19 Comments
User's avatar
JoA's avatar

Good post! Also applicable to many asks / interventions in animal welfare: eg, it's reasonable to use some time / money to convince companies to not breed genetically modified animals that grow so fast that their bones break under their own weight. Accepting that non-human animals can matter, even extremely moderately, can have radical-seeming consequences when the status quo is on the side of Lyman Stone.

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Gwen's avatar

More like a very shrimple case

... I said more like a very shri

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Russell Huang's avatar

You got me, Bentham. I admit the EV is high enough that I donated $100 today. Sante!

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Bentham's Bulldog's avatar

:)

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Russell Huang's avatar

I wanted to say you battered me into compliance, but then I thought “batter” might be insensitive in the context of shrimp.

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Shaeda's avatar

That's good to know re how effective just a single penny can be.

The thing is though I think any causes such as these that are so far removed from the typical person's life will always be very difficult to convince people to donate.

Think about it, a donation is actually a net action, whereas say, simply cutting down meat/dairy consumption is not necessarily a net action.

Unfortunately I don't think "most people care enough about shrimp" and "The answers is obviously yes" are true though for many, unfortunately.

(Edit: in case it comes across wrong…I donated. It’s hard to not justify donating!)

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Dwayne's avatar

This post finally convinced me to donate. If I can end that much suffering by donating, then I can't not donate. I would just be a bad person and that is the honest truth.

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Bentham's Bulldog's avatar

Aweeeeeeeeeeeesome!

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Shaeda's avatar

Yeah, agreed for the most part.

I’m just thinking along the lines of how I think the general population would react if they saw something like this. They already roll their eyes whenever animal welfare (veganism) comes up so I can only imagine how they’d react seeing about why we should donate to lobsters (again, based on this it would be hard to see why someone wouldn’t throw a dollar at it, but if they never even consider it they won’t).

An obvious pushback would be that many would rather contribute 0.00000001% to a child somewhere than 150 lobsters being spared torture. I think we need to be careful to not overload people with causes, however charitable they may be. It would probably be correct to say the first step everyone in a position to do so should make is reduce reliance on animals.

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Alex C.'s avatar

I read all the earlier posts, and I finally donated $100 yesterday. However, I still have some doubts. Part of me feels that this initiative brings us further away from a vegan world, in the sense that consumers will have their consciences soothed and will feel better about continuing to eat shrimp.

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Joanna's avatar

Bentham's Bulldog, more like Boddy's Bulldog

Good post!

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Usually Wash's avatar

Just convert people to Judaism. Then they’re not allowed to eat shrimp.

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Ken Kovar's avatar

But when the do they make delicious food 🥘

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Odysseus's avatar

Is this a satire? Millions of shrimp die every year in dried up ponds along with trillions of other creatures invisible to the human eye. Why would I care about a few shrimp in a bucket? Death and suffering is part of life.

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Bentham's Bulldog's avatar

Hi Odysseus, the fact that the world has lots of other death and suffering doesn't mean that extra marginal shrimp death and suffering isn't bad. I think it's bad when shrimp painfully die in dried up ponds!

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Ken Kovar's avatar

As a giant I am deeply offended by your shrimp chauvinism suh 😌😊😭😭

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Contradiction Clubber's avatar

> “Imagine that you discovered that there were 150 lobsters about to be boiled alive. There’s a machine designed to anesthetize them—so that they don’t have to struggle and writhe in agony for many minutes. Sadly, the machine is broken. To fix it, you would have to spend one single penny.”

Granting your empirical claims, you make a strong argument a fortiori. However, I think shrimp welfare denier should deny that there is a moral obligation to donate one cent in the above-mentioned lobster hypothetical. One might argue in this way. Lobster pain isn’t morally significant, so you don’t have an obligation to do anything about it. Of course, this relies on the intuition that lobster pain isn’t very important. However, even if there is an obligation to donate in the lobster case mention above, this might not imply an obligation to donate to shrimp welfare if satisficing is permitted.

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Michael's avatar

Your numbers are off by 10x. According to their website, they say $1 helps 1,500 shrimp, so 1¢ helps 15 shrimp.

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Bentham's Bulldog's avatar

It helps 1500 shrimp per dollar per year! But the stunners keep being reused year after year--so plausibly the real impact is 10X that!

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