions that support larger future populations imply that there is some probability — a seemingly low yet still significant probability — that a more narrow moral circle may in fact lead to less future suffering for the morally excluded beings (e.g. by making efforts to bring these beings into existence, on Earth and beyond, less likely).
Implications
In spite of this risk, I still consider generic moral circle expansion quite beneficial in expectation. Yet it seems less beneficial, and significantly less robust (with respect to the goal of reducing extreme suffering) than does the promotion of suffering-focused values. And it seems less robust and less beneficial still than does the twin-track strategy of focusing on both expanding our moral circle and deepening our concern for suffering. Both seem necessary yet insufficient on their own. If we deepen concern for suffering without broadening the moral circle, our deepened concern risks failing to pertain to the vast majority of sentient beings. On the other hand, if we broaden our moral circle without deepening our concern for suffering, we may end up allowing the beings within our moral circle to endure enormous amounts of suffering.
Magnus Vinding 
