Hi Vera, kind of you to thank me in the acknowledgements and I appreciate your thinking on this problem. I’ll flag for readers that I’m on the board of Animal Charity Evaluators, which is discussed in the article, but I’m not speaking for the organization.
As you know, I’m no professional philosopher, but I thought I’d share a few thoughts:
Your central argument feels structurally very close to the logic of the larder—the classic position that we do animals a favor by bringing them into existence for consumption, provided their lives have net positive welfare. Do you distinguish between your position and this logic of the larder?
The discussion of the Cumulative Pain Framework is valuable, but whether a cage-free hen’s life clears the threshold of “net positive welfare” is generally a normative judgment, not an empirical finding. Even hedonic welfare theories still have to make a normative call on how to balance pleasures and pains. Similarly, calling the threshold “a very low bar” is itself a normative stance. I’m sympathetic to Tännsjö and others who argue the conclusion isn’t actually repugnant once you think carefully about what “barely worth living” means: if a life is by definition net positive, it’s worth having.
I’m not familiar with Frick (2022), but my sense is it still proposes an axiology? To the extent that it does, it still needs to face Arrhenius’s impossibility results, so it’s not clear to me this actually provides an escape from the RC, unless it gives up some other desiderata.
Negative utilitarianism is dismissed because the surest way to minimize suffering would be to eliminate all sentient life—you call this “not an option I can take seriously,” which is fair. But Frick’s Procreation Asymmetry holds that there is no moral reason to create a life just because it would be net positive. Taken strictly, wouldn’t this imply a world with no sentient beings is not axiologically worse than a world full of flourishing ones, ~the conclusion you aimed to avoid? (I know Frick responds to this elsewhere, but I’m curious if that coincides with your view.)
I fear there’s some conflation between the philosophical sense of welfarism (“what is good for someone or what makes a life worth living, is the only thing that has intrinsic value”) and the sense in animal advocacy of “favoring tactics and strategies that lead to on-farm improvements in the welfare of animals.” It seems possible to accept many of your arguments against philosophical welfarism, while still endorsing animal advocacy welfarism. In the same vein, I think the reccommendation of turning to reducetarianism/abolitionism similarly relies on empirical facts that aren’t covered: what are these (cost-)effective reducetarian/abolitionist interventions?
Thanks for the opportunity to spend some time thinking about these issues.
Thanks so much for your response, Jacob. I really enjoy being in this conversation with you.
I’ll take your questions point by point!
Regarding the logic of the larder: I do not endorse the claim that we do animals a favor by bringing them into existence for consumption, provided their lives have net positive welfare. My argument is instead meant as a reductio of the maximizing assumptions behind EAA. If those assumptions are accepted, they appear to push one toward something very close to the logic of the larder. So the point is not to defend that view, but to expose a troubling implication of the underlying framework.
On the Cumulative Pain Framework: I agree that whether a cage-free hen’s life is, all things considered, net positive is not a purely empirical finding. There is an irreducibly normative question here about how pleasures and pains should be weighed. I also agree that calling the threshold “a very low bar” is itself a normative claim. At the same time, I do not think “normative” means arbitrary or merely a matter of opinion. If effective altruists want to know how to do the most good, they should want these judgments to be constrained by empirical evidence as much as possible, even if the evidence does not by itself settle all evaluative questions.
On Frick: Utilitarians start with a definition of the good (=welfare), and then derive from this starting point an account of what you ought to do (do whatever maximizes welfare). Frick does not start with a definition of the good. Instead, he proposes that in a context c1, outcome o1 is better than outcome o2 if and only if you have overall most reason to bring about o1. So, he starts with a primitive notion of reasons and derives from that an account of outcome betterness (or the good). He discusses how he avoids the Mere Addition Paradox (and the repugnant conclusion) in this article: https://academic.oup.com/book/38952/chapter-abstract/338159303?redirectedFrom=fulltext My paper only gestures in that direction; it does not try to show that Frick’s view avoids every impossibility result or satisfies every desideratum in population ethics.
Relatedly, I do not mean in the paper to endorse the procreation asymmetry, or the claim that adding a happy life is simply neutral. In fact, I explicitly say that the neutrality view still ultimately faces the repugnant conclusion. The view I treat most sympathetically is Frick’s broader nonconsequentialist, reasons-first framework, which tries to avoid the repugnant conclusion not by saying flourishing lives add no value, but by rejecting the consequentialist assumption that value is always something to be promoted through maximization.
Finally, on “welfarism”: I agree that there is an important distinction between welfarism in the philosophical sense and “welfarism” in animal advocacy as a practical orientation toward on-farm welfare improvements. It is entirely possible to reject the former while still endorsing the latter as a tactic in pursuit of different goals. More generally, the same tactic can serve different ultimate aims. So I agree that my argument against maximizing net aggregate welfare does not by itself settle the strategic question of which interventions are most effective in practice. That is why I framed my conclusion relatively modestly: not that abolitionist or reductionist approaches are thereby shown to be superior, but that I hope the argument encourages greater interest in nonconsequentialist foundations and in strategies that are not guided by maximizing welfare alone. In practice, I have on several occasions actively supported welfare-oriented work, including work by organizations such as ACE, despite my doubts about the underlying philosophical framework.
Thanks, Vera, appreciate your responses here! I’ll have to learn more about Frick’s work at some point.
I think my key uncertainty remains what sorts of lives are acceptable to create? My intuition is that the sorts of lives cage-free layer hens live are still far from worth creating. For example, to my mind, lives of sufficient quality probably have meaningful availability of individual moderate-to-high-quality health care—so that an individual would not die due to infection of a minor wound or a condition requiring surgical intervention. I think this bar makes it quite unlikely that lives on CAFOs would ~ever be worth creating. But, perhaps that’s too high a bar, especially if chickens don’t experience, say, anxiety about uncertain health care availability as a human might, even if that health care is never needed.
