Summary
Animal Charity Evaluators works to find and promote the most effective ways to help nonhuman animals. Our research is not premised upon any particular ideology or moral framework. We think our research is valuable to anyone who shares the following three philosophical commitments:
Species membership is a morally irrelevant characteristic of individuals—much like, for example, race, color, ethnicity, religion, sex, gender or gender expression, sexual orientation, pregnancy or parental status, marital status, national origin, citizenship, amnesty, veteran status, political beliefs, age, ability, or genetic information. No one should be given less than full moral consideration on the basis of any of these features.
All other morally relevant factors being equal, the best action is the one that is expected to result in the highest net welfare.
Empirical evidence and logical reasoning can help us determine which action is best.
On this page, we explain each of the claims above and some of the reasons we endorse them. We do not provide rigorous philosophical arguments in support of any of the claims; rather, we describe them in order to be explicit about our philosophical commitments.
We think it is important to note that even if one does not embrace our philosophy fully, simply assigning some moral status and some capacity to feel to nonhuman animals can be argument enough to support our work.
Commitment One: Anti-Speciesism
We are committed to anti-speciesism, in addition to other forms of anti-discrimination and anti-oppression. Species membership is a morally irrelevant characteristic of individuals—much like, for example, race, color, ethnicity, religion, sex, gender or gender expression, sexual orientation, pregnancy or parental status, marital status, national origin, citizenship, amnesty, veteran status, political beliefs, age, ability, or genetic information. No one should be given less than full moral consideration on the basis of any of these features.
What is moral consideration?
To say that an individual deserves “moral consideration” (or has “moral status”) is to say that we have moral obligations to that individual or that the individual can be wronged. Almost everyone believes that humans have moral status. An individual’s moral status should not be determined by their race, age, gender, disability status, sexual orientation, or any other such morally irrelevant characteristics. Similarly, we believe that no individual’s moral status should be determined by their species membership.
There is no moral justification for granting all human beings a higher moral status than any nonhuman animal.
While there are certainly differences between humans and nonhuman animals, none of those differences both (i) distinguish all human individuals from all nonhuman individuals, and (ii) are relevant to whether or not an individual deserves moral consideration.
Some people who believe that only humans deserve moral consideration have claimed that moral status is grounded in certain features that are uniquely human. They might argue, for example, that only humans use language, that only humans are self-aware, or that only humans are capable of empathy or moral concern. Some may claim that humans are more intelligent than all other species or that only humans have interests in their continued existence.
However, there is a host of evidence contradicting the claim that all humans have certain mental capacities that all nonhumans lack. There is evidence, for example, that dolphins can understand sentences and call each other using unique whistles. There is evidence that bonobos can recognize themselves in the mirror and that elephants can cooperate and comfort each other. There is evidence that pigs are capable of emotional empathy towards each other, and tuskfish have been observed using rocks as tools to open cockelshells. There is even evidence that crows can solve puzzles—with a competence equivalent to that of five- to seven-year-old human children. Many nonhuman animals engage in goal-directed behavior indicative of having interests in their continued existence, whether or not they have a concept of the future.1 Meanwhile, there are humans who lack each of these capacities—such as infants or those with unresponsive wakefulness syndrome—and surely we want a conception of moral status that includes these individuals.
We are only able to identify one characteristic that applies to all and only humans: membership in the species Homo sapiens. Species membership, like race, age, gender, or sexual orientation, is an irrelevant characteristic for giving individuals moral consideration.2 No one should be discriminated against on the basis of any of these features.
In his seminal book Animal Liberation, moral philosopher Peter Singer draws a comparison between speciesism and other forms of prejudice, such as racism and sexism. There are important differences among these various forms of oppression, including the distinct ways in which they can manifest. However, racism, sexism, and speciesism are analogous insofar as all such forms of discrimination mark certain individuals as “other” by identifying morally irrelevant characteristic features of their bodies, personalities, and identities and using these traits as justification for unfair treatment or inferior classification:
“Racists violate the principle of equality by giving greater weight to the interests of members of their own race when there is a clash between their interests and the interests of those of another race. Sexists violate the principle of equality by favoring the interests of their own sex. Similarly, speciesists allow the interests of their own species to override the greater interests of members of other species. The pattern is identical in each case.”3
We believe that all sentient individuals deserve moral consideration.
