The Best Charity Isn't What You Think

[ This is another guest post by Matthew Adelstein, the best undergraduate student. —mh ]

Open your mouth for the mute, for the rights of all who are destitute.

—Proverbs 31:8

Imagine that you came across 1,600 shrimp about to be painfully killed. They were going to be thrown onto ice where slowly, agonizingly, over the course of 20 minutes, they’d suffocate and freeze to death at the same time, a bit like suffocating in a suitcase in the middle of Antarctica. Imagine them struggling, gasping, without enough air, fighting for their lives, but it’s no use.

Fortunately, there’s a machine that will stun every shrimp, so that they’ll be unconscious during their deaths, rather than in extreme agony. But the machine is broken. To fix it, you’d have to spend a dollar. Should you do so? We can even sweeten the deal and imagine that the machine won’t just be used this year—it will be used year after year, saving 1,600 shrimp per year.

It seems obvious that you should spend the dollar. Extreme agony is bad. If you can prevent literally thousands of animals from being in extreme agony for around a fourth of the cost of a cup of coffee, of course you should do so! It’s common sense. In fact, this would be the best dollar you spent all year—every penny would save 16 shrimp from an agonizing death per year!

I asked chat GPT to make an image of 1,600 shrimp in a lecture hall—here’s the image, but it’s only of ~200 shrimp, so you really save much more than this:

(Above image is not realistic—shrimp do not actually attend lectures.)

It turns out, this scenario isn’t just a hypothetical. One of the best charities you can give to is called the shrimp welfare project (if you want to donate monthly, you can do so here). For every dollar it gets, it saves about 1,600 shrimp from a painful death every year.

The way it works is simple and common sense: it gives stunners to companies that kill shrimp so long as they agree to use them to stun at least 120 million shrimp. They also secure welfare commitments from corporations to stop crushing the eyes of live shrimp in order to increase their fertility and to use humane slaughter (e.g. they worked with Tesco to get an extra 1.6 billion shrimp stunned before slaughter every year). In total, they’ve helped around 2.6 billion shrimp per year, despite operating on a shoestring budget.

This makes them around 30 times better at reducing suffering and promoting well-being than the highly effective animal charities focused on chicken welfare, which themselves are hundreds or thousands of times more effective than the best charities helping humans. It costs thousands of dollars to save a human, but the best animal charities help hundreds of animals per dollar.

It may seem weird that the best thing to do is helping shrimp, but the world is a weird place. I’d be surprised if we got to heaven, asked God what the highest impact thing that we could have done is, and his answer was “oh, something very normal and within the Overton window.” The reason it seems crazy is because of bias; shrimp look weird and we don’t naturally empathize with them. But that’s not a reason to ignore their plight. Nearly all historical injustice can be traced to in inability to empathize with others.

Rethink Priorities, based on an incredibly thorough and detailed report, has a median estimate that shrimp suffer about 3.1% as intensely as humans (and, as I’ll discuss later, we can be quite confident that they suffer). If we multiply 1,600—the number of painful deaths averted per dollar—by 3.1%, then a dollar given to the shrimp welfare project prevents as much agony as anesthetizing 49.6 humans before they slowly suffocate to death at low temperatures, per year! That means it’s equivalent to making a human death painless every year for only two cents!

This is a highly conservative estimate. In fact, when you look at the mean estimate of how much they suffer from the same detailed report—by far the most detailed report on the subject ever compiled—it turns out that the average estimate of how much shrimp suffer is 19% as intensely as humans. That’s almost a fifth!

The mean estimate of how much shrimp suffer is a much better metric for measuring such things, for it looks at how much they suffer on average rather than the 50th percentile estimate of how much they suffer. If shrimp had a 49% chance of suffering very greatly and a 51% chance of not suffering at all, the median estimate of their suffering would be 0 while the mean estimate would be high.

Relying on the mean estimate, giving a dollar to the shrimp welfare project prevents, on average, as much pain as preventing 304 humans from painfully dying by freezing to death and suffocating. This would make three human deaths painless per penny, when otherwise the people would have slowly frozen and suffocated to death.

And remember: this is only the benefit per year! If we assume the stunners are used for ten years, then per dollar, it’s equivalent to preventing over 3000 humans from painfully dying and by the median estimate, it’s equivalent to preventing 496 painful human deaths. This is a truly absurd amount of good—much more, per dollar per year, than every nice thing I’ve ever done interpersonally.

One objection that I think misses the mark is that there are things other than pleasure and pain that matter and for this reason, it’s better to help humans. This is ill-thought-out; that pleasure and pain are not the only things that matter doesn’t mean they don’t matter at all. Preventing immense extreme suffering is very valuable even if things matter other than pleasure and pain. You could make this same argument against spending a dollar to give thousands of humans painless deaths!

