Luke Muehlhauser of the Open Philanthropy Project recently published a major report on animal consciousness and the question of "moral patienthood" — i.e. which beings merit moral concern? The purpose of the report is to inform Open Phil's grantmaking, especially in its farm animal welfare focus area. Luke would like to hear your questions and objections, and he will host an "Ask Me Anything" session on the issues discussed in the report, here on the Effective Altruism Forum, starting at 9am Pacific on Wednesday, June 28th.
I hope you will read the report and then join in with lots of questions about the topics it covers: consciousness, moral patienthood, animal cognition, meta-ethics, moral weight, illusionism, hidden qualia, and more!
Luke would also like to note that much of the most interesting content in the report is in the appendices and even some footnotes, e.g. on unconscious vision, on what a more satisfying theory of consciousness might look like, and an explanation of attention schema theory (footnote 288).
(In case it's confusing why I'm posting this: I'm coming on as a moderator of the Forum, and will post shortly with more info about that.)
This is a good start about some of the issues, but there is a need to bulk it up with information directly from neuroscientists.
For instance, some very senior people in the Stanford neuroscience community think that an essential difference between animals and people may be that the astrocytes, "helper cells," are so very different. Among many other things, astrocytes help to create and destroy synapses.
Neuroscientists also routinely do mice experiments, and a few have very sophisticated answers to ethical questions about what they do.
There are a lot of topics in EA ethics that benefit from a grounding in neuroscience and neuroethics. Both of these fields also contain many EA opportunities themselves. If money is being put down, then it's time to add some expert scientific opinion.
Hi, Steve. I'm an EA and also a neuroscience PhD student who studies astrocytes. As you might imagine, I totally agree that neuroscience perspectives are valuable for EA decisions. It's dismaying to me that physical and computer scientists are so well-represented in EA, but there are so few life scientists. I'm trying to figure out why this might be. Any ideas?
Regarding the ethics of animal experiments, I'm working on a project to create educational materials about the importance of environmental enrichment (IMHO the most important welfare issue for labora... (read more)