Some people argue that an individual has moral status if (and only if) they are the subject of a life.4
Others argue an individual has moral status if (and only if) they are autonomous or rational.5 Still others argue that an individual has moral status if (and only if) they are sentient; that is, they have the capacity for conscious experiences including pleasure and pain.6
In the interest of transparency, we want to be clear that we evaluate causes, interventions, and charities primarily according to the effects that they have on sentient individuals. Our work will likely be most useful for people who hold the view that individuals have moral status if and only if they are sentient. That said, we hope and expect that our work can still be useful to those who hold other views of moral status—simply assigning some moral status and some capacity to feel to nonhuman animals can be argument enough to support our work.
While we do prioritize by species, this is in accordance with anti-speciesism.
When deciding which animals to help, we do prioritize by species. Species differ in relevant factors such as the number of members of that species who are suffering, and the degree to which they experience suffering in their context—for example, farming practices differ across species, and these practices also differ in the amount of suffering they cause. Given finite resources, we thus want to prioritize our focus on species that endure large degrees of suffering in large numbers, all else equal. This does not mean that we are giving a higher moral status to certain species, only that we are using species as a proxy for other factors that we care about. We don’t consider species membership itself to be a relevant factor when deciding which nonhuman animals to help.
Commitment Two: Promoting Welfare
All other morally relevant factors being equal, the best action is the one that in expectation results in the highest overall welfare.7
At Animal Charity Evaluators, we work to identify the most effective ways to help nonhuman animals. There are different ways to promote the welfare of nonhuman animals. We can work to reduce an animal’s suffering or otherwise increase their wellbeing, or we can prevent an animal from existing if they would be born into a life in which we expect them to experience more suffering than wellbeing.
Because our goal is to answer questions about how people should behave, we are engaged in a fundamentally moral project. However, we are not committed to any particular ethical theory about how people should make decisions, and we are certainly not committed to any particular metaethical theory about the nature of morality. Our work relies on the simple assumption that all other morally relevant factors being equal, the best action is the one that is expected to promote the most welfare overall.
Given the choice between making a $1 donation that results in one life spared8 or making a $1 donation that results in ten lives spared, it’s better to make the donation that will spare ten lives, all else equal. Given the choice between volunteering an hour of time to make a small improvement in an animal’s welfare or volunteering an hour of time to make a large improvement in an animal’s welfare, it’s better to use the time to make the larger improvement, all else equal.
For shorthand, we often refer to actions that we expect to result in the highest net welfare as actions that have the “greatest positive impact.”
Some factors are not morally relevant.
If an action has a greater positive impact than any alternative, we take it to be the best course of action regardless of whether it: (i) affects individuals in close proximity to us (as opposed to those farther from us), (ii) coheres with cultural norms, (iii) prevents or creates future lives, (iv) alters the natural world, or (v) is a perfect course of action.
(i) The proximity of individuals
Some people might think that we have a stronger obligation toward individuals who are near to us than toward those who are far away, i.e., to “act locally.” At Animal Charity Evaluators, we believe that our obligations to an individual do not depend on that individual’s proximity to us.9 A dog in another country and a dog on our doorstep are equally capable of suffering and equally deserving of moral consideration.
(ii) Coherence with cultural norms
We believe that an action’s coherence with cultural norms is morally irrelevant. For instance, we believe that (other things being equal), Americans should adopt a diet that has the greatest positive impact for animals, even though such a diet may be quite different from a typical American diet. Note: This does not mean that we disregard cultural context in our work—understanding a cultural context and taking it into consideration when making decisions can be crucial for our assessment of the best funding opportunities.
