ACE employs both qualitative and quantitative strategies in our work to identify highly effective ways to help animals. One way that we evaluate interventions or charities quantitatively is by assigning numerical values to their immediate costs and benefits. We then use those values to calculate a cost-effectiveness estimate (CEE) in terms of “lives spared per dollar” or “years of suffering averted per dollar.”1 These estimates allow us to directly compare different interventions and charities, which helps us decide which ones to recommend.

We worry that publishing our CEEs seems to imply that we place more weight on them than we actually do. We have consistently struggled to communicate to our audience the extent to which our CEEs are approximations, highly uncertain, and bias-prone. We worry that some readers may make donation decisions based solely on our CEEs, which we do not advise.

Because we are committed to the principles of effective altruism, one of our primary goals is to identify the most effective ways to help animals given limited resources. Even when we take into account the risks and uncertainties described above, directly estimating cost-effectiveness is still one of the best ways we know of to identify highly cost-effective programs.

Read the full article at Animal Charity Evaluators

_________

About Toni is a member of ACE's research team. Her academic background is in moral psychology and philosophy of cognitive science.