This is interesting, but I think a debate wouldn’t be that informative or useful, and we should just support object-level research on wild animal lives like https://welfarefootprint.org/, but with positive welfare states. Break up animals into groups by moral weight/welfare range and sentience probability classes, and then pick some representatives for the total population in each class to study. Then we can aggregate the results.
A debate on intensity tradeoffs might be useful, though, because it could be that wild animals spend more time experiencing pleasure than suffering, but their average suffering is more intense than their average pleasure.
This is interesting, but I think a debate wouldn’t be that informative or useful, and we should just support object-level research on wild animal lives like https://welfarefootprint.org/, but with positive welfare states. Break up animals into groups by moral weight/welfare range and sentience probability classes, and then pick some representatives for the total population in each class to study. Then we can aggregate the results.
A debate on intensity tradeoffs might be useful, though, because it could be that wild animals spend more time experiencing pleasure than suffering, but their average suffering is more intense than their average pleasure.