(iii) Causing or preventing future lives
We believe that if a future individual will experience more suffering than wellbeing, it is better to prevent that individual from coming into existence—all else being equal. For example, we would consider an action to have a positive outcome if it “spares” an animal from being born into a life in industrial agriculture. We don’t know for certain that it would be preferable for an animal to avoid being born at all rather than to be born in a factory farm, but we operate based on the assumption that animals in factory farms experience more suffering than wellbeing in their lives and that it is, therefore, better to prevent them from being born.10
(iv) Altering the natural world
The natural world includes many places where humans find beauty and peace, and while some wish to leave natural habitats untouched to preserve aesthetics or out of concern for unknown effects, we believe we have a moral duty to consider the welfare of the sentient beings in these environments. Wild animals endure many hardships including disease, predation, fear, and starvation; the case for addressing these issues is supported by prominent economists, philosophers, and effective altruists.
We support organizations and academics researching ways that we might be able to improve the welfare of wild animals while carefully considering the flow-through impacts on ecosystems, when present.11 Just as humans have altered nature for our own benefit—for example, by eradicating natural diseases and developing agricultural practices to feed billions—we must also take actions to promote the welfare of our planet’s cohabitants.
(v) Perfection
Our endorsement of actions that have the greatest positive impact means that we sometimes endorse actions that are less than perfect. During our charity evaluation process, we do not (and probably never will) investigate every detail of each charity’s activities and staff. We do not, for instance, investigate whether every staff member of our Top Charities is vegan in order to determine whether a small fraction of our audience’s donations may support animal agriculture by funding staff salaries.
Some people might object to our endorsement of actions that may be imperfect. However, it seems to us that consistently acting in perfect coherence with our values is impossible given the complex world we live in. Any available course of action probably has some negative consequences, though they may be quite small. If we refused to recommend charities that employ non-vegans, have leather chairs in their conference rooms, or use cleaning products tested on animals, we might not be able to recommend any charities. Even if we found that we could, they might not be the most effective ones overall. Moreover, investigating all promising charities at such a high level of detail would probably not be the most effective use of our time. We think we can do the most good by identifying the best available courses of action, rather than investing all of our time in a search for perfect actions, which may not exist.
Is it wrong to prioritize the welfare of “the greatest number?”
It may seem unfitting to approach a moral problem the same way one might approach a math problem. We often hear animal advocates argue that the intrinsic value of each individual life is so great that it is wrong to compare the value of sparing one life to the value of sparing ten lives. In response to such a concern, we can only emphasize our respect for the value of each individual life. We do not see a contradiction between the conviction that each life is inherently valuable and the conviction that it is better to improve or spare more lives rather than fewer lives. On the contrary, it follows precisely from our conviction that each life is valuable that we choose to spare more lives rather than fewer lives.12
Perhaps those who feel that it’s inappropriate for us to focus on numbers are concerned that doing so will distract us from experiencing important moral emotions like empathy and concern. As philosopher John Stuart Mill expressed in his book Utilitarianism, calculating the consequences of our actions may make us seem “cold and unsympathizing” or it may “[chill our] moral feelings towards individuals.”13 In other words, focusing on the number of animals we help could distract us from our concern for each individual animal, which may be what motivated us to help animals in the first place.
When our critics express concern about our numbers-oriented approach to helping animals, we suspect they are anxious that our approach will lead us to ignore important groups of animals. Our focus on helping animals as much as possible does lead us to prioritize farmed animal advocacy and wild animal welfare, which may seem unfair to companion animals, animals in labs, animals used in entertainment, and so on.
We care deeply about the welfare of all sentient beings, and we think that the suffering of a rabbit in a laboratory is just as important as the suffering of a hen in a battery cage. We are grateful for the animal activists who are working on behalf of any and all populations of nonhuman animals. The reason we prioritize farmed animal advocacy is not that we think farmed animals matter more than other animals. We prioritize farmed animal advocacy because we believe it is the most promising avenue for helping animals as much as possible with limited resources.
Our emphasis on identifying the most effective cause areas and charities may seem to imply that we think there is one monistic approach to animal advocacy that is most effective. In fact, we think that the most effective approach is probably a pluralistic one, and we are excited to support a diverse set of projects around the globe through our Movement Grants program. However, we will continue to recommend that marginal resources primarily go toward supporting farmed animal advocacy and wild animal welfare for as long as it remains the case that those cause areas receive a small fraction of animal charities’ resources despite those animals enduring the vast majority of the suffering.
