I’m primarily a neartrmist global health person who wholeheartedly supports animal advocacy. At my life stage with my competitive advantage I don’t think it would make sense to change causes even if working on it was potentially 1000x more impactful.
I think that animal suffering from factory farming could easily be 1000x or even 10,000x more important than human suffering as you say, but it could also be 100x less. Although we are closer to answering the classic “how many suffering chickens equals a suffering human” question, I think EAs sometimes underrate the enormous uncertainty in “how bad” animal suffering is compared with humans and that EA research can lean towards overweighting animal suffering (although I would say that).
I think your suffering questions are important, but I doubt many would disagree that factory farmed chickens suffer badly in all the ways you stated. The moral weight is where the greater uncertainty lies.
To compare with humans, I think the equation is crudely
suffering x moral weight -and judging the moral weight is a far greater difficulty.
I think your argument is strong
To answer your question how to compare, I think Rethink Priorities research on moral weights is excellent—in depth, and well communicated even though I don’t agree with all of it.
https://rethinkpriorities.org/publications/category/Moral+Weight
I’m primarily a neartrmist global health person who wholeheartedly supports animal advocacy. At my life stage with my competitive advantage I don’t think it would make sense to change causes even if working on it was potentially 1000x more impactful.
I think that animal suffering from factory farming could easily be 1000x or even 10,000x more important than human suffering as you say, but it could also be 100x less. Although we are closer to answering the classic “how many suffering chickens equals a suffering human” question, I think EAs sometimes underrate the enormous uncertainty in “how bad” animal suffering is compared with humans and that EA research can lean towards overweighting animal suffering (although I would say that).
I think your suffering questions are important, but I doubt many would disagree that factory farmed chickens suffer badly in all the ways you stated. The moral weight is where the greater uncertainty lies.
To compare with humans, I think the equation is crudely
suffering x moral weight -and judging the moral weight is a far greater difficulty.