Personally, while I assign negative utility to animals suffering in factory farms, I adjust for the mental capacity of the animals in question (in broad terms “how much do I care about this animal’s suffering relative to a human’s?”) and in many cases this is the controlling factor of the calculation. If I were deciding between charities which prevented human suffering on that order, clearly the difference between top charities would outweigh the magnitude of my suffering, but when the animals in question are mostly chickens, it’s not clear to me that this is still the case. I discount tremendously on the suffering of a creature capable of this relative to humans.
I wasn’t arguing that you should donate to non-human animal charities. I was arguing that if you do donate to non-human animal charities, you should donate solely to the most cost-effective such charity, even if you would get more fuzzies by splitting your donation between two or more charities. I was also implicitly suggesting that if you believe that non-human animal human charities are comparably cost-effective, the argument generalizes to human charities, too. Discounting the suffering of non-human animals only serves to strengthen my argument, since it decreases the cost-effectivenss of non-human animal charities relative to that of human charities.
Discounting the suffering of non-human animals only serves to strengthen my argument, since it decreases the cost-effectivenss of non-human animal charities relative to that of human charities.
In that case, I’m not sure what your original argument was.
The painfulness of the decision is also a form of disutility that has to be balanced against the difference between the charities though, which was the point of my original comment. If the difference between the values of the donations, when adjusted for the species involved, is less utility than the amount you personally lose from agonizing over how to apportion your donation, splitting it may result in higher utility overall.
Obviously, this is heavily dependent on how large the utility differences between the top charities are; if it weren’t, my comment about discounting the suffering of less intelligent species wouldn’t have been relevant.
Personally, while I assign negative utility to animals suffering in factory farms, I adjust for the mental capacity of the animals in question (in broad terms “how much do I care about this animal’s suffering relative to a human’s?”) and in many cases this is the controlling factor of the calculation. If I were deciding between charities which prevented human suffering on that order, clearly the difference between top charities would outweigh the magnitude of my suffering, but when the animals in question are mostly chickens, it’s not clear to me that this is still the case. I discount tremendously on the suffering of a creature capable of this relative to humans.
I wasn’t arguing that you should donate to non-human animal charities. I was arguing that if you do donate to non-human animal charities, you should donate solely to the most cost-effective such charity, even if you would get more fuzzies by splitting your donation between two or more charities. I was also implicitly suggesting that if you believe that non-human animal human charities are comparably cost-effective, the argument generalizes to human charities, too. Discounting the suffering of non-human animals only serves to strengthen my argument, since it decreases the cost-effectivenss of non-human animal charities relative to that of human charities.
In that case, I’m not sure what your original argument was.
The argument was explained in the sentences immediately preceding the one you quoted.
The painfulness of the decision is also a form of disutility that has to be balanced against the difference between the charities though, which was the point of my original comment. If the difference between the values of the donations, when adjusted for the species involved, is less utility than the amount you personally lose from agonizing over how to apportion your donation, splitting it may result in higher utility overall.
Obviously, this is heavily dependent on how large the utility differences between the top charities are; if it weren’t, my comment about discounting the suffering of less intelligent species wouldn’t have been relevant.