Commitment Three: Empirical Evidence and Logical Reasoning
Empirical evidence and logical reasoning can help us determine which action is best.
Anyone who is determined to help animals as much as possible should rely on evidence and reason to guide their actions. Investigating the best ways to help animals is, at least to some extent, an empirical enterprise. To better understand the inner lives of nonhuman animals, we can rely on research from academic fields such as biology, neuroscience, and ethology, among others. Predicting the effects of various actions is also, at least to some extent, an empirical enterprise. Through our Animal Advocacy Research Fund, we support studies that investigate the effects of common animal advocacy interventions. We also appreciate the studies conducted by other animal charities and academics and rely on them to inform our work.
The role of empirical research in choosing cause areas
To increase the expected value of our actions, we prioritize cause areas that are large in scale, tractable, and neglected. Large-scale cause areas are those that offer opportunities for having a significant positive impact. They often involve relatively large groups of individuals who experience relatively high amounts of suffering. Tractable cause areas are those that can be substantially improved by human intervention. Neglected cause areas are those that receive relatively little attention and resources. Based on these three criteria, we find farmed animal welfare in particular to be a promising cause area for creating positive change. Wild animal welfare is also highly neglected and large in scale, and although it is a newer field with fewer tractable interventions identified, we see it as another promising cause area where further research and development may have a large impact.
Determining which cause areas are large-scale, tractable, and neglected requires empirical research. Empirical research from the sciences informs our judgment that nonhuman animals are capable of suffering. Given their enormous numbers, this means that the problem is very large in scale. We rely upon evidence to determine the tractability of animal protection interventions, and we have used data about charitable donations in the U.S. to determine that farmed animal welfare is particularly neglected. For more information about the evidence we have used to select a cause area, see our Prioritizing Causes page.
The role of empirical research in guiding action
Choosing cause areas to work on is just the first step toward identifying which actions can have the greatest impact. Much research is still needed before we can confidently predict which actions will be of the most help to animals. In order to contribute to our understanding of the consequences of various interventions on behalf of animals, ACE synthesizes existing research and helps fund new research. We use our knowledge of interventions and general research to identify which animal charities are likely doing the most good for animals so that donors can make more informed choices about where to give.
What kinds of evidence can help us make better choices?
To better understand the inner lives of nonhuman animals, we can rely on research from academic fields such as biology, neuroscience, and ethology. To investigate the effects of common animal advocacy interventions, we rely on studies conducted by other animal charities or by academics. To better understand what farmed animals experience, in particular, we can also rely on information about what happens inside factory farms, much of which has been discovered and publicized through undercover investigations.
In addition to directly studying the effects of animal advocacy interventions, we can use evidence from many other fields to help us determine how to best help nonhuman animals. For instance, research on social psychology, marketing, and moral decision-making can help us learn how to persuade others to join our cause or take actions to help animals. Research about behavioral interventions and about current vegetarians and vegans helps us to support individuals wishing to adopt and maintain dietary changes that help nonhuman animals. Historical and sociological research can help us learn what makes social movements effective.
Often, there is limited evidence available.
Unfortunately, though we have many different possible sources of evidence, we still often find that we do not have enough information to determine the best ways to help animals with a high degree of confidence. We try to be careful about the conclusions we draw from research on psychological phenomena, behavioral interventions used in other fields, and the history of other social movements—since the extent to which such research can be reliably generalized to the animal advocacy movement is not always clear.
Given the current state of the research, our conclusions are often quite tentative. Nonetheless, we strongly believe in using what data we have to inform our understanding of effective animal advocacy, and we therefore do make recommendations on the basis of the empirical evidence available. We do our best to express our level of uncertainty in our communications. For instance, in our charity reviews, we present any quantitative cost-effectiveness estimates as ranges rather than as point estimates, and we provide reasons to think that our estimates might be high or low, whenever we think that there are any. We also do our best to explain our research methodology in detail so that readers who disagree with our interpretation of the available evidence are able to locate the source of their disagreement and adjust the conclusions that we’ve drawn as they see fit.
