Sorry for being this blunt, but EA is about using evidence and reason to identify the most effective ways to help others. I can’t possibly see how operating on a vague guess is on par with that.
This criticism is independent of the fact that I still claim a “negative life” is not a concept we should incorporate into moral theories, and that we definitely shouldn’t aim to just cull all animals whose lives we somehow think are negative.
My sense is that most people working on wild animal welfare would guess soil animals have negative lives. In addition, Karolina Sarek, Joey Savoie, and David Moss estimated in 2018, based on a weighted factor model, that wild bugs have a welfare per animal-year equal to −42 % of that of fully happy wild bugs. In my last post about soil animals, I assumed −25 %, which is less negative than they supposed.
Sorry for being this blunt, but EA is about using evidence and reason to identify the most effective ways to help others. I can’t possibly see how operating on a vague guess is on par with that.
This criticism is independent of the fact that I still claim a “negative life” is not a concept we should incorporate into moral theories, and that we definitely shouldn’t aim to just cull all animals whose lives we somehow think are negative.
My sense is that most people working on wild animal welfare would guess soil animals have negative lives. In addition, Karolina Sarek, Joey Savoie, and David Moss estimated in 2018, based on a weighted factor model, that wild bugs have a welfare per animal-year equal to −42 % of that of fully happy wild bugs. In my last post about soil animals, I assumed −25 %, which is less negative than they supposed.