Hi, thanks very much Roxanne.
So I take it all of us are seasoned veterans
of EA, and so all of us know that the strongest
arguments are based on nothing more than flimsy
anecdotes.
So I'd like to start with one of those at
the beginning of the talk. In May of 2018.
New York state's highest court denied the
nonhuman rights project, lead for appeal,
refusing to review an earlier decision made
by a lower court that did not grant a writ
of Habeas Corpus to two chimpanzees, Tommy
and Kiko.
Following a five year campaign between the
nonhuman rights project and each of New York's
four intermediate appellate regional courts
in which these courts, too refused to grant
a writ of Habeas Corpus relief to Tom and
Kiko, two chimpanzees which release them from
confinement and move them into sanctuary.
And so this means that the Nonhuman Rights
Project needs to push their case again before
the court.
That Tommy and Kiko have to wait even longer
to be moved from captivity into sanctuary,
and moreover that New York's case law remains
unchanged.
However, along with this decision came an
opinion from Judge Fahey, which was really
quite striking in its content, and the opinion
stated that the decision not to grant leave
to repeal to Nonhuman Rights Project was not
based on the merits of the Nonhuman Rights
Project's claim.
In fact, moreover, he argued that the legal
system really needs to grapple with questions
of whether nonhuman animals can be granted
a fundamental right to liberty and can be
graned a writ of habeas corpus for relief
from confinement.
And more striking still, he argued that the
status of nonhuman animals as property under
the law is a manifest injustice and that while
it may be arguable that a chimpanzee is not
a person, there's no doubt that it's not merely
a thing.
This came after an earlier decision in the
intermediate appellate courts from Barbara
Jaffe, which was also striking in its content,
arguing that whether one is a human is not
relevant to whether one is a person under
the law.
And that ultimately questions about personhood
will be decided not by facts about biology,
but facts about public policy and principle.
And so what these opinions do is they create
precedent within the court system and greatly
increase the probability of the success of
future personhood initiatives to grant fundamental
legal rights for chimpanzees and other animals.
So what I'd like to talk about today is how
we can evaluate the altruistic efficacy of
campaigns such as these, and how we can start
to think about comparing them to other kinds
of interventions we can form that have caused
more direct measurable change in the world,
as well as other interventions which have
a much more long-term systemic structural
impact in the world, just like these kinds
of campaigns.
And there's a lot of inherent uncertainty
when we're thinking about shaping the far
future with structural distributed interventions.
And I think that there's room for a lot of
reasonable disagreement with these issues,
but that by reasoning qualitatively about
some of the considerations that are in play,
we can make progress on these issues and think
about how to evaluate some of these kinds
of interventions.
So to do so, I will be reasoning qualitatively
for the case for long-termism, the case from
long-termism to moral circle expansion and
the case from moral circle expansion to personhood
initiatives.
So, to get us started, I want to characterize
what these personhood initiatives are.
They are judicial and legislative initiatives
aimed at establishing fundamental rights for
nonhuman animals.
And so they're concerned with rights law rather
than welfare law.
And the difference here is one of content.
So welfare law concerns the treatment of nonhuman
animals under conditions of - or of any individual
- under conditions of domination and control.
So the conditions of animals in laboratories
and on farms for example, whereas rights laws
prohibit domination and control in the first
place, and they concern things like right
to bodily liberty, noninterference, mental
and bodily integrity and so on.
And so I'll characterize personhood initiatives
as any of these initiatives that are trying
to shape rights law, through legal interventions,
and through legal means.
The key players right now that are working
on personhood initiatives can be subdivided
into two different kinds of approaches.
Some go through the court systems which are
seeking to pursue writs of Habeas Corpus,
which release individual, particular animals
from situations of confinement and established
their fundamental rights, and then legislative
initiatives which seek to change the laws
in a whole region for a whole group of animals,
directly.
And so, on the court side of things, the Nonhuman
Rights Project, who I mentioned at the beginning,
is working in the US.
In addition to the work that they've been
doing for chimpanzees, they've recently launched
an initiative in Connecticut, trying to gain
a writ of Habeas Corpus for three elephants
who are in the Connecticut zoo,
The AFADA in Argentina recently, I believe
in 2015, won a writ of Habeas Corpus for an
orangutan and later won a writ of Habeas Corpus
for a chimpanzee.
Currently the state is trying to decide what
the content of these rights will be, how to
enforce them.
And so there's some uncertainty about how
things will proceed.
