Thanks for putting this together! I’m skeptical of putting too much weight on the conclusions (just given how much uncertainty there is), but I think this is valuable addition to the conversation on this subject.
It’s worth noting that MacAskill touched on this topic in chapter 9 of WWOTF, using neuron counts as a proxy for moral weight. He comes to a very different conclusion, which makes sense given that neuron count-based moral weights for basically all animals are much lower than the RP moral weights:
To capture the importance of differences in capacity for wellbeing, we could, as a very rough heuristic, weight animals’ interests by the number of neurons they have. The motivating thought behind weighting by neurons is that, since we know that conscious experience of pain is the result of activity in certain neurons in the brain, then it should not matter more that the neurons are divided up among four hundred chickens rather than present in one human. If we do this, then a beetle with 50,000 neurons would have very little capacity for wellbeing; honeybees, with 960,000 neurons, would count a little more; chickens, with 200 million neurons, count a lot more; and humans, with over 80 billion neurons, count the most. This gives a very different picture than looking solely at numbers of animals: by neuron count, humans outweigh all farmed animals (including farmed fish) by a factor of thirty to one. This was very surprising to me; before looking into this, I hadn’t appreciated just how great the difference in brain size is between human beings and nonhuman animals.
If, however, we allow neuron count as a rough proxy, we get the conclusion that the total weighted interests of farm land animals are fairly small compared to that of humans, though their wellbeing is decisively negative.
This does not yet resolve whether the welfare of humans and farmed animals combined is negative. Even though, in totality, farmed animals may have fewer neurons, the vast majority of farmed animals (chicken and fish) live lives full of intense suffering, which could well outweigh total human wellbeing. If the intensity of the suffering of chickens and fish is at least forty times the intensity of average human happiness, then the combined wellbeing of humans and farmed animals is negative.
Are you willing to share your underlying source code? I might be interested in adding uncertainty to the analysis.
Thanks for the kind words! I’m also skeptical of putting too much weight on the conclusions given the huge uncertainties, which I hope comes across in the post.
Re: underlying code—I’m working on a sharable version. Just sent you a DM!
Thanks for putting this together! I’m skeptical of putting too much weight on the conclusions (just given how much uncertainty there is), but I think this is valuable addition to the conversation on this subject.
It’s worth noting that MacAskill touched on this topic in chapter 9 of WWOTF, using neuron counts as a proxy for moral weight. He comes to a very different conclusion, which makes sense given that neuron count-based moral weights for basically all animals are much lower than the RP moral weights:
Are you willing to share your underlying source code? I might be interested in adding uncertainty to the analysis.
Neuron count doesn’t seem to be that good to indicate the sentience of other beings.
See the post Why Neuron Counts Shouldn’t Be Used as Proxies for Moral Weight
Thanks for the kind words! I’m also skeptical of putting too much weight on the conclusions given the huge uncertainties, which I hope comes across in the post.
Re: underlying code—I’m working on a sharable version. Just sent you a DM!