EA should invest in animal liberation and diet change advocacy

Abstract

Effective altruism has come to treat farmed animal welfare campaigns as the strategically serious option and to set aside animal liberation and diet change advocacy as approaches that were tried and failed. Friedrich argues that this reading is too quick: what failed were particular versions of those strategies under conditions that no longer hold. He offers five reasons to fund liberation and diet change work alongside welfare work. First, the moral claim at the heart of the movement — that eating animals means paying for treatment almost everyone would find repugnant — is true and should be stated rather than hidden. Second, other successful justice movements did not conceal their foundational ethical commitments. Third, belief in liberation is what draws and retains much of the talent in advocacy and in alternative proteins. Fourth, liberation advocacy plausibly widened the Overton window that made the welfare reforms winnable in the first place. Fifth, advances in AI and an expected increase in philanthropic resources change what diet change advocacy can now attempt, including saturating elite universities with arguments about animal ethics. He is explicit that welfare organisations should not themselves adopt liberation framing; his claim is that the wider ecosystem should fund a portfolio of strategies reflecting what its members actually believe. – AI-generated abstract.