It looks like a very promising move for these,
at least these particular animals, if not
for the majority of them in the country.
And currently AFADA is pursuing another writ
for three chimpanzees who are at an eco-park
in Argentina.
The Federation for Indian Animal Protection
Organizations only recently started moving
on personhood initiatives in India, but they
are gearing up to pursue personhood for elephants,
and look to be using litigation strategies
as well.
On the legislation side, Sentience Politics,
which is a spin off organization from the
original larger Sentience Politics working
primarily on political campaigning in Switzerland,
is pushing for the fundamental rights to bodily
liberty and mental integrity for chimpanzees
in the state of Basel, and they're doing so
through a citizens' initiative.
So like a ballot initiative where citizens
go and vote on an issue on the ballot, to
decide whether they want to establish, give
these basic rights to chimpanzees throughout
the state.
So, legislation, as I mentioned, directly
shifts laws regarding particular groups of
animals in particular districts.
Well, litigation only concerns particular
animals.
And so what litigation does is it sets precedent
for further litigation and for legislation,
and it also legitimates positive legislative
ideals, sort of blessing them before the law
so that the law can take further steps, further
action on these rights.
And so what both of these strategies do, in
addition, is they forced the state to think
less simplistically and more complicatedly
about rights law in general, clearing up the
confusion about what the purposes of rights
are, what they're doing, how they protect
individuals, that can pave the way for much
more nuanced and expansive protection in the
future.
That can cover a wide variety of sentient
beings in a wide variety of circumstances.
It allows the state to digest some of these
ideas, which, which will allow for the progress
in the future.
And, yeah, I think that's it for that.
Instead of evaluating whether we should be
pursuing litigation or legislation strategies,
which animals we should be pursuing rights
for, what countries we should be working in,
and other important details that we can and should
debate, I'd like to ask the question of why
we should pursuing basic legal rights for
nonhuman animals in the first place, in order
to evaluate the efficacy of these kinds of
strategies.
And so to do so, I'm going to talk about...
be using a paradigm called moral circle expansion.
This is a specific kind of value spreading
that includes any effort to shift the values
and moral behavior of humanity and its descendants
in a positive direction to benefit the far
future.
And this is motivated by long-termism, which
is a paradigm that has a lot of uptake in
the effective altruism movement.
It's the view that the primary determinant
of the value of actions we take today is the
effect that those actions have on the very
long-term future.
And I think that most people in this audience,
most people in the world, when they reason
on what they care about, are committed to
some form of long-termism, because the vast
majority of beings who our actions will affect
are going to be in the future.
And because future beings have welfare that
is no less important than present day beings.
If you don't think your values commit you
to that, that'd be surprising.
We can talk about that in the Q&A or talk
in office hours.
But I think that's something that many of
us are going to find ourselves committed to.
So moral circle expansion is an alternative
or complimentary strategy to AI alignment,
which is often also motivated by long-termist
considerations.
I say it's complimentary because in order
to get the best outcomes that we want, we
need to pursue both of these strategies.
We need AI alignment to ensure that artificial
intelligence has human values.
But we need moral circle expansion to ensure
that human values are good values that we
actually want to see instantiated in an extremely
powerful being who could greatly shape the
trajectory of the future.
You might work on moral circle expansion if
you think that the far future is not positive
in expectation for some reasons that I'm going
to be discussing.
Or if you think that for reasons of tractability,
you, or a particular group, or all of us could
do more to improve the value of the far future
by improving its expected quality rather than
by extending its expected longevity.
So many EAs who work on moral circle expansion
are particularly concerned with risks of astronomical
suffering or s-risks.
These are events that would bring about suffering
on an astronomical scale, vastly exceeding
all suffering that's ever existed on earth
so far.
These include possibilities such as the largest
number of sentient beings for recreation,
labor for scientific experiments and prediction
models, blackmail, revenge, justice, religion,
and even pure sadism.
All the, like, nightmare scenarios that you
can possibly cook up are thrown in here.
Many but not all s-risks have much higher
probability if we have an artificial general
intelligence that is insufficiently aligned
with values that would be ideal, the kinds
of values we try to cultivate within the effective
altruism movement.
But again, not all of these outcomes are contingent
upon any kind of AGI takeoff.
And some of them can exist without that.
On the topic of s-risks, Jonas Vollmer is
going to be talking about s-risks in a meetup
tomorrow morning, I believe.
So, for people who are interested in that
would be a good place to learn more.
