This seems like an irrelevant objection, given that the OP is explicitly arguing about a conditional (IF mundane improvements in factory farming is a good intervention point for aggregate welfare reasons, THEN wireheading chickens is an even better intervention on those grounds), not unconditionally favoring the latter policy over the former.
For EA to make any sense at all as a way of organizing to do good, it needs to be able to clearly distinguish a rank-ordering of interventions on the basis of merit in a strictly utilitarian or other aggregative analysis with some particular defined outcome, from the question of which interventions have additional sources of support such as other moral considerations.
It also needs to be possible to have a discussion of whether a position is coherent separately from the question of whether it’s the position we in fact hold, if that position is a claimed justification for demanding resources.
This seems like an irrelevant objection, given that the OP is explicitly arguing about a conditional (IF mundane improvements in factory farming is a good intervention point for aggregate welfare reasons, THEN wireheading chickens is an even better intervention on those grounds), not unconditionally favoring the latter policy over the former.
For EA to make any sense at all as a way of organizing to do good, it needs to be able to clearly distinguish a rank-ordering of interventions on the basis of merit in a strictly utilitarian or other aggregative analysis with some particular defined outcome, from the question of which interventions have additional sources of support such as other moral considerations.
It also needs to be possible to have a discussion of whether a position is coherent separately from the question of whether it’s the position we in fact hold, if that position is a claimed justification for demanding resources.