For A Short Period Of Time, You Can Save 21,000 Shrimp Per Dollar

5 arguments for doing so!

(I think this is an important article, so I’d appreciate sharing and restacking it.)

It’s shrimp welfare week—a period during which various substackers are trying to raise funds for the Shrimp Welfare Project. At this link, donations will be matched 50%. In normal times, a dollar given to the Shrimp Welfare Project spares about 1,400 shrimp from excruciating torture per year—that single dollar’s effect compounded over many years saves probably about 14,000 shrimp total from a painful death from being slowly frozen and suffocated to death on ice. 1.5x that impact=21,000 shrimp per dollar.

I think you should donate to this fundraiser. You’ve probably heard me make this case before. I’ve mentioned how we torture 440 billion shrimp on nightmare farms, stab out their eyes, afflict them with horrendous diseases due to overcrowding, and leave them to suffocate to death over the course of many minutes. 110 billion people have ever lived. We torture and kill four times that many shrimp every year, and that is just on the farms. If wild shrimp are counted, the situation is far more dismal.

In fact, I think there are several different strong arguments for giving to the Shrimp Welfare Project (an organization whose interventions help 4.4 billion shrimp per year, so that even if they shut down tomorrow, 4.4 billion additional shrimp would continue to be spared each year for many years to come). It’s easy for these arguments to blend together in a person’s mind, so let me differentiate them explicitly.

Argument 1: bare intuition

Imagine there were 210 shrimp in front of you, about to suffocate to death—writhing about in agony. You could put them all out of their misery, make every one of their deaths painless, for a penny. Doing so would seem like an excellent use of money. But that is the effectiveness of the shrimp welfare project. So if spending a penny to save 210 shrimp is worth it, then so is giving to the Shrimp Welfare Project fundraiser.

If you give 100 dollars, you can help out around 2.1 million shrimp. There are 1.1 million people in Rhode Island, and about 600,000 in Wyoming. You personally, at very trivial cost, can spare millions of sentient beings from horrific and excruciating agony. If you wouldn’t boil a lobster alive, then you should certainly be willing to donate a few dollars—at least—to prevent hundreds of thousands or millions of similar animals from suffering horrendously.

Argument 2: the suffering argument

Shrimp can plausibly suffer a great deal. The most detailed report on their suffering guessed they could suffer within an order of magnitude as intensely as we can. The mean estimate from that report was that shrimp suffer 19% as intensely as people—if you buy that, then a dollar given to this fundraiser prevents as much agony as stopping nearly 4,000 people from experiencing the agony of slow suffocation. That might overstate things, but it also might understate things.

While we often assume that shrimp barely suffer because of their simple brains, that is little more than an arbitrary dogma—built on nothing. At the very least, we should have lots of uncertainty about how much pain they feel—but uncertainty is enough to make money given to the Shrimp Welfare Project very impactful in expectation. You don’t have to be certain that lobsters feel pain to think we shouldn’t boil them in pots.

Suffering is bad because of how it feels, not because of the cognitive capacities or species of the sufferer. If you have a migraine, for example, it’s bad because it hurts you, not because you’re smart and can do calculus. If you got a lot dumber—even if you got as dumb as a shrimp—a migraine would still be a bad thing. If a being can hurt, then we have a duty not to inflict pointless suffering on them. And yet the suffering we inflict upon shrimp is almost incomprehensible in its magnitude.

The argument here is as follows:

1. Suffering is bad.

2. If you can prevent a very large expected amount of a bad thing for a dollar, there is strong reason to do so.

3. Giving a dollar to the Shrimp Welfare Project prevents a very large expected amount of suffering.

4. So there is strong moral reason to give to the Shrimp Welfare Project.

Note: 3 doesn’t require you’re certain that shrimp can suffer. It just requires that you think it’s not extremely unlikely that they can. Even if you’re a bit uncertain, money given to the SWP prevents lots of expected suffering. Note additionally: the argument doesn’t assume anything controversial about the badness of pain, and it especially doesn’t assume utilitarianism.

