In 2016, I was the joint winner in the Undergraduate Category of the Oxford Uehiro Prize in Practical Ethics. Read my essay here, or below.

Ethical vegetarians abstain from eating animal flesh because they care about the harm done to farmed animals. More precisely, they believe that farmed animals have lives so bad they are not worth living, so that it is better for them not to come into existence. Vegetarians reduce the demand for meat, so that farmers will breed fewer animals, preventing the existence of additional animals. If ethical vegetarians believed animals have lives that are unpleasant but still better than non-existence, they would focus on reducing harm to these animals without reducing their numbers, for instance by supporting humane slaughter or buying meat from free-range cows.

I will argue that if vegetarians were to apply this principle consistently, wild animal suffering would dominate their concerns, and may lead them to be stringent anti-environmentalists.

If animals like free-range cows have lives that are not worth living, almost all wild animals could plausibly be thought to also have lives that are worse than non-existence. Nature is often romanticised as a well-balanced idyll, so this may seem counter-intuitive. But extreme forms of suffering like starvation, dehydration, or being eaten alive by a predator are much more common in wild animals than farm animals. Crocodiles and hyenas disembowel their prey before killing them[1]. In birds, diseases like avian salmonellosis produce excruciating symptoms in the final days of life, such as depression, shivering, loss of appetite, and just before death, blindness, incoordination, staggering, tremor and convulsions.[2] While a farmed animal like a free-range cow has to endure some confinement and a premature and potentially painful death (stunning sometimes fails), a wild animal may suffer comparable experiences, such as surviving a cold winter or having to fear predators, while additionally undergoing the aforementioned extreme suffering[3]. Wild animals do experience significant pleasure, for instance when they eat, play or have sex, or engage in other normal physical activity. One reason to suspect that this pleasure is outweighed by suffering is that most species use the reproductive strategy of r-selection, which means that the overwhelming majority of their offspring starve or are eaten shortly after birth and only very few reach reproductive age.[4]^,[5] For instance, ‘in her lifetime a lioness might have 20 cubs; a pigeon, 150 chicks; a mouse, 1000 kits’,[6] the vast majority of which will die before they could have had many pleasurable experiences. Overall, it seems plausible that wild animals have worse lives than, say, free-range cows. If vegetarians think the latter are better off not existing, they must believe the same thing about wild animals.

A second important empirical fact is that wild animals far outnumber farmed animals. Using figures from the FAO, Tomasik estimates that the global livestock population is 24 billion (including 17 billion chicken)[7]. I restrict my count of wild animals to those at least as complex as chicken or small fish, which vegetarians clearly believe do have moral weight. Using studies of animal density in different biomes, Tomasik estimates conservatively that there are at least 6*10¹⁰ land birds, 10¹¹ land mammals, and 10¹³ fish. Animals in each of these categories alone are several times more numerous than livestock.

If wild animals’ well-being is negative and the above numbers are remotely correct, the scale of wild animal suffering is vast. As Richard Dawkins writes, ‘During the minute it takes me to compose this sentence, thousands of animals are being eaten alive; others are running for their lives, whimpering with fear; others are being slowly devoured from within by rasping parasites; thousands of all kinds are dying of starvation, thirst and disease.’[8] If they accept the premises so far, consistent vegetarians should focus on preventing the existence of as many wild animals as possible, since even a small reduction in the global number of wild animals would outweigh the impact of ending all livestock production. For example, they could reduce animal populations by sterilising them, or by destroying highly dense animal habitats such as rainforests. This would place them directly at odds with environmentalists who try to preserve nature from human intervention. It may even be the case that vegetarians should react to this argument by eating more meat, since feeding the livestock requires more surface area for agriculture, and fields contain far fewer wild animals per square kilometre than other biomes such as forests.

An intuitive response to wild animal suffering can be that cycles of predation and starvation are natural, and therefore they must be neutral morally. But what is natural is not necessarily what is good, for instance, humans will routinely use technology to remove diseases which are natural.

It is important to emphasize that the claim ‘wild animal suffering is bad’ does not imply a guilt claim of the form ‘predators are morally guilty’. A lion’s instinct is indeed natural and does not deserve our moral condemnation. However, we can avoid much confusion if we remember to keep separate the concepts of guilt of an agent and wrongness of an action. It is perfectly possible to claim that X is harmful and should be prevented while also holding that the direct cause of X is not a moral agent. The fact that we are so used to thinking about cases of human behaviour, where guilt and wrongness are largely aligned, may partly explain why arguments about wild animal suffering seem counter-intuitive.