Another objection is that really intense agony matters much more than mild agony—just as no number of mild headaches are as bad as a single extreme torture, perhaps no number of shrimp painfully dying is as bad as a human painfully dying. But I’m dubious of this on several counts. First, I reject the claim that no number of mild bads can add up to be as bad as a single thing that’s very bad, as do many philosophers.

Second, shrimp deaths are probably above the threshold at which suffering becomes very morally serious—it takes them longer to suffocate and freeze than it takes us, so their deaths on average last 20 minutes. Even if they suffer only 3% as intensely as we do, as per the median estimate, an experience 3% as bad as slowly suffocating to death over the course of 20 minutes at insanely low temperatures is very bad.

Third, there’s high uncertainty in the estimates. On average, they suffer 19% as intensely as we do. If a creature suffers 19% as intensely as us, we should give it significant weight, especially when there’s over a 5% chance that they suffer more than we do. A 5% chance that spending a dollar averts as much misery as preventing tens of thousands of human deaths—thousands per year—is a dollar well spent.

For the objection to work, you must be very confident that:

1. Lots of mild pains aren’t as bad as one extreme pain.

2. The median estimate of the badness of shrimp deaths is below the threshold at which they are as important as other deaths.

3. The odds that shrimps’ suffering is above the threshold are very near zero.

I don’t think you should be confident in any of those things—I suspect they’re all false.

A final objection claims that shrimp welfare doesn’t matter. I think so long as shrimp can suffer, their suffering matters. Think about what it’s like to be in extreme pain—the sort of pain that characterizes suffocating or drowning. That’s a bad thing! What makes it bad isn’t our species or the fact that we’re smart but instead what the pain feels like.

If we came across very mentally disabled people or extremely early babies (perhaps in a world where we could extract fetuses from the womb after just a few weeks) that could feel pain but only had cognition as complex as shrimp, it would be bad if they were burned with a hot iron, so that they cried out. It’s not just because they’d be smart later, as their hurting would still be bad if the babies were terminally ill so that they wouldn’t be smart later, or if they were cognitively enfeebled and thus permanently mentally stunted.

Can shrimp suffer? Almost definitely yes. This is the plurality view among those who have studied it for a simple reason: there’s every evolutionary reason to expect them to suffer and in every way they behave like they do suffer. It’s beneficial for a shrimp to be able to suffer, just like it’s beneficial for you to suffer; it helps them avoid injury. Thus, it would be a bit surprising if they didn’t suffer.

Nothing about how shrimp behave makes sense except on the assumption that they suffer. If injured, shrimp will nurse the wound and behave differently, just as we do. Shrimp respond to painkillers, and shockingly will even self-administer painkillers if they’re hurt, in exactly the way we’d expect them to if they felt pain.

Shrimp have most features that we’d expect to go with consciousness. They communicate, integrate information from different senses into one broad picture, make trade-offs between pain and various goods, display anxiety, have personal taste in food, and release stress hormones when scared. Other crustaceans behave as we do when we’re in pain, being likelier to abandon a shell when they’re given more intense electric shocks, such that their abandonment is a function of both the desirability of the shell and greatness of the shocks. One study looked at the seven criteria that are the best indicators of pain and concluded that crustaceans possess all of them, including being able to communicate and remember and avoid places where they were in pain.

Even if you’re not sure that they can suffer, as long as there’s a chance, the shrimp welfare project is still insanely impactful—if a dollar had even a 20% chance of averting thousands of painful deaths, it would be well spent.

Despite the fact that we kill many trillions of shrimp every single year, the shrimp welfare project, the only project helping shrimp avoid extreme suffering, is seriously underfunded. It’s hugely dependent on a few big donors who have cut funding recently, utterly devastating it. As a result, it needs small, grass-roots funders like you to prevent millions of animals from being subjected to an incredibly cruel fate, like being slowly suffocated and frozen to death and having their eyes crushed.

Thousands saved per dollar per year really scales. My articles are generally read by about 2,000 people—this means if you all give ten dollars to the shrimp welfare project, that would save 32 million shrimp from a cruel fate every single year. For the cost of a car, the number of shrimp that you could massively help is more than the population of California. This is one of the few cases where a single person like you or me can dramatically help tens of millions!

One way to see how good different charities are is to imagine that after you died, you had to live the life of every creature on earth. This forces you to empathize not just with those that are salient, but with everyone. You’d have to live the perspective of everyone you helped and hurt, of everyone mistreated and treated well. In such a world, one of my profoundest regrets would be that I did nothing about the millions of shrimp that I would have to spend millions of years living as.

Shrimp are a test of our empathy. Shrimp don’t look normal, caring about them isn’t popular, but basic ethical principles entail that they matter. This is one of the rare cases where you can prevent tens of thousands of terrible things from happening for just a dollar. I hope you’ll join me! I’m giving about 50 dollars per month to the shrimp welfare project, which helps around 1.3 million shrimp per year: