Great post, and I’m excited to see RP work on this. I have great confidence in your carefulness about this.
A concern I have with pretty much every approach to weighting welfare across species is that it seems like the correct weights may depend on the type of experience. For example, I could imagine the intensity of physical pain being very similar across species but the severity of depression from not being able to move to vary greatly.
Is there a way to allow for this within the approach you lay out here?
Thanks for your comment. Measuring and comparing welfare across species is a tremendous theoretical and practical challenge. For measuring capacity for welfare, we would want to get a rough sense of the range of physical pain and pleasure an animal can experience as well as the range of emotional pain and pleasure an animal can experience. We would also want to know the degree to which physical and emotional pain/pleasure contribute to overall welfare, and this may differ by species. (We will need to account for combination effects: among other things, “stacking” one unit of physical pain on top of one unit of emotional pain may create more or less than two units of overall suffering.) All else being equal, if two animals have the same range of possible physical pains and pleasures, but animal A has a greater range of possible emotional pains and pleasures than animal B, we would expect animal A to have a greater capacity for welfare than animal B.
One thing to keep in mind is that what ultimately matters morally is realized welfare, not capacity for welfare. In many instances, judging the effectiveness of an intervention will require looking at species-specific differences in the way welfare is realized. Two animals may have the same overall capacity for welfare, and they may be subject to the same conditions (solitary confinement, say), but species-specific differences (one is a social animal and the other is not, say) may indicate that one animal suffers much more than the other in those conditions.
Nonetheless, I do believe thinking about capacity for welfare will help increase the efficiency with which our resources are allocated across interventions, especially when applied to big-picture questions, like “What percentage of our resources should ideally go to fish or crustaceans or insects?”
Great post, and I’m excited to see RP work on this. I have great confidence in your carefulness about this.
A concern I have with pretty much every approach to weighting welfare across species is that it seems like the correct weights may depend on the type of experience. For example, I could imagine the intensity of physical pain being very similar across species but the severity of depression from not being able to move to vary greatly.
Is there a way to allow for this within the approach you lay out here?
Hi Zach,
Thanks for your comment. Measuring and comparing welfare across species is a tremendous theoretical and practical challenge. For measuring capacity for welfare, we would want to get a rough sense of the range of physical pain and pleasure an animal can experience as well as the range of emotional pain and pleasure an animal can experience. We would also want to know the degree to which physical and emotional pain/pleasure contribute to overall welfare, and this may differ by species. (We will need to account for combination effects: among other things, “stacking” one unit of physical pain on top of one unit of emotional pain may create more or less than two units of overall suffering.) All else being equal, if two animals have the same range of possible physical pains and pleasures, but animal A has a greater range of possible emotional pains and pleasures than animal B, we would expect animal A to have a greater capacity for welfare than animal B.
One thing to keep in mind is that what ultimately matters morally is realized welfare, not capacity for welfare. In many instances, judging the effectiveness of an intervention will require looking at species-specific differences in the way welfare is realized. Two animals may have the same overall capacity for welfare, and they may be subject to the same conditions (solitary confinement, say), but species-specific differences (one is a social animal and the other is not, say) may indicate that one animal suffers much more than the other in those conditions.
Nonetheless, I do believe thinking about capacity for welfare will help increase the efficiency with which our resources are allocated across interventions, especially when applied to big-picture questions, like “What percentage of our resources should ideally go to fish or crustaceans or insects?”