Underlying some of these principled arguments is the intuition that harmful acts, like killing livestock, are worse than harmful omissions, like failing to avert wild animal suffering. I cannot begin to give a full treatment to the act/omission debate here, but one thought experiment suggests harmful omissions matter at least somewhat. Imagine you see a fire spreading in a forest and, while walking away from the fire, you see an injured fawn: a broken leg prevents her from fleeing. You carry a rifle and could instantly kill the fawn at no cost to yourself, preventing her from the extreme suffering of being burned alive. In this situation, for vegetarians who care about harm to animals, it is clear that it would be immoral to omit to act and allow wild animal suffering to happen. So the general principle ‘allowing wild animals to suffer is morally neutral’ cannot hold.

A second set of counter-arguments are empirical: they concede that consistent vegetarians are morally obliged to reduce wild animal suffering, but attack various empirical claims made above.

It may be objected that we cannot reduce the number of animals by sterilising them, because as soon as fewer animals are born, more resources (like food and territory) become available, which increases the evolutionary payoff of producing more animals. If we sterilise some deer, there will at first be fewer fawns, so there will be more nuts and berries available, which allows other deer (or other species) to have more offspring, until we are back to the original equilibrium. The existence of such evolutionary pressures towards an equilibrium population seems plausible, but it remains an unsolved empirical question. It may be the case that the population takes several years to reach its equilibrium again, in which case much animal suffering would be averted in the meantime. Regardless, this is only an objection against one particular method for reducing wild animal numbers, and it only tells us that sterilisation would be ineffective, not harmful. If we reject sterilisation on these grounds, habitat destruction, for instance, evidently does reduce animal numbers for the long run.

A frequent objection against intervening in nature is that we are uncertain about the consequences: for instance, culling predators might cause an ecological catastrophe. While our uncertainty is a good reason to do more research in order to reduce it, it is not in principle an argument for inaction. If we are so uncertain, inaction towards predation could also be causing vastly more suffering than we currently estimate. In order to make sure our aversion to intervene is not caused by status quo bias, we can use the reversal test,[9] an elegant instance of which is provided by the reintroduction of wolves in Scotland, where they had been hunted to extinction in the 1700s.[10] If we are more worried about the uncertain effects of reintroducing wolves than we are about the uncertainty of inaction towards wolf predation, this may be due to status quo bias.

Possibly the strongest counter-argument is that we are extremely uncertain about whether wild animals’ lives are worth living. How much pain or pleasure animals feel in response to certain stimuli is dependent on facts about their neurology which is not well understood. While we may make some reasonable extrapolation from our human experience (being eaten alive is very painful), animal subjective experience may differ significantly. While animals might experience hedonic adaptation[11] to their circumstances, encounters with predators produce lasting psychological damage similar to post-traumatic stress disorder in humans.[12] There is some evidence that domesticated animals are less stressed,[13] but measures of stress hormones may not coincide with animals’ revealed preferences[14]. Clearly, I do not pretend to have solved this difficult empirical question. However I note that these considerations should also make us uncertain about the subjective well-being of farmed animals; and I have already offered reasons why wild animals plausibly have worse lives than free-range animals.

Even if vegetarians still reject this argument, and believe that wild animals’ lives are better than the lives of farm animals, to the extent that they are worth living, this does not imply they should do nothing. They should not reduce animal numbers, but they should still reduce the suffering of existing animals. Because there are so many animals and the suffering they undergo can be so extreme, this consideration would likely still dominate concern about farmed animals. One could vaccinate animals against diseases: rabies has already been eliminated from foxes for human benefit[15]. After elephants’ teeth wear out, they are no longer able to chew food and eventually collapse from hunger, after which they may be eaten alive by scavengers and predators. Fitting elephants with artificial dentures, which has already been done on captive animals, would significantly increase their healthspan[16]. Or one could cull predator populations by allowing more of them to be hunted.

A possible concern with this type of intervention may be that any advantage given to a particular individual by reducing their suffering would increase the suffering of others. For instance, if elephants can eat for longer, more other herbivores will starve; or if we kill predators, their prey will proliferate and their competitors will starve. If we think that ecosystems lie on such a razor-sharp evolutionary equilibrium where all animals are strongly competing for every piece of resource, this objection is plausible. But crucially, if we accept this, then it is becomes plausible that wild animals actually do have lives that are not worth living: if evolution produces so many animals that each can just barely survive, it is likely that they endure much suffering and little pleasure. So it seems like we must either accept that some interventions can reduce extreme wild animal suffering, or concede that animals’ lives are plausibly not worth living.

