Is there an accessible summary anywhere of the research underlying this shift in viewpoint?
I don’t think there has been a summary, but that sounds like a good thing to write. But to quickly summarize things that are probably most informing this:
I’m less confident in negative utilitarianism. I was never that confident in it, and feel much less so now. I don’t think this is due to novel research, but just my views changing upon reflecting on my own life. I still broadly probably have an asymmetric view of welfare, but am more sympathetic to weighing positive experiences to some degree (or maybe have just become a moral particularist). I also think if I am less confident in my ethics (which them changing over time indicates I ought to be), then taking reversible actions robust under a variety of moral frameworks that seem plausibly good seems like a better approach.
I feel a lot less confident that I know how long most animals’ subjective experiences last, in part due to research like Jason Schukraft on the subjective experience of time. I think the best argument that most animal lives are net-negative is something like “most animals die really young before they accumulate any positive welfare, so the painfulness of their death outweighs basically everything else.” This seems less true if their experiences are subjectively longer than they appear. I also have realized that I have a possibly bad intuition that 30 years of good experiences + 10 years of suffering is better than 3 minutes of good experiences and 1 minute of suffering, partially informing this.
I think learning more about specific animals has made me a lot less confident that we can broadly say things like “r-selectors mostly have bad lives.”
Would you say this is a general shift in opinion in the WAW field as a whole?
When I started working in wild animal welfare, basically no one with a bio/ecology background worked in the space. Now many do. Probably many of those people accurately believe that most things we wrote / argued historically were dramatic oversimplifications (because they definitely were). I’m not sure if opinion is shifting, but there is a lot more actual expertise now, and I’d guess that many of those new experts have more accurate views of animals’ lives, which I believe ought to incline one to be a least a bit skeptical of some claims made early in the space.
I don’t think there has been a summary, but that sounds like a good thing to write. But to quickly summarize things that are probably most informing this:
I’m less confident in negative utilitarianism. I was never that confident in it, and feel much less so now. I don’t think this is due to novel research, but just my views changing upon reflecting on my own life. I still broadly probably have an asymmetric view of welfare, but am more sympathetic to weighing positive experiences to some degree (or maybe have just become a moral particularist). I also think if I am less confident in my ethics (which them changing over time indicates I ought to be), then taking reversible actions robust under a variety of moral frameworks that seem plausibly good seems like a better approach.
I feel a lot less confident that I know how long most animals’ subjective experiences last, in part due to research like Jason Schukraft on the subjective experience of time. I think the best argument that most animal lives are net-negative is something like “most animals die really young before they accumulate any positive welfare, so the painfulness of their death outweighs basically everything else.” This seems less true if their experiences are subjectively longer than they appear. I also have realized that I have a possibly bad intuition that 30 years of good experiences + 10 years of suffering is better than 3 minutes of good experiences and 1 minute of suffering, partially informing this.
I think learning more about specific animals has made me a lot less confident that we can broadly say things like “r-selectors mostly have bad lives.”
When I started working in wild animal welfare, basically no one with a bio/ecology background worked in the space. Now many do. Probably many of those people accurately believe that most things we wrote / argued historically were dramatic oversimplifications (because they definitely were). I’m not sure if opinion is shifting, but there is a lot more actual expertise now, and I’d guess that many of those new experts have more accurate views of animals’ lives, which I believe ought to incline one to be a least a bit skeptical of some claims made early in the space.