While I agree that net global welfare may be negative and declining, in light of the reasoning and evidence presented here, I think you could and should have claimed something like this: “net global welfare may be negative and declining, but it may also be positive and increasing, and really we have no idea which it is—any assessment of this type of is enormously speculative and uncertain”.
As I read the post, the two expressions that popped into my head were “if it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing with made-up numbers” and “if you saw how the sausage is made …”.
The problem here is that all of the numbers for ‘animal welfare capacity’ and ‘welfare percentages’ are essentially—and unfortunately—made up. You cite Rethink Priorities for the former, and Charity Entrepreneurship for the latter, and express some scepticism, but then more or less take them at face value. You don’t explain how those people came up with numbers and whether they should be trusted. I don’t think I am disparaging the good folk at either organisation—and I am certainly not trying to! - because you asked them about this, I think they would freely say “look, we don’t really know how to do this. We have intuitions about this, of course, but we’re not sure if there’s any good evidenced-based way to come up with these numbers”;* indeed, that is, in effect, the conclusion Rethink Priorities stated in the write-up of their recent workshop (see my comment on that too). Hence, such numbers should not be taken with a mere pinch of salt, but with a bucketload.
You don’t account for uncertainty here (you used point estimates), and I appreciate that is extra hassle, but I think the uncertainty here is the story. If you were to use upper and lower subjective bounds for e.g. “how unhappy are chickens compared to how happy humans are?”, they would be very large. They must be very large because, as noted, we don’t even know what factual, objective evidence we would use to narrow them down, so we have nothing to constrain the bounds of what’s plausible. But given how large they would be, we’d end up with the conclusion that we really don’t know whether global welfare is negative or positive.
* People are often tempted to say that we could look at objective measures, like neuron counts, for interspecies comparison. But this merely kicks the can down the road. How do we know what the relationship is between neuron counts and levels of pleasure and pain? We don’t. We have intuitions, yes, but what evidence could we point to to settle the question? I do not know.
There’s compellingevidence that life has gotten better for humans recently
I don’t think that is compelling evidence. Neither Pinker nor Karnosfky look at averages of self-reported happiness or life satisfaction, which would be the most relevant and comparable evidence, given your assumptions. According to the so-called Easterlin Paradox average subjective wellbeing has not been going up over the past few decades and won’t with further economic growth. There have been years of debates over this (I confess I got sucked in, once) but, either way, there is not a consensus among happiness researchers that there is compelling evidence life has gotten better (at least as far as happiness is concerned).
I strongly agree with your main point on uncertainty, and I’ll defer to you on the (lack of) consensus among happiness researchers on the question of whether or not life is getting better for humans given their paradigm.
Yup, I’d be inclined to agree it’s easier to ground the idea life is getting better for humans on objective measures. The is author’s comparison is made in terms of happiness though:
This work draws heavily on the Moral Weight Project from Rethink Priorities and relies on the same assumptions: utilitarianism, hedonism, valence symmetry, unitarianism, use of proxies for hedonic potential, and more
I’m actually not sure how I’d think about the animal side of things on the capabilities approach. Presumably, factory farming looks pretty bad on that, so there are increasingly many animals with low/negative capability lives, so unclear how this works out on a global level.
Fair. I struggle with how to incorporate animals into the capabilities approach, and while I appreciate Martha Nussbaum turning her attention here I was also wary of list-based approaches so it doesn’t help me too much.
While I agree that net global welfare may be negative and declining, in light of the reasoning and evidence presented here, I think you could and should have claimed something like this: “net global welfare may be negative and declining, but it may also be positive and increasing, and really we have no idea which it is—any assessment of this type of is enormously speculative and uncertain”.
As I read the post, the two expressions that popped into my head were “if it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing with made-up numbers” and “if you saw how the sausage is made …”.
The problem here is that all of the numbers for ‘animal welfare capacity’ and ‘welfare percentages’ are essentially—and unfortunately—made up. You cite Rethink Priorities for the former, and Charity Entrepreneurship for the latter, and express some scepticism, but then more or less take them at face value. You don’t explain how those people came up with numbers and whether they should be trusted. I don’t think I am disparaging the good folk at either organisation—and I am certainly not trying to! - because you asked them about this, I think they would freely say “look, we don’t really know how to do this. We have intuitions about this, of course, but we’re not sure if there’s any good evidenced-based way to come up with these numbers”;* indeed, that is, in effect, the conclusion Rethink Priorities stated in the write-up of their recent workshop (see my comment on that too). Hence, such numbers should not be taken with a mere pinch of salt, but with a bucketload.
You don’t account for uncertainty here (you used point estimates), and I appreciate that is extra hassle, but I think the uncertainty here is the story. If you were to use upper and lower subjective bounds for e.g. “how unhappy are chickens compared to how happy humans are?”, they would be very large. They must be very large because, as noted, we don’t even know what factual, objective evidence we would use to narrow them down, so we have nothing to constrain the bounds of what’s plausible. But given how large they would be, we’d end up with the conclusion that we really don’t know whether global welfare is negative or positive.
* People are often tempted to say that we could look at objective measures, like neuron counts, for interspecies comparison. But this merely kicks the can down the road. How do we know what the relationship is between neuron counts and levels of pleasure and pain? We don’t. We have intuitions, yes, but what evidence could we point to to settle the question? I do not know.
This is a minor comment but you say
I don’t think that is compelling evidence. Neither Pinker nor Karnosfky look at averages of self-reported happiness or life satisfaction, which would be the most relevant and comparable evidence, given your assumptions. According to the so-called Easterlin Paradox average subjective wellbeing has not been going up over the past few decades and won’t with further economic growth. There have been years of debates over this (I confess I got sucked in, once) but, either way, there is not a consensus among happiness researchers that there is compelling evidence life has gotten better (at least as far as happiness is concerned).
I strongly agree with your main point on uncertainty, and I’ll defer to you on the (lack of) consensus among happiness researchers on the question of whether or not life is getting better for humans given their paradigm.
However, I think one can easily ground out the statement “There’s compelling evidence that life has gotten better for humans recently” in ways that do not involve subjective wellbeing and if one does so then the statement is quite defensible.
Yup, I’d be inclined to agree it’s easier to ground the idea life is getting better for humans on objective measures. The is author’s comparison is made in terms of happiness though:
I’m actually not sure how I’d think about the animal side of things on the capabilities approach. Presumably, factory farming looks pretty bad on that, so there are increasingly many animals with low/negative capability lives, so unclear how this works out on a global level.
Fair. I struggle with how to incorporate animals into the capabilities approach, and while I appreciate Martha Nussbaum turning her attention here I was also wary of list-based approaches so it doesn’t help me too much.