And so, people who are pursuing moral circle
expansion try to shape the future to decrease
the probability of these s-risks and extremely
bad outcomes, and increase the probability
of very good outcomes by expanding the values
that humans and future generations will have
such that they shape the world in positive
rather than negative ways.
And now I'd like to talk about how we can
see rights legislation shaping our moral circle
and our descendants' moral circles and the
impact that rights have... that the law has
on morality.
Uh, so rights legislation can perform three
different functions.
It can perform a deterrence function, it can
set precedent, and it can also change values
through a process that, I'll call it institutional
signalling.
And I'm going to talk about each of these
in turn.
Deterrence is the standard boring role that
we see the law playing, or all of us believe
that the law plays at least to some degree
in some contexts, which is disincentivizing
people from doing bad things, by threatening
them with punishment.
And if the law plays this role, which it seems
like it does to some extent, this disincentivizes...
if we have the right kinds of legislation,
would disincentivize people from harming sentient,
non human beings.
And while this is a boring humdrum kind of
role for the law to play, it is an important
one.
Because if AI take off is sufficiently slow,
there may be opportunities for significant
state regulation of AI.
And if that's the case and we have sufficient
moral circle expansion work, this could ensure
that the kind of regulation that we have protects
more sentient beings than just humans, and
more sentient beings than it otherwise would
protect if we did not seek moral circle expansion.
Of course, all other kinds of future actions
which could... seemingly all future actions
which could cause risk of astronomical suffering
too, could be disincentivized through deterrence
efforts.
The law also... particular legislative acts
in the law, and particular legal interventions
also set precedent.
In common law systems like the United States,
all published decisions in judicial opinions
become part of the body of law that constrains
the way that judges rule.
And this is why the precedents, or the opinions
I discussed the beginning of this talk are
so important, because these too become part
of the body of law, and the body of decisions
that constrains how judges can rule and shapes
the kinds of decisions they can make in the
future.
And this is true even at the highest levels.
So, for example, in the US, the Supreme Court
is significant... their decisions are significantly
shaped by precedent as well.
The Supreme Court decides which cases they're
going to hear and will not hear cases where
they think that there's been a sufficiently
good ruling on them already.
They won't pick up the cases, dive into them,
analyze them, discuss them amongst themselves.
And so legal precedent can shape what the
Supreme Court hears and does, but it can also
make certain laws immutable with increasing
time, institutional reliance and political
acceptance.
Some laws just become too deeply ingrained
to be very easy to do something about, through
precedent setting.
And of course, the decisions of courts and
other branches significantly shape each other's
agenda.
What one branch does can change what's actionable
for another branch, and change what's relevant
for another branch.
In fact decisions... in fact, when courts
decide in favor of ascribing certain rights
to individuals, such as, in the case of Sandra
the orangutan in Argentina, oftentimes what
the court system will do is they'll hand off
the legislation to another government agency
who will decide what content this law should
have, and how they should employ it.
And so this then can change the legislature's
priorities as they think about what the structure
of these rights should be.
And it can also produce positive legal content
for the legislatures to use in their legislation.
And so in all these cases, whether we're using
legislative actions or litigatory actions,
decisions that courts and other branches make
will set precedent for future decisions and
allow us to have better, more progressive,
more effective laws in the future.
Finally, and I think most importantly for
our purposes, the law can provide institutional
signaling that can greatly shape human moral
attitudes and behavior.
I think that questions about institutional
signaling are best framed by a question.
The question is whether common sense morality
is better than it once was because the laws
changed, or whether the laws changed because
common sense morality is better.
Do people discriminate less today because
discrimination is legally prohibited?
Or does the law prohibit discrimination because
we discriminate less, and our values have
gotten better.
So I think obviously, the the question as
posed is not a good one.
We would expect the relationship between the
law and morality to be bidirectional.
Morality influences the law and law influences
morality.
But I'm going to be arguing, giving some reasons
to favor the latter thesis, to think that
the law can significantly change people's
morality.
So one way in which the law can shape human
morality and moral behavior, is by being a
persuasive source for morality for people
to uptake.
So because society is diverse and different
people are offering you different moral judgments
all the time, your peers, your parents, your
faith communities and political parties, and
everyone around you seems to disagree about
morality, the law, maybe a particularly powerful
source for shaping and sustaining moral norms.
Since law is a common denominator that holds
across all citizens, unless a particular issue
is very divisive and contentious in the law.
But to the degree that it is a common denominator
among citizens, the law may be a very powerful
source for shaping morality.
And if this thesis is right, then the informational
influence of the law is likely to be a heuristic
process, affecting our system two reasoning,
such that the informational content of the
law is invoked in our intuitive common sense
moral judgments that we make in everyday cases.
Now, I think this view is plausible on reflection,
but not a lot of research has been done to
understand it and see whether this is actually
a way that morality is shaped.
The evidence is pretty thin.
The two best known empirical studies, which
are studies in which people were asked to
judge the morality of a bunch of unsavory
behaviors, are highly inconclusive.
And in these cases what, what the study participants
were asked is whether these behaviors were
right and wrong, and then they were told the
action was either legal or illegal, and there
was some change in people's perceptions of
the morality of these actions based on whether
they were legal or illegal.
They were more likely to judge them as immoral
if they were illegal, as one would expect.
But as Nigel Walker, one of the study authors
himself has pointed out, a lot of this data
might be explained in terms of the fact that
there were some conscientious law abiding
citizens in the room who thought that some
actions that are illegal can be wrong in virtue
of the fact that they are illegal.
And so when they're told that they're illegal,
they then become morally wrong because breaking
the law is morally wrong on the views of some
of these conscientious law-abiders.
So, this doesn't provide a lot... we don't
have a lot of evidence for the persuasive
source of morality view of the law.
But, these particular studies and a bunch
of other studies, also do show a much stronger
effect of perceived peer opinion on morality.
So one thing that these studies did show was
that when they, in a separate variable condition,
when participants were told that their peers
strongly favored a certain... strongly believed
that certain actions were moral or immoral,
this greatly updated people's perceptions
of the morality of these actions.
And so I think that the law can play a very
effective role in shaping moral attitudes
and behavior by representing group attitudes
as being a particular way.
Because social norms strongly anchor human
moral attitudes and behavior, the law can
shape morality by shaping what's perceived
as the group norms and attitudes.
And this can happen directly when group members
infer that a certain level of momentum must
exist in order to support the change that
has happened.
We can see this in two separate studies that
Tankard and Paluck recently performed on Supreme
Court rulings on gay marriage.
Here they found robust evidence that the Supreme
Court ruling legalizing gay marriage was associated
with significant shifts in perceived present
and future social norms in support of gay
marriage.
So, these two studies, the first study was...
let's see, so the second study was a study
in which they performed five separate Mturk
studies, and the first three studies happened
before the Supreme Court ruling in favor of
gay marriage.
And the last two Mturk studies happened after
it and they found that study participants
evaluating the morality of gay marriage and
evaluating the positivity of gay rights updated
strongly on pure opinion after the Supreme
Court ruling on gay marriage.
They strongly improved their belief that the
public supported gay marriage and was moving
in a direction that was more supportive of
gay marriage.
A different study used a different technique,
and what they did was they gave fake articles
to study participants that were either predicting
a really strong landslide win in favor of
gay marriage or one really strongly against
gay marriage and evaluated candidates' attitudes
towards gay marriage and gay rights in this
context.
And this one found that people who were given
a positive ruling in these articles not only
perceived a much greater status quo norm in
favor of gay rights and much stronger directional
norms in favor of it, but their personal attitudes
towards gay marriage were also much more positive,
and their feelings towards gay people on a
feeling thermometer were also much more positive.
So this study strongly suggests not only that
the law can shape what's perceived as pure
opinion and group norms, but also people's
own moral attitudes.
Flores and Barclay similarly found a massive
increase in pro gay-rights attitudes immediately
following an earlier Supreme Court ruling,
which importantly didn't have any backlash
either.
And I won't go through this study very much,
but you can see looking at the transitional
probabilities that in states where... that
in a number of states there were very, very
large updates from people who are opposed
to gay rights to becoming ambivalent about
gay rights.
In some states, 24 percent people who were
opposed became ambivalent, and in some 47
percent who opposed became ambivalent.
And there was also a minority of participants
who updated in favor from being ambivalent
about gay rights to favoring them as well.
And so here we see just a really massive transition
in pro-rights attitudes following a Supreme
Court ruling that legalized gay marriage in
some states and increased protections for
people in gay partnerships.
So the law can also represent group attitudes
more indirectly, when people change their
opinion, change their behavior to accord
with law, their cognitive processes are opaque.
People don't know why they're acting this
way, but, but they assume automatically that
the reason people were acting this way is
because they want to.
Because that's what good people, responsible
people do.
And so when people will start, you know, discriminate
less, or they eat less meat, or perform any
behavior that may become disincentivized by
the law, or incentivized by the law, rather,
people assume that they're doing that because
they want to, and that's what good people
do.
And over time people begin to see a world
free of certain behaviors as normative, not
because the law says so, but because others
are doing that.
I won't go through all of these conditions
under which norms and behavior shifting seeming
more powerful, but some of these I think are
particularly important for our purposes here.
So, the law can be more influential on norms
and behavior when, number three, individuals'
personal views are closer to the new normative
information, which I think points positively
in favor of a goalpost shifting strategy,
which starts with more low hanging legal fruit.
And when we, when we update society's morality
in a direction that's favorable to the rights
of nonhuman animals, we can then pursue increasingly
more progressive legal initiatives.
Taking people's personal views even iterated
closer and closer to the more progressive
legal wins.
For when new normative information is widely
shared, which I think suggests the importance
of mass media mobilization, surrounding legal
campaigns, and six, when political movements
coexist to mobilize individuals following
a decision, which I think suggests the importance
of large amounts of grassroots mobilization
around legal initiatives.
And so all of this suggests that we should
be pluralistic in our approach to advocacy,
employing legal interventions alongside grassroots,
mass media mobilization, and through a combination
of precedent setting and norm and attitude
change, iterated person initiatives and other
legal interventions can progressively shape
the law and moral attitudes, establishing
increasingly progressive basic rights for
sentient beings.
And we can expect this in turn, for the reasons
I've discussed, to increasingly expand humanity's
moral circle.
So I've got some conclusions here, but I've
already run over by a little bit.
So I think I'll just start to move towards
Q&A, and let you read the conclusions by your
own.
Thanks very much.
Thanks so much.
Alright, yeah, you want to join me over here?
Great.
Thanks again for your talk.
Really appreciated it.
I have a couple of somewhat challenging audience
questions.
If they get a little too complex, I think
you can just speak to him in office -- can
I, like, delegate?
-- Yeah, that's right.
Just call on, call on the audience for these.
The first one was, do you think that these
initiatives, I think the initiatives at the
beginning of your talk, work in concert with
incrementalist legal approaches like the current
California ballot initiative, which maybe
you know about or should they be prioritized
above other laws?
Right.
So I think that... so I think it's not a binary
sort of question.
I mean, so I think, my suspicion is that they
do work in concert.
Welfare laws do increase people's moral sentiments
towards nonhuman animals and create momentum
for further legal wins.
I think there's increasing consensus in the
effective animal advocacy movement that that
is indeed the case.
And for that, for that reason, we can expect
these to increase the likelihood of success
of establishing basic legal rights for nonhuman
animals.
So I think they do work in concert.
But there's still a question of which of these
strategies should we be prioritizing more
heavily.
And that's a question that I feel ill-equipped
to answer.
But we should be prioritizing both of them
much more heavily than we currently are.
Cool.
Someone else asked, are there risks with personhood
being legally expanded to include animals,
if there are times when significant welfare
improvements for animals would come into conflict
with those laws?
I was pressed to find an example of when this
might be the case.
Maybe the audience member could elaborate
on what an example of this might be.
So is it like legislating basic rights for
nonhuman animals would come in conflict with
welfare laws protecting nonhuman animals?
Yeah, I don't have a really good sense of
what that would look like.
Oh, I have, there are some hands that are
suggesting this.
Here's one: say you give it to dolphins, then
uh, maybe the conditions surrounding would
require you to factory farm more fish to feed
to them.
Okay.
I think you're going a different direction
from this, which might be.
So, I mean, here's another similar line of
thought, which is like, so a lot of these
basic legal protections are in favor of things
like autonomy and bodily liberty.
If we give a large amount of autonomy and
bodily liberty to nonhuman animals, where
you leave them too much to their own devices,
to make their own decisions, it gives us fewer
grounds for paternalism and supporting their
welfare against their own preferences.
And so, like, liberal rights could also come
into conflict with welfare in that, in that
way as well.
And I think this... and I think if this is
the kind of idea we have here, we do need
to balance the autonomy we give for indirect
moral circumspection kinds of reasons, and
the direct welfare benefits of paternalistic
interventions.
And I think this is a question just to be
worked out in the, in the decision about what
kinds of laws we codify and how much paternalism
we allow, given the basic rights that we ascribe
to nonhuman animals.
Well, unfortunately we are pretty close on
time, so I think I'm going to have to call
the questions there, but thanks again so much.
Thank you.
