One note is that I haven’t really seen anyone doing welfare biology / wild animal welfare science themselves make these arguments—they’ve mostly been discussed in philosophy/econ papers on the topic. Interestingly, the scientists in the space seems to put much less weight on things like the Evening Out argument you describe, and generally seem to view welfare as just much more contingent on species/specific life-history factors that are hard to make abstracted claims about.
Yeah, that makes sense and was also my (less informed) impression. I’ve said so in the post:
As others[2] have also pointed out, I think we’d get the best sense of net wild animal welfare not from abstract arguments but by studying individual animals up close. I don’t think anyone who works on these topics really disagrees (my post is directed more towards non-experts than experts). Still, I have seen versions of the Evening Out Argument come up here and there in discussions, and I got the impression that some people [[in EA]] put a lot more weight on these sorts of considerations than I would.
I think it’s a typical EA thing, having too high of a regard for specific types of arguments (especially when the empirical work is being done in places).
(But then my also somewhat abstract/philosophical counterarguments should at least land well with an EA target audience! :))
Oh yeah! Sorry, missed that. But to be clear, I definitely agree that this was an important point to put out there and am glad you did! :) Thanks for writing it.
Thanks for writing this up!
One note is that I haven’t really seen anyone doing welfare biology / wild animal welfare science themselves make these arguments—they’ve mostly been discussed in philosophy/econ papers on the topic. Interestingly, the scientists in the space seems to put much less weight on things like the Evening Out argument you describe, and generally seem to view welfare as just much more contingent on species/specific life-history factors that are hard to make abstracted claims about.
Yeah, that makes sense and was also my (less informed) impression. I’ve said so in the post:
I think it’s a typical EA thing, having too high of a regard for specific types of arguments (especially when the empirical work is being done in places).
(But then my also somewhat abstract/philosophical counterarguments should at least land well with an EA target audience! :))
Oh yeah! Sorry, missed that. But to be clear, I definitely agree that this was an important point to put out there and am glad you did! :) Thanks for writing it.