Some may choose to treat this outlandish conclusion as a reductio against vegetarianism (either against the idea that farm animals matter morally or against the belief that we should prevent them from coming into existence). Perhaps vegetarians who still reject the conclusion should increase their confidence that buying free-range meat is a good thing. For those who accept it, the question of how most effectively to reduce wild animal suffering is left open. As I have repeatedly emphasised, we are still very ignorant about many relevant empirical questions, so immediate large-scale intervention will not be very effective. In addition, intervention may have significant backlash effects and reduce sympathy for the anti-speciesist message. The best immediate action is probably to produce more research on wild animal suffering, in order to make future action more likely to be effective.

[1] Dawrst, Alan. "The predominance of wild-animal suffering over happiness: An open problem." Essays on Reducing Suffering (2009): 255-85.

[2] Michigan Department of Natural Resources. "Salmonellosis." Quoted in Tomasik, “The Importance of Wild Animal Suffering”

[3] Tomasik, Brian. “Intention-Based Moral Reactions Distort Intuitions about Wild Animals.” Essays on Reducing Suffering (2013)

[4] Horta, Oscar. "Debunking the idyllic view of natural processes: population dynamics and suffering in the wild." Télos 17.1 (2010): 73-88.

[5] Ng, Yew-Kwang. "Towards welfare biology: Evolutionary economics of animal consciousness and suffering." Biology and Philosophy 10.3 (1995): 255-285.

[6] Fred, Hapgood. Why males exist: an inquiry into the evolution of sex. 1979. Quoted in Tomasik, “The Importance of Wild Animal Suffering”.

[7] Tomasik, Brian. "How Many Wild Animals Are There?." Essays on Reducing Suffering (2014).

[8] Dawkins, Richard. River out of Eden: A Darwinian view of life. Basic Books, 1996.

[9] Bostrom, Nick, and Toby Ord. "The Reversal Test: Eliminating Status Quo Bias in Applied Ethics*." Ethics 116.4 (2006): 656-679.

[10] "Wild Wolves 'good for Ecosystems'" BBC News. BBC, 31 Jan. 2007. Web. 25 Jan. 2016.

[11] Frederick, Shane, and George Loewenstein. "Hedonic adaptation." (1999).

[12] Zoladz, Phillip R. An ethologically relevant animal model of post-traumatic stress disorder: Physiological, pharmacological and behavioral sequelae in rats exposed to predator stress and social instability. Diss. University of South Florida, 2008.

[13] Wilcox, Chritie. "Bambi or Bessie: Are Wild Animals Happier?" Scientific American Blog. N.p., 21 Apr. 2011. Web. 20 Jan. 2016.

[14] Dawkins, M. S. "Using behaviour to assess animal welfare." Animal welfare-potters bar then Wheathampstead- 13 (2004): S3-S8.

[15] Freuling, Conrad M., et al. "The elimination of fox rabies from Europe: determinants of success and lessons for the future." Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 368.1623 (2013): 20120142.

[16] Pearce, David. "A Welfare State for Elephants?." RELATIONS 3.2. November 2015-Wild Animal Suffering and Intervention in Nature: Part II (2015): 153.

This my book review of Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn’s ”A Path Appears”. (Also available on scribd here). In 2015, the review won the Sciences Po - Books prize, a book review competition organized by my University and the magazine Books. It was published in French translation in the June 2015 edition of Books, of which I’ve scanned the relevant pages.

In May 2013 TIME magazine’s cover called millennials –those born between 1980 and 2000– the “Me Me Me Generation”. It featured a young woman taking a selfie, the emblematic act of a generation of smartphone-toting, selfish narcissists. Yet statistics such as those by the Pew Research Center describe an empathetic age group that votes less often, but is more likely to do volunteer work than their parents were. Most likely, Millennials are simply doing things differently, both shaping and reacting to the ways altruism and citizenship are being reinvented. That, at least, is the hopeful message captured in the title of Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn’s new book A Path Appears. A generation ago, they say, “’giving back’ was what we did in December, hunched over a checkbook and relying on guesswork. In recent years, advances in neuroscience and economics –and a flowering of carefully monitored experiments- have given us much greater insight into what works to create opportunity worldwide, and much greater prospects for personal satisfaction from giving”. The sunlit path towards creating a better lives for others, they say, appears before us clearer than ever. And they want you to take it: the book is sold as a “galvanizing narrative about making a difference here and abroad—a road map to becoming the most effective global citizens we can be.”

