What I meant was that I worry about the type of thinking that allows for serious harm if it increases net welfare, e.g. disregarding rights violations so long as they lead to the greatest total good.
I worry about that too in some sense. On the other hand, I would not consider “serious harm” donating to organisations working on invertebrate welfare instead of ones working to help farmed vertebrates or humans. In addition, I wonder whether donating to organisations working on invertebrate welfare is better than to ones working on chicken welfare reforms from rights-based perspectives too. I estimate broiler welfare and cage-free campaigns decrease 1.95 M and 452 k arthropod-years per $, thus violating the right to life of lots of animals.
There are just so many insects in the world that I think it would be hard to improve their welfare on a large scale without some level of societal investment.
Rosenberg (2023) “found that there are ≈1 × 10^19 (twofold uncertainty range) soil arthropods on Earth, ≈95% of which are soil mites and springtails”. So looking into a few representative species of mites and springtails might be enough to have a good picture of the welfare of wild terrestrial arthropods.
Thanks for the follow-up, Samuel!
I worry about that too in some sense. On the other hand, I would not consider “serious harm” donating to organisations working on invertebrate welfare instead of ones working to help farmed vertebrates or humans. In addition, I wonder whether donating to organisations working on invertebrate welfare is better than to ones working on chicken welfare reforms from rights-based perspectives too. I estimate broiler welfare and cage-free campaigns decrease 1.95 M and 452 k arthropod-years per $, thus violating the right to life of lots of animals.
Rosenberg (2023) “found that there are ≈1 × 10^19 (twofold uncertainty range) soil arthropods on Earth, ≈95% of which are soil mites and springtails”. So looking into a few representative species of mites and springtails might be enough to have a good picture of the welfare of wild terrestrial arthropods.
Thanks for the support, @Samuel Mazzarella 🔸!