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Is RP's Moral Weights Project too animal friendly? Four critical junctures
webAuthor
NickLaing
Credibility Rating
3/5
Good(3)Good quality. Reputable source with community review or editorial standards, but less rigorous than peer-reviewed venues.
Rating inherited from publication venue: EA Forum
This is a critical analysis of Rethink Priorities' Moral Weights Project, relevant to AI safety insofar as questions about sentience, moral patienthood, and welfare measurement methodology may inform how we evaluate the moral status of AI systems and other non-human entities.
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149
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58
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eaforum
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CuratedForum Tags
Cause prioritizationAnimal welfarePhilosophyBuilding effective altruismMoral weightAnimal Welfare vs Global Health Debate Week Criticism of effective altruist causesFarmed animal welfareInvertebrate welfareEvents on the EA ForumMoral philosophy
Metadata
Importance: 42/100commentary
Summary
This EA Forum post critically examines Rethink Priorities' Moral Weights Project, identifying four key decision points where methodological choices may have systematically inflated the moral weight assigned to non-human animals relative to humans. The author questions assumptions about sentience, welfare ranges, and aggregation methods that could significantly affect conclusions about animal welfare prioritization.
Key Points
- •Identifies four specific methodological junctures where the Moral Weights Project may have made assumptions favorable to higher animal moral weights
- •Questions how sentience proxies and welfare range estimates are constructed and whether they appropriately account for uncertainty
- •Examines whether aggregation methods used to combine moral weight estimates introduce systematic biases toward animal-friendly conclusions
- •Raises concerns about the downstream implications for EA resource allocation if moral weights are overestimated for animals
- •Provides a critical counterpoint to Rethink Priorities' influential research on cross-species welfare comparisons
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# Is RP's Moral Weights Project too animal friendly? Four critical junctures
By NickLaing
Published: 2024-10-11
I really appreciate the RP [Moral Weights Project](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/s/y5n47MfgrKvTLE3pw) and before I say anything I’d like to thank the amazing RP crew for their extremely thoughtful and kind responses to this critique. Because of their great response I feel a little uncomfortable even publishing this, as I respect both the project and the integrity of the researchers.[^o3f5xikeng]
This project helped me appreciate what it might mean for animals to suffer, and gave a framework to compare animal and human suffering. RP’s impressive project is now a crux in the EA “space”. 80,000 hours recently used these numbers as a key factor in elevating factory farming to a *"most pressing world problem"* and many forum posts use their median welfare estimates as a central number in cost-effectiveness analysis. ***Of the first 15 posts this debate week, 7 referenced the project.***
As I considered their methodology, I reflected that the outcome hinged on a series of difficult and important junctures, which led to the surprising (to many) conclusion that the moral weight of animals might not be so different from humans. However through my biased, anthropocentric lens[^gmlwvyvsm9d], it seemed to me that these key junctures lean towards favoring animals .
I present four critical junctures, where I think the Moral Weights project favored animals. ***I don’t argue that any of their decisions are necessarily wrong***, only that each decision shifts the project outcome in an animal friendly direction and sometimes by at least an order of magnitude.[^x96u2nk3yxi]
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**Juncture 1 – Animal Friendly Researchers (Unclear multiplier)**
*“*[*Our team*](https://rethinkpriorities.org/publications/the-welfare-range-table) *was composed of three philosophers, two comparative psychologists (one with expertise in birds; another with expertise in cephalopods), two fish welfare researchers, two entomologists, an animal welfare scientist, and a veterinarian.”*
It's uncontroversial to assume that researchers’ findings tend towards their priors - what they already believe[^quj87s5wxlc]. This trend is obvious in contentious political subjects. In immigration research classically conservative think tanks are more likely to emphasise problems with immigration compared with libertarian or liberal ones[^fttmc95le6].[ ](https://via.library.depaul.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1026&context=etd)In the Moral weights project, researchers either have histories of either being animal advocates or are at best neutral - I couldn’t find anyone who had previously expressed public skepticism at animals having high moral weight. Major contributors Bob Fischer and Adam Shriver have a body of work which supports animal welfare.
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