We could also ask how many days of one’s human life one would be willing to forgo to experience some duration of time as another species. This approach would allow us to assign cardinal numbers to the value of animal lives.
I hope I’m not being too obvious here, but I’ve seen people frequently speak of animals “mattering” X times as much as a human, say, without drawing this distinction: we’d need to be very careful to distinguish what we mean by value of life. For prioritizing which lives to save, this quote perhaps makes sense. But not if “value of animal lives” is meant to correspond to how much we should prioritize alleviating different animals’ suffering. I wouldn’t trade days of my life to experience days of a very poor person’s life, but that doesn’t mean my life is more valuable in the sense that helping me is more important. Quite the opposite: the less value there is in a human’s/animal’s life, the more imperative it is to help them (in non-life-saving ways), for reasons of diminishing returns at least.
I would strongly encourage surveys about intuitions of this sort to precisely ask about tradeoffs of experiences, rather than “value of life” (as in the Norwood and Lusk survey that you cite).
Yeah, I agree that estimating welfare (either average realized welfare or capacity for welfare) this way is a bad strategy for a number of reasons. There are going to be many confounders and the framing of the thought experiment obscures rather than clarifies the issue.
I hope I’m not being too obvious here, but I’ve seen people frequently speak of animals “mattering” X times as much as a human, say, without drawing this distinction: we’d need to be very careful to distinguish what we mean by value of life. For prioritizing which lives to save, this quote perhaps makes sense. But not if “value of animal lives” is meant to correspond to how much we should prioritize alleviating different animals’ suffering. I wouldn’t trade days of my life to experience days of a very poor person’s life, but that doesn’t mean my life is more valuable in the sense that helping me is more important. Quite the opposite: the less value there is in a human’s/animal’s life, the more imperative it is to help them (in non-life-saving ways), for reasons of diminishing returns at least.
I would strongly encourage surveys about intuitions of this sort to precisely ask about tradeoffs of experiences, rather than “value of life” (as in the Norwood and Lusk survey that you cite).
Yeah, I agree that estimating welfare (either average realized welfare or capacity for welfare) this way is a bad strategy for a number of reasons. There are going to be many confounders and the framing of the thought experiment obscures rather than clarifies the issue.