The first chapter of the book is representative of its approach – and of its paradoxes. We meet Rachel Beckwith, an American girl who decided to celebrate her ninth birthday by asking friends and relatives to donate to charity:water, an organization that drills wells in impoverished villages around the world and lets people set up their own fundraisers online. Rachel’s target sum was not reached. Six weeks later, Rachel tragically died in a highway accident, but the story of her generosity rippled through social media, and her page eventually raised over a million dollars. Cut to Lester Strong - who left his job as a news executive to run Experience Corps, an organization bringing in older Americans to tutor students in public schools across the country. Next we learn about Dr. Gary Slutkin, whose Cure Violence program combats urban violence in the United States by applying methods of epidemiology. After these uplifting stories, the second half of the chapter focuses on numbers and scientific studies designed to show how much more we know about creating opportunity; and how much more efficiently, therefore, we who live in privilege can employ our wealth and skills for causes larger than ourselves. Esther Duflo, an MIT economist, has pioneered the use of randomized controlled trials, which apply the rigorous methods of pharmaceutic drug testing to policies designed to help the world’s poorest people. She found that for 50 cents a year, you can deworm a child in Kenya, increasing their school attendance and cognitive development. Once an adult, that child will earn 20% more compared to those in a control group. So although two thirds of Americans donate an average of $1000 to charity each year, they rarely give money away as intelligently as they make it. As Esther Duflo says, “Worms have a little bit of a problem grabbing the headlines. They are not beautiful and don't kill anybody”.

This book, like its first chapter, constantly meshes hard evidence with inspiring anecdotes. As regular New York Times columnists and Pulitzer prize winners, the authors have clearly understood that if they want to produce a compelling book they must combine storytelling with rational argument. In fact, as they keep piling up story after story of activists saving the world, you may begin to see the strings. But the real challenge of this 656-page tome is to coherently bridge the gap between the rational and the emotional, the Esther Duflos and the Rachel Beckwiths. After all, these motivations for altruism are quite different, and they may point to quite irreconcilable courses of action. Can Kristof and WuDunn successfully appeal to both the calculating utilitarian and the impulsive altruist?

The book is structured into three parts, the first of which collects stories and evidence about programs that work best in providing opportunity. Microfinance institutions have been all the rage in recent decades. They lend small amounts to developing-country entrepreneurs who lack access to traditional banks, without requiring any collateral. The idea is that a poor Kenyan farmer has exceptionally high-return investment opportunities, such as doubling his crop yield by using fertilizer; but is never able to get started because he does not have enough money to buy that first unit of fertilizer. When Esther Duflo and her team conducted a randomized trial of microlending in Hyderabad, they found that 7 percent of those who had received a loan had successfully started a small business, compared to 5 percent in the control group. The economists called themselves “quite pleased with these results” because they demonstrated that the main goal of microfinance had been achieved. But nearly everyone else in the development community felt a huge letdown. Having believed microfinance to be a silver bullet, they found those numbers depressing. In fact, some microfinance institutions reacted by trying to cast doubt on the study. In politics as in development aid, then, great narratives are not always compatible with the numbers. Though not a magical solution, supporting a microfinance institution is still an efficient donation. The average loan repayment rate is over 90%, which allows your donation to be reinvested many times into the local economy.

As it turns out, for governments in the rich world, creating opportunity is also a great investment. A black man in America is more likely to spend time in prison than college. If that statistic can be turned around, the taxpayer benefits, too. In one of the best chapters of the book, entitled “The land of opportunity – if you catch them early”, the authors argue that the best way to make the lottery of birth less unfair is to intervene in the earliest stage of life. Actually, it’s better to start before that: during pregnancy, the fetal brain is being shaped by the uterine environment in ways that will affect the child for the rest of his or her life. A simple program to encourage women to stop smoking during pregnancy costs about $30 per woman counselled. Randomized trials have shown that each of these $30 save about $800 in averted neonatal costs. After birth, returns to society quickly decrease, but it’s still not too late: pre-kindergarten nursing visits for low-income unmarried mothers produce $5.7 in state and federal government savings for each dollar invested. James Zimmermann, CEO of Macy’s and an advocate for this kind of intervention, puts it succinctly: “investing in early childhood achieves the best return on investment for our country. Currently more than 90% of our education dollars are spent after age five, yet 85% of a child’s core brain structure is developed before age five.” There are three words in that quote you may have glossed over: for our country. Yet they represent one of the main paradoxes of this book. The authors keep talking about effective giving, but they miss the biggest effectiveness gap of all: between poor and rich countries. If you read this book trying to decide how best to make a difference, forget about nurse visits: 50-cent-a-year deworming in Africa beats anything you can do in the rich world. The authors repeatedly show they are aware of this discrepancy, yet they brazenly ignore its implications. It may feel good to say that poverty at home and abroad are “too important to be pitted against each other”, but upon reflection that turns out to be as fallacious as claiming that college scholarships and nurse visitation programs cannot be compared. If this book bridges the gap between rational analysis and gut feeling, it is only at a huge cost in consistency. As a result, A Path Appears lacks the moral force of Peter Singer’s resolutely utilitarian manifesto for helping the global poor, The Life You Can Save.

