In this post, I share some thoughts from this weekend about the scale of farmed animal suffering, compared to the expected lives lost from engineered pandemics. I make the case that animal welfare as a cause has a 100x higher scale than biorisk. Iād happily turn this in to a post if you have more youād like to add either for or against.
Scale Comparisons
Farmed Animal Suffering. I was thinking about the scale of farmed animal suffering, which is on the order of 1011 lives per year. These animals endure what might be among the worst conditions on the planet, considering only land animals. My estimate for the moral weight of the average land animal is approximately 1% to 0.1% that of a human. At first glance, this suggests that farmed animal suffering is equivalent to the annual slaughter of between 100 million and 1 billion humans, without considering the quality of their lives before death. I want to make the case that the scale of this could be 100x or a 1000x that of engineered pandemics.
Engineered Pandemics. In The Precipice, Toby Ord lists engineered pandemics as yielding a 1 in 30 extinction risk this century. Since The Precipice was published in 2020, this equates to a 1 in 30 chance over 80 years, or approximately a 1 in 2,360 risk of extinction from engineered pandemics in any given year. If that happens, 1010 human lives would be lost, resulting in an expected loss of approximately four million human lives per year.
Reasons I might be wrong
Tractability & Neglectedness. If engineered pandemic preparedness is two orders of magnitude higher in neglectedness and/āor tractability, that would outweigh the scale and make them tractable. Iād be happy to hear someone more knowledgeable give some comparisons here.
Extinction is Terrible. Human extinction might not equate to just 1011 lives lost, due to future lives lost. Further, the The Precipice only discusses extinction level pandemics, but as suggested by Rodriguez here, one in 100k people surviving might only stand a ~50% chance of further survival. I personally donāt ascribe much value to future people not existing as I subscribe more to the Person-affecting View. Under moral uncertainty, thatās relevant even if you mostly donāt agree about that view.
Collapse Facilitating Lock-in. A sufficiently large population loss could mean that in re-building civilization, a system is constructed which can centralize enough for a value lock-in. This could be in the shape of an authoritarian system oppressing everyone, or a lock-in of a system similar to the current one with an equal or greater amount of animals slaughtered annually.
Introduction
In this post, I share some thoughts from this weekend about the scale of farmed animal suffering, compared to the expected lives lost from engineered pandemics. I make the case that animal welfare as a cause has a 100x higher scale than biorisk. Iād happily turn this in to a post if you have more youād like to add either for or against.
Scale Comparisons
Farmed Animal Suffering. I was thinking about the scale of farmed animal suffering, which is on the order of 1011 lives per year. These animals endure what might be among the worst conditions on the planet, considering only land animals. My estimate for the moral weight of the average land animal is approximately 1% to 0.1% that of a human. At first glance, this suggests that farmed animal suffering is equivalent to the annual slaughter of between 100 million and 1 billion humans, without considering the quality of their lives before death. I want to make the case that the scale of this could be 100x or a 1000x that of engineered pandemics.
Engineered Pandemics. In The Precipice, Toby Ord lists engineered pandemics as yielding a 1 in 30 extinction risk this century. Since The Precipice was published in 2020, this equates to a 1 in 30 chance over 80 years, or approximately a 1 in 2,360 risk of extinction from engineered pandemics in any given year. If that happens, 1010 human lives would be lost, resulting in an expected loss of approximately four million human lives per year.
Reasons I might be wrong
Tractability & Neglectedness. If engineered pandemic preparedness is two orders of magnitude higher in neglectedness and/āor tractability, that would outweigh the scale and make them tractable. Iād be happy to hear someone more knowledgeable give some comparisons here.
Extinction is Terrible. Human extinction might not equate to just 1011 lives lost, due to future lives lost. Further, the The Precipice only discusses extinction level pandemics, but as suggested by Rodriguez here, one in 100k people surviving might only stand a ~50% chance of further survival. I personally donāt ascribe much value to future people not existing as I subscribe more to the Person-affecting View. Under moral uncertainty, thatās relevant even if you mostly donāt agree about that view.
Collapse Facilitating Lock-in. A sufficiently large population loss could mean that in re-building civilization, a system is constructed which can centralize enough for a value lock-in. This could be in the shape of an authoritarian system oppressing everyone, or a lock-in of a system similar to the current one with an equal or greater amount of animals slaughtered annually.