This seems like a promising approach to comparing hedonic wellbeing across species of nonhuman animals. Comparing human with nonhuman wellbeing is also important for prioritising interventions, and there doesn’t seem to be a good way of doing this at the moment. Do you think this could be part of a solution?
Sadly AWMs only really give a relative measure of welfare against a comparable genetic background: you can use them to say population A is ageing faster than population B and therefore has worse cumulative welfare, but not (at least currently) to obtain an absolute welfare measure for either population. That makes it difficult to see how they could be used to compare welfare between different species, including humans.
This seems like a promising approach to comparing hedonic wellbeing across species of nonhuman animals. Comparing human with nonhuman wellbeing is also important for prioritising interventions, and there doesn’t seem to be a good way of doing this at the moment. Do you think this could be part of a solution?
Sadly AWMs only really give a relative measure of welfare against a comparable genetic background: you can use them to say population A is ageing faster than population B and therefore has worse cumulative welfare, but not (at least currently) to obtain an absolute welfare measure for either population. That makes it difficult to see how they could be used to compare welfare between different species, including humans.