In part two, the authors discuss not on-the-ground programs, but rather how the art of helping itself has been transformed by new approaches. Here, they wade into more controversial terrain, but that may be where their insights will most surprise you. As an example of the “social business” model that is blurring the lines between for-profit and non-profit, they hold up an enterprise by Danone in producing a Yogurt containing micronutrients to fill nutritional deficits of children in Bangladesh. The yogurt is sourced locally, providing business and employment opportunities. This venture is often criticized as a public-relations ploy and, to some, smacks of cultural imperialism (Bangladeshis had never heard of Yogurt before Danone started advertising). The authors don’t dwell on these considerations; instead they make the larger point that social businesses, which operate on a “double bottom line” model combining profits and social impact, have helped bring the efficiency and scalability of business to charitable causes.

One of the most interesting characters of this book is Dan Pallotta, an ambitious consultant who in 1994 launched Pallotta TeamWorks, a company which organized bike rides and other events to raise money for AIDS and breast cancer prevention. Pallotta knew that the reason his events were successful was that they were fun, cool, and well-organized. He poured money into marketing and logistics, saying “We advertised our events the way Apple advertises iPads.” He also paid himself $394 000 in 2001. All this meant that only about 60% of the money raised went to the charities.  Increasingly criticized for this high overhead figure and his somewhat glitzy approach to charity, Pallotta was dropped by his sponsor in 2002. That sponsor tried to run the events themselves, keeping costs down. But though overhead was lower, the amounts raised for charities dropped 70% in one year, from $6 million under Pallota’s management to only $1.6 million. People started to realize that what had been called overhead was actually essential to the fundraising effort. In an inspiring TED talk, Pallotta argues that “the way we think about charity is dead wrong”, and urges donors to ignore the “depressing label of overhead” and instead focus on what charities are getting done per dollar. Meanwhile, established charities have quickly realized that they can exploit our emotional responses through advertising: in 2002, UNICEF  experimented with putting a nickel in its mailings, visible through a glassine window on the envelope. This triggered people’s reciprocity instinct, and the response rate doubled. Sounds like manipulation? In the for-profit world, it’s called marketing. If we think it’s okay for a multinational to use those tactics to sell hamburgers, why do we frown upon charities doing it to ‘sell’ education for Ethiopian girls?

The last third of the book is dedicated to showing that far from being a Gandhi-style sacrifice, altruism can be a source of great fulfillment. The MRI scan, the grail of modern brain science, has been used in countless experiments to show that giving money to charities activates the same pleasure centers of the brain as eating fine food or having sex. In fact, things we think will make us happy, like winning the lottery, have almost no long-term impact; but helping others has been shown to increase long-term life satisfaction and health. While the studies cited are rather solid, this optimism hides the many ways in which our altruistic instincts actually work against us. The American charity Smile Train, which offers cleft palate surgeries to children in the developing world, uses the photo of a Russian boy in their mailings: randomized trials showed that the mostly white donor base responded best when shown a picture of someone with the same skin color. Spontaneously, we help those who resemble us. We also like identifiable victims: people are actually more willing to donate $300 000 to save one child than the same amount to save eight children. Perhaps we should not rely all too much on our instincts. Very often, actions that make you feel good crowd out actions that do the most good.

A Path Appears functions nicely as an inspiring catalogue of all the ways you can help others. It provides a treasure trove of studies and anecdotes that will delight anyone interested in altruism; its twenty chapters are actually so exhaustive that they can become exhausting. If you have a friend who might like to do some volunteer work, but doesn’t know where to start, buy her the book. If you care more about the impact than the narrative, however, I have a provocative suggestion for you. We’ve already seen how much good money can do, when given to the best causes. If you really want to make a difference, why not try something none of the people in this book have done: quit your job, but don’t go work for a charity. Instead, go to Wall Street, earn as much money as you can, then give it to the most effective charities. Join Goldman Sachs. Save the world.

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