I’d be interested in hearing more of why you believe global health beats animal welfare on your views. It sounds like it’s about placing a lot of value on people’s desires to live. How are you making comparisons of desire strength in general between individuals, including a) between humans and other animals, and b) between different desires, especially the desire to live and other desires?
Personally, I think there’s a decent case for nonhuman animals mattering substantially in expectation on non-hedonic views, including desire and preference views:
I think it’s not too unlikely that nonhuman animals have access to whatever general non-hedonic values you care about, e.g. chickens probably have (conscious) desires and preferences, and there’s a decent chance shrimp and insects do, too, and
if they do have access to them, it’s not too unlikely that
interpersonal comparisons aren’t possible for those non-hedonic values, between species and maybe even just between humans, anyway (more here and here), so
we can’t particularly justify favouring humans or justify favouring nonhumans, and so we just aim for something like Pareto efficiency, across species or even across all individuals, or
we normalize welfare ranges or capacities for welfare based on their statistical properties, e.g. variance or range, which I’d guess favours animal welfare, because
it will treat all individuals — humans and other animals — as if they have similar welfare ranges or capacities for welfare or individual value at stake, and
far greater numbers of life-years and individuals are helped per $ with animal welfare interventions.
I’d be interested in hearing more of why you believe global health beats animal welfare on your views. It sounds like it’s about placing a lot of value on people’s desires to live. How are you making comparisons of desire strength in general between individuals, including a) between humans and other animals, and b) between different desires, especially the desire to live and other desires?
Personally, I think there’s a decent case for nonhuman animals mattering substantially in expectation on non-hedonic views, including desire and preference views:
I think it’s not too unlikely that nonhuman animals have access to whatever general non-hedonic values you care about, e.g. chickens probably have (conscious) desires and preferences, and there’s a decent chance shrimp and insects do, too, and
if they do have access to them, it’s not too unlikely that
their importance reaches heights in nonhumans that are at least a modest fraction of what they do in humans, e.g. by measuring their strength using measures of attention or effects on attention or human-based units, or
interpersonal comparisons aren’t possible for those non-hedonic values, between species and maybe even just between humans, anyway (more here and here), so
we can’t particularly justify favouring humans or justify favouring nonhumans, and so we just aim for something like Pareto efficiency, across species or even across all individuals, or
we normalize welfare ranges or capacities for welfare based on their statistical properties, e.g. variance or range, which I’d guess favours animal welfare, because
it will treat all individuals — humans and other animals — as if they have similar welfare ranges or capacities for welfare or individual value at stake, and
far greater numbers of life-years and individuals are helped per $ with animal welfare interventions.
I also discuss this and other views, including rights-based theories, contractualism, virtue ethics and special obligations, in this section of the piece of mine that you cited.