Given these biases, I tend to weigh much more heavily interventions like bednets that save lives that would otherwise not be lived, over things that only improve lives like most animal welfare interventions.
Huh? Even if you weigh moments of happiness much more, that doesn’t always support maximising the number of lives. To use a somewhat farcical model that I hope is nevertheless illustrative, wouldn’t you prefer to add two moments of happiness to someone’s life than to create a new life that only experienced one moment of happiness? If so, I don’t see why you’d conclude that bednets are better than welfare reforms under these assumptions.
I guess my unstated assumption is that if the lives of the chickens are already worth living, then increasing their welfare further will quickly run into the diminishing returns due to the law of diminishing marginal utility. Conversely, adding more lives linearly increases happiness, again, assuming that each life has at least a baseline level of happiness that makes the life worth living.
Huh? Even if you weigh moments of happiness much more, that doesn’t always support maximising the number of lives. To use a somewhat farcical model that I hope is nevertheless illustrative, wouldn’t you prefer to add two moments of happiness to someone’s life than to create a new life that only experienced one moment of happiness? If so, I don’t see why you’d conclude that bednets are better than welfare reforms under these assumptions.
I guess my unstated assumption is that if the lives of the chickens are already worth living, then increasing their welfare further will quickly run into the diminishing returns due to the law of diminishing marginal utility. Conversely, adding more lives linearly increases happiness, again, assuming that each life has at least a baseline level of happiness that makes the life worth living.