I’ll try to write a longer comment later, but right now I’m uncertain but lean towards global health because of some combination of the following: 1. I suspect negative lives are either rare or nonexistent, which makes it harder to avoid logic-of-the-larder-type arguments
2. I’m more uncertain about this, but I lean towards non-hedonic forms of consequentialism (RP parliament tool confirms that this generally lowers returns to animals)
3. Mostly based on the above, I think many moral weights for animals are too high
I’m also not sure if the 100 million would go to my preferred animal welfare causes or the EA community’s preferred animal welfare causes or maybe the average person’s preferred animal welfare causes. This matters less for my guesses about the impact of health and development funding.
To your first point, it seems that animal welfare interventions which fix population size, like humane slaughter, would be orders of magnitude better than global health interventions, even if the animals live net good lives. For another example, the Fish Welfare Initiative’s interventions to improve fish lives may increase the number of farmed fish due to increasing capacity for stocking density, so that charity could also seem exceptionally good by the logic of the larder.
I’ll try to write a longer comment later, but right now I’m uncertain but lean towards global health because of some combination of the following:
1. I suspect negative lives are either rare or nonexistent, which makes it harder to avoid logic-of-the-larder-type arguments
2. I’m more uncertain about this, but I lean towards non-hedonic forms of consequentialism (RP parliament tool confirms that this generally lowers returns to animals)
3. Mostly based on the above, I think many moral weights for animals are too high
I’m also not sure if the 100 million would go to my preferred animal welfare causes or the EA community’s preferred animal welfare causes or maybe the average person’s preferred animal welfare causes. This matters less for my guesses about the impact of health and development funding.
To your first point, it seems that animal welfare interventions which fix population size, like humane slaughter, would be orders of magnitude better than global health interventions, even if the animals live net good lives. For another example, the Fish Welfare Initiative’s interventions to improve fish lives may increase the number of farmed fish due to increasing capacity for stocking density, so that charity could also seem exceptionally good by the logic of the larder.
Interesting, I’d be curious to know why you think factory farmed animals have positive lives. If true, this would have huge implications.
I think animals could still matter a lot (or the interpersonal comparisons are undefined) on non-hedonic welfarist views:
On objective list theories, see Theories of Welfare and Welfare Range Estimates by Bob Fischer.
On preference- and desire-based theories, see my posts Which animals realize which types of subjective welfare? and Solution to the two envelopes problem for moral weights. Some more background is in Types of subjective welfare.