We Should Expect to Be Extremely Biased About Speciesism

The following is a slightly edited excerpt from my book Effective Altruism: How Can We Best Help Others? (2018/2022).

If ever there were a bias that we evolved not to transcend, it is surely our speciesist bias. After all, we evolved in a context in which our survival depended on our killing and eating non-human beings. For most of our evolutionary history, the questioning of such a practice, and the belief that non-human beings should be taken seriously in moral terms, meant a radically ...