#24 Jamie Harris - How to Expand Our Moral Circle Beyond Humans

Bold Conjectures with Paras Chopra

Over the course of history, we've expanded our moral circle to arrive at equal rights for all humans in most countries in the world.
Can we go beyond it and expand to include animals and other sentient beings?
== What we talk about ==
0:00 - Introduction
1:38 - How did you get interested in effective altruism (EA) and what made you focus on animal advocacy?
10:27 - The concept of replaceability, its connection with the EA community, and importance of scale of impact
20:08 - Why do you prioritize animal advocacy against helping the suffering humans?
31:05 - Do you see the number of users of animal products decreasing very slowly as demoralizing?
39:06 - Why is the transition from supporting animal advocacy to actually making an impact on people's food habits difficult?
41:15 - How would you guide someone who wants to pursue their career in animal advocacy?
44:25 - What are some things animal advocates do which accidentally harm animals rather than benefitting them?
54:24 - Being vegetarian and supporting pro-animal welfare are not the same thing
57:26 - Some effective altruists say helping humans is better than helping animals. Your take on that?
1:01:03 - Animals can’t protest for their rights and welfare / Animals can’t protest for their rights and welfare, Humans can
1:07:02 - Artificial sentience in animal advocacy and welfare
1:15:01 - What metrics do you use to keep a track of the impact you are making?
== About the guest ==
Jamie Harris is the co-founder of and researcher at the non-profit Animal Advocacy Careers, a non-profit that seeks to identify and remove bottlenecks in the animal advocacy movement, with a special focus on farmed animal advocacy.
Jamie is also a researcher at the Sentience Institute, a non-profit organization dedicated to researching how we can expand humanity’s moral circle to include other non-human sentient beings like animals and, in the future, AI systems.
Jamie’s career is inspired by the effective altruism ideology which aims to figure out how we can do the most good in the world. It’s about being rational about figuring out which of our actions have the biggest bang for the buck when it comes to improving the world. As you can imagine from Jamie’s focus, he believes that alleviating suffering for farmed animals is a high-priority goal.
So, today I want to talk to him about why he believes that (v/s say helping poor or unhealthy humans), where is today’s animal advocacy focused, and what can we learn from previous social movements for achieving a world where animals are removing from the food supply chain (a cause that I very much believe in myself).