“Welfare per year” = “population (animal-years per year)”*”welfare per animal-year” = “deaths per year”*”welfare per death”. It is unclear to me whether “welfare per animal-year” varies more or less than “welfare per death”. So it is also unclear to me whether population is a better or worse proxy for welfare than deaths per year as long as both proxies cover the same life stages.
Using more appropriate units (such as total annual deaths or days of experience) reveals that highly r-selected animals might dominate moral calculus to a greater degree than a naive estimate might suggest.
On the other hand, more r-selected animals will tend to be more abundant, and have a lower moral weight? I agree with the above because I think differences in moral weight may be very small, but I also believe they may be very large.
Standing population size is usually not a reliable proxy for comparing the likely scale of harm between different highly numerous species, due to significant differences in population throughput and life-history.
“adult population size”?
For example, for identical stable populations of ants and aphids, we might expect there to be over 200x as many aphid deaths, and over 7x as many aphid days of experience.
Hi Abraham and Mal. Nice post.
“Welfare per year” = “population (animal-years per year)”*”welfare per animal-year” = “deaths per year”*”welfare per death”. It is unclear to me whether “welfare per animal-year” varies more or less than “welfare per death”. So it is also unclear to me whether population is a better or worse proxy for welfare than deaths per year as long as both proxies cover the same life stages.
On the other hand, more r-selected animals will tend to be more abundant, and have a lower moral weight? I agree with the above because I think differences in moral weight may be very small, but I also believe they may be very large.
“adult population size”?
“stable adult populations”?