Great to see this being looked at. Do you have any examples of this method in use? I’d be interested to see various animals and situations ranked using this method—as it could provide a baseline to quantify the benefits of various interventions.
I also attempted to create my own method of comparing animal suffering while I was calculating the value of going vegetarian. I’ll provide a quick summary here, and would love to hear if anyone else has tried something similar.
The approach was to create an internally consistent model based upon my naive intuitions and what data I could find. I spent a while tuning the model so that various trade-offs would make sense and didn’t lead to incoherent preferences. It is super rough, but was a first step in my self-examination of ethics.
I created a scale of the value of [human/animal] experience from torture (-1000) to self-actualization (+5) with neutral at 0.
I guessed where various animal experiences fell on the scale, averaged over a lifetime. This is a very weak part of the model—and where Joey’s method could really come in handy.
I then multiplied the experience by the lifespan of the animal (as a percentage of human life).
Finally, I added a ‘cognitive/subjectivity’ multiplier based on the animal’s intelligence. This is contentious, but helps so I don’t value the long-lived cicada (insect) the same as a human. This follows from other ethical considerations in my model, but some people prefer to remove this step.
The output of this rough model was to value various animal lives as a percentage of human lives—a more salient/comparable measure for me.
This model was built over about 5 hours and is still updating as I have more conversations around animal suffering. Would love to hear if anyone else tried a different strategy!
Examples coming soon. We are currently aiming to have ~15 done and published by 10/7/18. Our full goal of this project is to create a consistent systematic baseline to quantify the benefits of various interventions which would then allows us to compare specific charity ideas and rank what might be the best few to found within the animal movement.
I tried to do something similar when deciding where to donate. The most significant difference was step 4. I used neuron count as a multiplier. For example, according to http://reflectivedisequilibrium.blogspot.com/2013/09/how-is-brain-mass-distributed-among.html, cows on average have 13.6 times more neurons than chickens. So in my model, one minute of cow’s life was 13.6 times more important than one minute of chicken’s life of comparable quality. I’ve seen some people comparing the square root of neuron count instead. http://ethical.diet/ makes it easy to make these kinds of comparisons for farm animals.
Great to see this being looked at. Do you have any examples of this method in use? I’d be interested to see various animals and situations ranked using this method—as it could provide a baseline to quantify the benefits of various interventions.
I also attempted to create my own method of comparing animal suffering while I was calculating the value of going vegetarian. I’ll provide a quick summary here, and would love to hear if anyone else has tried something similar.
The approach was to create an internally consistent model based upon my naive intuitions and what data I could find. I spent a while tuning the model so that various trade-offs would make sense and didn’t lead to incoherent preferences. It is super rough, but was a first step in my self-examination of ethics.
I created a scale of the value of [human/animal] experience from torture (-1000) to self-actualization (+5) with neutral at 0.
I guessed where various animal experiences fell on the scale, averaged over a lifetime. This is a very weak part of the model—and where Joey’s method could really come in handy.
I then multiplied the experience by the lifespan of the animal (as a percentage of human life).
Finally, I added a ‘cognitive/subjectivity’ multiplier based on the animal’s intelligence. This is contentious, but helps so I don’t value the long-lived cicada (insect) the same as a human. This follows from other ethical considerations in my model, but some people prefer to remove this step.
The output of this rough model was to value various animal lives as a percentage of human lives—a more salient/comparable measure for me.
This model was built over about 5 hours and is still updating as I have more conversations around animal suffering. Would love to hear if anyone else tried a different strategy!
Examples coming soon. We are currently aiming to have ~15 done and published by 10/7/18. Our full goal of this project is to create a consistent systematic baseline to quantify the benefits of various interventions which would then allows us to compare specific charity ideas and rank what might be the best few to found within the animal movement.
http://everydayutilitarian.com/essays/how-much-suffering-is-in-the-standard-american-diet/ is the closest thing to calculating the value of going vegetarian that I know.
Please link to the examples here when they are finished, thanks!
We had applied this system to 15 different animals/breeds and recently posted the summary of our research here.
I tried to do something similar when deciding where to donate. The most significant difference was step 4. I used neuron count as a multiplier. For example, according to http://reflectivedisequilibrium.blogspot.com/2013/09/how-is-brain-mass-distributed-among.html, cows on average have 13.6 times more neurons than chickens. So in my model, one minute of cow’s life was 13.6 times more important than one minute of chicken’s life of comparable quality. I’ve seen some people comparing the square root of neuron count instead. http://ethical.diet/ makes it easy to make these kinds of comparisons for farm animals.