Argument 3: marginal cases

The argument from marginal cases is generally presented as an argument for animal rights. The core idea is this: for our current mistreatment of animals to be anything less than a hideous, unspeakable abomination, there must be some very large, categorical gulf between animals and people. If animals matter anywhere near as much as people do, then the fact that we torture hundreds of billions of them in hideous ways is extremely serious.

If animals matter many orders of magnitude less than people, there would have to be something about them that explains why they matter so much less. If A matters much less than B, there must be some reason why. But any explanation of why animals matter barely at all will have horrendous and counterintuitive consequences.

Let’s apply this argument to the Shrimp Welfare Project. Obviously if you could spare 21,000 people from the painfulness of death for a dollar, that would be a great use of a dollar. Even if you could only spare 210 people for a dollar, that would be a good use of a dollar. Thus, to think giving to shrimp isn’t very valuable, you have to think shrimp matter many orders of magnitude less than people.

But here is the problem: any explanation for why shrimp matter so little will also imply that a human with the same property would matter equivalently little. For instance, suppose you say that shrimp barely matter at all because they’re not smart. Well, there are some very mentally impaired humans. There are also babies who are not very smart. If you say that shrimp being violently tortured to death isn’t a big deal because they are cognitively simple, that would imply that comparably cognitively simple people wouldn’t be a big deal. But that’s obviously wrong!

Now, one could try to get around this by saying that shrimp don’t matter because they are both unintelligent and non-human. But this has two problems:

1. It draws distinctions based on morally irrelevant characteristics like species. If two beings have identical capacities, ability to suffer, and so on, they should be afforded the same moral worth, even if they’re different species.

2. It implies that if we discovered some very mentally disabled people were not biologically human—e.g. they were some other species placed here by aliens—even if this didn’t diminish their capacities at all, it would then not be a big deal if they were tortured to death. This is obviously wrong.

Argument 4: moral risk

Lots of very smart people think shrimp welfare matters a lot. I think giving a dollar to the Shrimp Welfare Project very likely does more good than every nice thing you’ve ever done for a person. Many smart philosophers agree. Now, even if you disagree with this, you shouldn’t be extremely confident in your view when smart people disagree. Dustin, the best philosopher I know, agrees with me, and you shouldn’t be very confident he’s wrong.

So here is the argument in brief:

1. If there’s some serious chance that for a tiny cost, you can do more good than every nice thing you’ve ever done for a person, then paying that cost is very valuable.

2. There is some serious chance that for a tiny cost, by giving to the Shrimp Welfare Project, you can do more good than every nice thing you’ve ever done for a person (lots of smart people think this, and you shouldn’t be very confident that they’re wrong.

3. Thus, giving to the Shrimp Welfare Project is very valuable.

Argument 5: offsetting

You probably eat meat. Eating meat causes animals lots of suffering for comparatively minor cost. If you eat meat, then, you have made animals worse off—especially shrimp who you probably eat the most of. If you harm a group a great deal, then you should try to offset the harm. Thus, you should give to the Shrimp Welfare Project to offset your harm to the shrimp.

What can be done

While the Shrimp Welfare Project has already benefitted billions of shrimp, there are new ways they might benefit 100 billion shrimp per year. But they need more funding to create and expand those programs. If you can afford it, I encourage you to give to the shrimp. While donations to the shrimp are not cool or fashionable, and you will not be viewed as a hero, you have the opportunity to prevent millions of beings from enduring unspeakable suffering for small cost.

If morality ever demands anything, it is that we stop horrific suffering at trivial personal cost. Though the sufferers do not look like us, and though they are not smart, as they gaze at us through pain-filled eyes—not even having mouths to scream—it is clear that they deserve that something be done to prevent them from freezing, sputtering, and choking to death by the hundreds of billions.