“Where does the moral circle stop?” — our talk at a welfare research forum.

The talk, delivered at a closed-doors welfare research forum on 24 April, was a forty-minute exposition of the expected-value case for lithic welfare: scale, neglectedness, and the role of moral uncertainty in determining where the marginal philanthropic dollar should land. We departed from our usual practice of inviting questions only at the end, and instead encouraged interruption throughout. We received fewer interruptions than we expected.

A show of hands at the close indicated that 4% of the room reported a non-trivial increase in their credence that rocks possess morally relevant experience. No one in the room reported a decrease. A larger fraction — we did not measure it precisely — reported that they could not articulate a principled stopping point for the moral circle short of the position we were defending, even where they remained uncomfortable with that position. This is, in our view, the more important result.

Several attendees pressed on the cost-effectiveness comparison: specifically, whether the expected-value framing privileges low-probability, high-impact bets in a way that breaks down at sufficient extremity. This is a fair criticism. We address it directly in Working Paper 03, which we encouraged the room to read with appropriate scepticism.

We are publishing neither the slides nor a recording at this time. The forum operates under a non-attribution norm, and we honour it. A written version of the argument is in preparation and will appear in due course.

We remain grateful to the organisers, and to the audience, for taking the argument seriously enough to argue with it.