Iâve been thinking about this approach since last year, and havenât had time to prioritize it to do detailed work on a framework, but I have some initial thoughts. I think youâre right that, if youâre comfortable with that sort of cluelessness, this kind of thing is relatively safe to do (although as @Michael St Jules đ¸ notes, Iâd also want to do some proper population modeling in a highly studied ecosystem to get some grounding for the idea).
But I think you can actually do better than focusing on only the very worst diseases depending on population parameters. For example, in populations that are top-down regulated (i.e., the population size is held under the carrying capacity of the resource by an external factor), you would not expect increases in starvation as a result of removing a disease (caveat: if that disease *is* the top down regulator, than you would have a problemâwhich unfortunately is the case in many CWD contexts). So then the disease doesnât need to be worse than both starvation and predation, say, but rather just worse than predation. The population size would equilibriate somewhere a bit higher, but the top-down regulation creates a buffer between population size and resource carrying capacity, and at high enough predation pressures you might reasonably expect almost no population increase.
So I think in an ideal case, youâd identify (1) a high suffering disease that (2) affects a population primarily controlled by intense predation pressure in (3) a predator that mainly eats the target population (so the increases in predator population sizes donât affect other animals, who arenât having a disease treated and for whom this would just represent an increase in suffering).
Of course, if you have a population with high predation pressure, the target population probably dies very quickly after getting the disease, so the suffering caused by the disease might not be very long in duration. But if its a really awful disease that could still be a lot of suffering.
I donât think anyoneâs done a scan of the literature for diseases with these properties, and I doubt youâd easily find a perfect caseâmost populations are a mixture of top-down and bottom-up regulation. But I also think that probably my few hours of playing around with these ideas on the side of my other work are not likely to be the final word on the question :) so Iâm optimistic someone spending a lot more time with this could identify other âecological profilesâ of diseases that make them âsaferâ in indirect effects terms to work on than others (I think thereâs some things to say about bottom-up regulated populations as well, for exampleâprobably there you would want a disease that is a lot worse than starvation).
Hey Mal, this is a great point, I completely agree. The disease doesnât have to be worse than all possible ways of dying if you know that the counterfactual is likely to be a particular mid-intensity harm. Although the welfare gains should still be significant in order to justify the ecological risks.
Iâve been thinking about this approach since last year, and havenât had time to prioritize it to do detailed work on a framework, but I have some initial thoughts. I think youâre right that, if youâre comfortable with that sort of cluelessness, this kind of thing is relatively safe to do (although as @Michael St Jules đ¸ notes, Iâd also want to do some proper population modeling in a highly studied ecosystem to get some grounding for the idea).
But I think you can actually do better than focusing on only the very worst diseases depending on population parameters. For example, in populations that are top-down regulated (i.e., the population size is held under the carrying capacity of the resource by an external factor), you would not expect increases in starvation as a result of removing a disease (caveat: if that disease *is* the top down regulator, than you would have a problemâwhich unfortunately is the case in many CWD contexts). So then the disease doesnât need to be worse than both starvation and predation, say, but rather just worse than predation. The population size would equilibriate somewhere a bit higher, but the top-down regulation creates a buffer between population size and resource carrying capacity, and at high enough predation pressures you might reasonably expect almost no population increase.
So I think in an ideal case, youâd identify (1) a high suffering disease that (2) affects a population primarily controlled by intense predation pressure in (3) a predator that mainly eats the target population (so the increases in predator population sizes donât affect other animals, who arenât having a disease treated and for whom this would just represent an increase in suffering).
Of course, if you have a population with high predation pressure, the target population probably dies very quickly after getting the disease, so the suffering caused by the disease might not be very long in duration. But if its a really awful disease that could still be a lot of suffering.
I donât think anyoneâs done a scan of the literature for diseases with these properties, and I doubt youâd easily find a perfect caseâmost populations are a mixture of top-down and bottom-up regulation. But I also think that probably my few hours of playing around with these ideas on the side of my other work are not likely to be the final word on the question :) so Iâm optimistic someone spending a lot more time with this could identify other âecological profilesâ of diseases that make them âsaferâ in indirect effects terms to work on than others (I think thereâs some things to say about bottom-up regulated populations as well, for exampleâprobably there you would want a disease that is a lot worse than starvation).
Hey Mal, this is a great point, I completely agree. The disease doesnât have to be worse than all possible ways of dying if you know that the counterfactual is likely to be a particular mid-intensity harm. Although the welfare gains should still be significant in order to justify the ecological risks.