While I agree that bivalves are very likely at most minimally sentient, I’d feel more comfortable with people promoting bivalve aquaculture at scale if the downside risks are clearer to me.
Do you have any sense of exactly how unlikely it is that bivalves suffer?
I found this discussion interesting. To me it seems like they feel aversion—not sure how that is any different from suffering—so it is just a question of “how much?”.
From a welfarist perspective, and under the assumption that going vegan/vegetarian isn’t an option, one challenge might be: “Should we promote grass-fed beef consumption instead?”
A very rough estimate (might be off by orders of magnitude):
I’m super uncertain if I’m comfortable with giving mussels approx. 1⁄20′000 the moral worth compared to cows. Even after reading, for example, this blog post arguing The Ethical Case for Eating Oysters and Mussels.
[Edit: If bivalves mainly substitute fish, then this challenge might be missing the issue.]
Substitution is unclear. In my experience it’s very clear that scallop is served as a main course protein in contexts where the alternative is clearly fish, or most often shrimp. So insofar that substitution occurs, we’d mainly see substitution of shrimp and fish.
However, it is not clear how much substitution of meat in fact occurs at all as supply increases. People generally seem to like eating meat and meat-like stuff. I don’t know data here but meat consumption is globally on the rise.
Do you have any sense of exactly how unlikely it is that bivalves suffer?
Brian Tomasik wrote this analysis of bivalve suffering. I think it offers some good reasons not to conclude that it’s super unlikely.
It might be that how much weight/likelihood to place on bivalve suffering is ultimately quite subjective though (e.g., I think I would place more weight on it than as expressed in the article because of different intuitions about how much different processes matter as evidence of suffering).
Nice analysis – thank you for posting!
While I agree that bivalves are very likely at most minimally sentient, I’d feel more comfortable with people promoting bivalve aquaculture at scale if the downside risks are clearer to me.
Do you have any sense of exactly how unlikely it is that bivalves suffer?
https://www.animal-ethics.org/snails-and-bivalves-a-discussion-of-possible-edge-cases-for-sentience/#:~:text=Many%20argue%20that%20because%20bivalves,bivalves%20do%20in%20fact%20swim
I found this discussion interesting. To me it seems like they feel aversion—not sure how that is any different from suffering—so it is just a question of “how much?”.
From a welfarist perspective, and under the assumption that going vegan/vegetarian isn’t an option, one challenge might be:
“Should we promote grass-fed beef consumption instead?”
A very rough estimate (might be off by orders of magnitude):
Cows have at least 400′000 kcal according to this back-of-the-envelope calculation.
A large mussel has maybe 20 kcal according to the USDA.
I’m super uncertain if I’m comfortable with giving mussels approx. 1⁄20′000 the moral worth compared to cows. Even after reading, for example, this blog post arguing The Ethical Case for Eating Oysters and Mussels.
[Edit: If bivalves mainly substitute fish, then this challenge might be missing the issue.]
Substitution is unclear. In my experience it’s very clear that scallop is served as a main course protein in contexts where the alternative is clearly fish, or most often shrimp. So insofar that substitution occurs, we’d mainly see substitution of shrimp and fish.
However, it is not clear how much substitution of meat in fact occurs at all as supply increases. People generally seem to like eating meat and meat-like stuff. I don’t know data here but meat consumption is globally on the rise.
Brian Tomasik wrote this analysis of bivalve suffering. I think it offers some good reasons not to conclude that it’s super unlikely.
It might be that how much weight/likelihood to place on bivalve suffering is ultimately quite subjective though (e.g., I think I would place more weight on it than as expressed in the article because of different intuitions about how much different processes matter as evidence of suffering).