Without taking a stance on cage-free layer hens, I wonder if your standard isn’t too demanding. I guess that no humans had access to medical care good enough that they wouldn’t die due to infection of a minor wound until like 80 years ago or something. Were there no lives worth creating before then?
I take it this is a question for Jacob, right? I’ll just chime in with one thought. - I think the comparison to wildlife suffering is relevant here too. Most wild animals live short lives and die of starvation, predation, disease of exposure. If the bar for net zero welfare is too high, it appears that one would be either pressed to drastically intervene and turn ecosystems upside down to avoid this suffering, or to eliminate all wildlife.
I agree this would be an implication of such a bar and that it seems demanding, to say the least! I’ll reiterate I have a great deal of uncertainty on this and related topics. That said, I do think the answer is potentially yes, or that those lives were possibly mostly instrumental in getting to a world where some lives were worth creating.
I think it’s also notably “convenient” that the bar was crossed so recently; perhaps the bar is even higher and we have largely not yet reached it. Of course, this seems like a very counter-intuitive conclusion, although I think most conclusions on the topic will be.
Without taking a stance on cage-free layer hens, I wonder if your standard isn’t too demanding. I guess that no humans had access to medical care good enough that they wouldn’t die due to infection of a minor wound until like 80 years ago or something. Were there no lives worth creating before then?
I take it this is a question for Jacob, right? I’ll just chime in with one thought. - I think the comparison to wildlife suffering is relevant here too. Most wild animals live short lives and die of starvation, predation, disease of exposure. If the bar for net zero welfare is too high, it appears that one would be either pressed to drastically intervene and turn ecosystems upside down to avoid this suffering, or to eliminate all wildlife.
I agree this would be an implication of such a bar and that it seems demanding, to say the least! I’ll reiterate I have a great deal of uncertainty on this and related topics. That said, I do think the answer is potentially yes, or that those lives were possibly mostly instrumental in getting to a world where some lives were worth creating.
I think it’s also notably “convenient” that the bar was crossed so recently; perhaps the bar is even higher and we have largely not yet reached it. Of course, this seems like a very counter-intuitive conclusion, although I think most conclusions on the topic will be.