We’d definitely want to avoid establishing perverse incentives (such as the famous “paying for dead cobras ⇒ cobra farming”). At first glance, your example seems to gesture at a problem with establish credits for “alleviating suffering” versus “producing positive welfare”, which I agree we might want to avoid.
I don’t think that paying for welfare has to be implemented as “paying for someone not to do something bad”—some carbon credits are set up way (paying not to chop down trees), but others are not (Stripe Frontier’s carbon capture & sequestration). Perhaps you as a wealthy individual would be better served by offering eg $1 per proven happy hen-year? So long as you set the prices correctly, I do think it would be a good thing to farm more animals in a way where the animals are generally happy, similar to how it would be a good thing to institute policies creating more happy human lives.
In practice, I think we’d want to balance considerations like potential perverse incentives/blackmail, versus “how feasible is it to actually implement”, and also rely on sanity checks/monitoring/investigative reporting to understand how these markets are functioning.
Thank you both for these answers, this is helpful!
It sounds like it is useful to distinguish two possible ways of implementing a welfare market:
A farmer is paid to change the welfare of their animals from negative (it would be better if they had never existed) to positive (it is better that they get to exist).
A farmer is paid to change the welfare of their animals from negative, to less negative, but the animals still lead net-negative lives overall.
I can see how on pure consequentialist grounds the first case would be good, and avoid the problem I was asking about. Although I expect a lot of vegans who have a principled objection to animals being treated as property will object to this, if increasing quantity of farmed animals is explicitly viewed as a positive outcome of the policy. I would certainly have reservations about it.
On the other hand, the second case seems like it does carry the risk I was asking about. We should expect the quantity of animals farmed to increase in a way that might outweigh the gain in welfare per animal (whether or not it does will I think depend on complicated economics things like the slopes of supply and demand curves?)
We’d definitely want to avoid establishing perverse incentives (such as the famous “paying for dead cobras ⇒ cobra farming”). At first glance, your example seems to gesture at a problem with establish credits for “alleviating suffering” versus “producing positive welfare”, which I agree we might want to avoid.
I don’t think that paying for welfare has to be implemented as “paying for someone not to do something bad”—some carbon credits are set up way (paying not to chop down trees), but others are not (Stripe Frontier’s carbon capture & sequestration). Perhaps you as a wealthy individual would be better served by offering eg $1 per proven happy hen-year? So long as you set the prices correctly, I do think it would be a good thing to farm more animals in a way where the animals are generally happy, similar to how it would be a good thing to institute policies creating more happy human lives.
In practice, I think we’d want to balance considerations like potential perverse incentives/blackmail, versus “how feasible is it to actually implement”, and also rely on sanity checks/monitoring/investigative reporting to understand how these markets are functioning.
Thank you both for these answers, this is helpful!
It sounds like it is useful to distinguish two possible ways of implementing a welfare market:
A farmer is paid to change the welfare of their animals from negative (it would be better if they had never existed) to positive (it is better that they get to exist).
A farmer is paid to change the welfare of their animals from negative, to less negative, but the animals still lead net-negative lives overall.
I can see how on pure consequentialist grounds the first case would be good, and avoid the problem I was asking about. Although I expect a lot of vegans who have a principled objection to animals being treated as property will object to this, if increasing quantity of farmed animals is explicitly viewed as a positive outcome of the policy. I would certainly have reservations about it.
On the other hand, the second case seems like it does carry the risk I was asking about. We should expect the quantity of animals farmed to increase in a way that might outweigh the gain in welfare per animal (whether or not it does will I think depend on complicated economics things like the slopes of supply and demand curves?)