Fantastic questions, Lizka! And these images are great. I need to get much better at (literally) illustrating my thinking. I very much appreciate your taking the time!
Here are some replies:
Replacing an M with an N. This is a great observation. Of course, there may not be many real-life cases with the structure you’re describing. However, one possibility is in animal research. Many people think that you ought to use “simpler” animals over “more complex” animals for research purposes—e.g., you ought to experiment on fruit flies over pigs. Suppose that fruit flies have smaller welfare ranges than pigs and that both have symmetrical welfare ranges. Then, if you’re going to do awful things to one or the other, such that each would be at the bottom of their respective welfare range, then it would follow that it’s better to experiment on fruit flies.
Assessing the neutral point. You’re right that this is important. It’s also really hard. However, we’re trying to tackle this problem now. Our strategy is multi-pronged, identifying various lines of evidence that might be relevant. For instance, we’re looking at the Welfare Footprint Data and trying to figure out what it might imply about whether layer hens have net negative lives. We’re looking at when vets recommend euthanasia for dogs and cats and applying those standards to farmed animals. We’re looking at tradeoff thought experiments and some of the survey data they’ve generated. And so on. Early days, but we hope to have something on the Forum about this over the summer.
Symmetry vs. asymmetry. This is another hard problem. In brief, though, we take symmetry to be the default simply because of our uncertainty. Ultimately, it’s a really hard empirical question that requires time we didn’t have. (Anyone want to fund more work on this!?) As we say in the post, though, it’s a relatively minor issue compared to lots of others. Some people probably think that we’re orders of magnitude off in our estimates, whereas symmetry vs. asymmetry will make, at most, a 2x difference to the amount of welfare at stake. That isn’t nothing, but it probably won’t swing the analysis.
The “caged vs. cage-free chicken / carp vs. salmon” examples. This is a great question. We’ve done a lot on this, though none of it’s publicly available yet. Basically, though, you’re correct about the information you’d want. Of course, as your note indicates, we don’t care about natural lifespan; we care about time to slaughter. And while it’s very difficult to know where an animal is in its welfare range, we don’t think it’s in principle inestimable. Basically, if you think that caged hens are living about the worst life a chicken can live, you say that they’re at the bottom end of their welfare range. And if you think cage-free hens have net negative lives, but they’re only about half as badly off as they could be, then can infer that you’re getting a 50% gain relative to chickens’ negative welfare range in the switch from caged to cage-free. And so on. This is all imperfect, but at least it provides a coherent methodology for making these assessments. Moreover, it’s a methodology that forces us to be explicit about disagreements re: the neutral point and the relative welfare levels of animals in different systems, which I regard as a good thing.
Fantastic questions, Lizka! And these images are great. I need to get much better at (literally) illustrating my thinking. I very much appreciate your taking the time!
Here are some replies:
Replacing an M with an N. This is a great observation. Of course, there may not be many real-life cases with the structure you’re describing. However, one possibility is in animal research. Many people think that you ought to use “simpler” animals over “more complex” animals for research purposes—e.g., you ought to experiment on fruit flies over pigs. Suppose that fruit flies have smaller welfare ranges than pigs and that both have symmetrical welfare ranges. Then, if you’re going to do awful things to one or the other, such that each would be at the bottom of their respective welfare range, then it would follow that it’s better to experiment on fruit flies.
Assessing the neutral point. You’re right that this is important. It’s also really hard. However, we’re trying to tackle this problem now. Our strategy is multi-pronged, identifying various lines of evidence that might be relevant. For instance, we’re looking at the Welfare Footprint Data and trying to figure out what it might imply about whether layer hens have net negative lives. We’re looking at when vets recommend euthanasia for dogs and cats and applying those standards to farmed animals. We’re looking at tradeoff thought experiments and some of the survey data they’ve generated. And so on. Early days, but we hope to have something on the Forum about this over the summer.
Symmetry vs. asymmetry. This is another hard problem. In brief, though, we take symmetry to be the default simply because of our uncertainty. Ultimately, it’s a really hard empirical question that requires time we didn’t have. (Anyone want to fund more work on this!?) As we say in the post, though, it’s a relatively minor issue compared to lots of others. Some people probably think that we’re orders of magnitude off in our estimates, whereas symmetry vs. asymmetry will make, at most, a 2x difference to the amount of welfare at stake. That isn’t nothing, but it probably won’t swing the analysis.
The “caged vs. cage-free chicken / carp vs. salmon” examples. This is a great question. We’ve done a lot on this, though none of it’s publicly available yet. Basically, though, you’re correct about the information you’d want. Of course, as your note indicates, we don’t care about natural lifespan; we care about time to slaughter. And while it’s very difficult to know where an animal is in its welfare range, we don’t think it’s in principle inestimable. Basically, if you think that caged hens are living about the worst life a chicken can live, you say that they’re at the bottom end of their welfare range. And if you think cage-free hens have net negative lives, but they’re only about half as badly off as they could be, then can infer that you’re getting a 50% gain relative to chickens’ negative welfare range in the switch from caged to cage-free. And so on. This is all imperfect, but at least it provides a coherent methodology for making these assessments. Moreover, it’s a methodology that forces us to be explicit about disagreements re: the neutral point and the relative welfare levels of animals in different systems, which I regard as a good thing.