We are also working in many different ways to build upon the available body of research. We maintain a Research Library and a Data Repository so that researchers can catch up on existing research before planning their own studies. We provide guidelines for animal advocates who wish to study the effects of their interventions using surveys. We organized a Symposium on Multidisciplinary Research in Effective Animal Advocacy in 2016 and a Research Workshop in 2017, and we made the talks from the symposium available online. Finally, we administer funding to promising research projects through our Animal Advocacy Research Fund. We hope that these efforts will help to produce a more substantial body of animal advocacy research within the next few years.
Other Commitments
We do not endorse actions that are violent,14 even if they appear to have a greater positive impact than other options. For instance, it may seem that harming a vivisectionist would have a positive impact by preventing them from continuing to experiment on animals and perhaps disincentivizing others from doing the same. However, we do not endorse actions that involve physical force and are intended or highly likely to cause substantial or permanent harm to any sentient individual.
Our opposition to violence is not purely philosophical. There are also empirical reasons to believe that violence is not the best way to achieve social change.15 As a public-facing charitable organization, advocating violent action could pose a serious threat to our work.
Additionally, ACE is committed to being transparent with the public. We value organizations that are open about failures as well as successes, that provide financial information online, and that are willing to publish detailed information about their work. We strive to be one of these organizations ourselves.
Note that we do not expect all organizations to be transparent with the public about the same information. We recognize that organizations and individuals working in some regions could be harmed by making public certain information about their work. However, we expect charities participating in our evaluations to be transparent with us regarding the information we request even if it is confidential. In these cases, we favor confidentiality and safety over transparency.
For more information, see page 101 of Lori Gruen’s Ethics and Animals: An Introduction.
For a more detailed presentation of the argument included in this section, see the first section of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s article on “The Moral Status of Animals.”
Note that, while Singer is implying here that it is wrong to be speciesist in favor of one’s own species, a similar argument could be made that it is wrong to be speciesist in favor of any species.
For instance, see Tom Regan’s The Case for Animal Rights.
For instance, see Immanuel Kant’s “Groundwork for the Metaphysic of Morals.” Also see Christine Korsgaard’s “Fellow Creatures: Kantian Ethics and our Duties to Animals,” in which she argues that all beings who have concern for themselves have moral status.
For instance, see Peter Singer’s “All Animals Are Equal.”
Our second commitment implies that, all else equal, adding more individuals to the world is a good thing provided that those individuals experience more happiness than suffering and thus increase the population’s net welfare. The claim that it’s always better to add more happy individuals to the world, while potentially controversial, is unlikely to have practical implications for our work in the near future. Because our priority is helping animals who are suffering greatly and/or in large numbers (e.g., factory farmed animals), we recommend actions that improve their lives or prevent more of them from being born. We are unlikely to recommend increasing the number of farmed animals or any other individuals.
We use the term “life spared” loosely; we consider preventing an animal from living a miserable life to be “sparing” a life.
As philosopher Derek Parfit puts it in “Innumerate Ethics,” “Why do we save the larger number? Because we do give equal weight to saving each. Each counts for one. That is why more count for more.”
In his essay “Asymmetries in the Morality of Causing People to Exist,” Philosopher Jeff McMahan suggests that, intuitively, it is best to prevent net-negative lives.
In response to the question “Aren’t ecosystems too complex to be able to predict the outcomes for wild animal welfare?,” Wild Animal Initiative notes that “some methods of improving wild animal welfare may not interact with complex ecosystem dynamics. For example […] insecticides that cause less distress to the insects they target […].”
As philosopher Derek Parfit puts it in “Innumerate Ethics,” “Why do we save the larger number? Because we do give equal weight to saving each. Each counts for one. That is why more count for more.”
See page 13 of the linked edition of Utilitarianism.
ACE uses the definition of violent action outlined by the World Health Organization’s Violence Prevention Alliance, meaning actions that involve “the intentional use of physical force or power, threatened or actual, against oneself, another person, or against a group or community, that either results in or has a high likelihood of resulting in injury, death, psychological harm, maldevelopment, or deprivation.”
See, for example, Stephan & Chenoweth (2011), Huet-Vaughn (2013), Wasow (2020) and Madestam et al. (2013).