There are two factors mixed up here:@kyle_fish writes about an (objective) amount of animal welfare. The concept @Jeff Kaufman refers to instead includes the weightwe humans put on that animals’ welfare. For a meaningful conversation about the topic, we should not mix these two up.*
Let’s briefly assume a || world with humans2: just like us, but they simply never cared about animals at all (weight = 0). Concluding: “We thus have no welfare problem” is the logical conclusion for humans2 indeed, but it would not suffice to inform a genetically mutated human2x who happened to have developed care about animal welfare—or who simply happened to be curious about absolute welfare in his universe.
In the same vein: There’s no strict need to account for usual human’s care when analyzing whether, “Net global welfare may be negative” (title!). On the contrary, it would lead to an unnecessary bias, that just comes on top of the analysis’ necessarily huge uncertainty (that the author does not fail to emphasize, although as others comment, it could deserve even stronger emphasis).
There are two factors mixed up here: @kyle_fish writes about an (objective) amount of animal welfare. The concept @Jeff Kaufman refers to instead includes the weight we humans put on that animals’ welfare. For a meaningful conversation about the topic, we should not mix these two up.*
Let’s briefly assume a || world with humans2: just like us, but they simply never cared about animals at all (weight = 0). Concluding: “We thus have no welfare problem” is the logical conclusion for humans2 indeed, but it would not suffice to inform a genetically mutated human2x who happened to have developed care about animal welfare—or who simply happened to be curious about absolute welfare in his universe.
In the same vein: There’s no strict need to account for usual human’s care when analyzing whether, “Net global welfare may be negative” (title!). On the contrary, it would lead to an unnecessary bias, that just comes on top of the analysis’ necessarily huge uncertainty (that the author does not fail to emphasize, although as others comment, it could deserve even stronger emphasis).