Perhaps somewhat beyond the scope of your paper, although it does seem like a crux of the argument, do you have a sense for the sorts of lives you think are acceptable to create?
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.
That’s a great question, Jacob, and I don’t think I have a full answer!
I had funny conversations with my partner about this. He is (or was) an anti-natalist, and thought it is always wrong to “inflict existence” on someone. But I thought that I would always choose life over no-life, and would want to be born into virtually any context (provided the alternative is not being born at all). This is just to illustrate that people have widely different intuitions on this question.
I think the challenge for effective altruists is to find an answer to this question that is as much constrained by empirical evidence and good argument as possible.
Hi Vera, kind of you to thank me in the acknowledgements and I appreciate your thinking on this problem. I’ll flag for readers that I’m on the board of Animal Charity Evaluators, which is discussed in the article, but I’m not speaking for the organization.
As you know, I’m no professional philosopher, but I thought I’d share a few thoughts:
Your central argument feels structurally very close to the logic of the larder—the classic position that we do animals a favor by bringing them into existence for consumption, provided their lives have net positive welfare. Do you distinguish between your position and this logic of the larder?
The discussion of the Cumulative Pain Framework is valuable, but whether a cage-free hen’s life clears the threshold of “net positive welfare” is generally a normative judgment, not an empirical finding. Even hedonic welfare theories still have to make a normative call on how to balance pleasures and pains. Similarly, calling the threshold “a very low bar” is itself a normative stance. I’m sympathetic to Tännsjö and others who argue the conclusion isn’t actually repugnant once you think carefully about what “barely worth living” means: if a life is by definition net positive, it’s worth having.
I’m not familiar with Frick (2022), but my sense is it still proposes an axiology? To the extent that it does, it still needs to face Arrhenius’s impossibility results, so it’s not clear to me this actually provides an escape from the RC, unless it gives up some other desiderata.
Negative utilitarianism is dismissed because the surest way to minimize suffering would be to eliminate all sentient life—you call this “not an option I can take seriously,” which is fair. But Frick’s Procreation Asymmetry holds that there is no moral reason to create a life just because it would be net positive. Taken strictly, wouldn’t this imply a world with no sentient beings is not axiologically worse than a world full of flourishing ones, ~the conclusion you aimed to avoid? (I know Frick responds to this elsewhere, but I’m curious if that coincides with your view.)
I fear there’s some conflation between the philosophical sense of welfarism (“what is good for someone or what makes a life worth living, is the only thing that has intrinsic value”) and the sense in animal advocacy of “favoring tactics and strategies that lead to on-farm improvements in the welfare of animals.” It seems possible to accept many of your arguments against philosophical welfarism, while still endorsing animal advocacy welfarism. In the same vein, I think the reccommendation of turning to reducetarianism/abolitionism similarly relies on empirical facts that aren’t covered: what are these (cost-)effective reducetarian/abolitionist interventions?
Thanks for the opportunity to spend some time thinking about these issues.
Thanks so much for your response, Jacob. I really enjoy being in this conversation with you.
I’ll take your questions point by point!
Regarding the logic of the larder: I do not endorse the claim that we do animals a favor by bringing them into existence for consumption, provided their lives have net positive welfare. My argument is instead meant as a reductio of the maximizing assumptions behind EAA. If those assumptions are accepted, they appear to push one toward something very close to the logic of the larder. So the point is not to defend that view, but to expose a troubling implication of the underlying framework.
On the Cumulative Pain Framework: I agree that whether a cage-free hen’s life is, all things considered, net positive is not a purely empirical finding. There is an irreducibly normative question here about how pleasures and pains should be weighed. I also agree that calling the threshold “a very low bar” is itself a normative claim. At the same time, I do not think “normative” means arbitrary or merely a matter of opinion. If effective altruists want to know how to do the most good, they should want these judgments to be constrained by empirical evidence as much as possible, even if the evidence does not by itself settle all evaluative questions.
On Frick: Utilitarians start with a definition of the good (=welfare), and then derive from this starting point an account of what you ought to do (do whatever maximizes welfare). Frick does not start with a definition of the good. Instead, he proposes that in a context c1, outcome o1 is better than outcome o2 if and only if you have overall most reason to bring about o1. So, he starts with a primitive notion of reasons and derives from that an account of outcome betterness (or the good). He discusses how he avoids the Mere Addition Paradox (and the repugnant conclusion) in this article: https://academic.oup.com/book/38952/chapter-abstract/338159303?redirectedFrom=fulltext My paper only gestures in that direction; it does not try to show that Frick’s view avoids every impossibility result or satisfies every desideratum in population ethics.
Relatedly, I do not mean in the paper to endorse the procreation asymmetry, or the claim that adding a happy life is simply neutral. In fact, I explicitly say that the neutrality view still ultimately faces the repugnant conclusion. The view I treat most sympathetically is Frick’s broader nonconsequentialist, reasons-first framework, which tries to avoid the repugnant conclusion not by saying flourishing lives add no value, but by rejecting the consequentialist assumption that value is always something to be promoted through maximization.
Finally, on “welfarism”: I agree that there is an important distinction between welfarism in the philosophical sense and “welfarism” in animal advocacy as a practical orientation toward on-farm welfare improvements. It is entirely possible to reject the former while still endorsing the latter as a tactic in pursuit of different goals. More generally, the same tactic can serve different ultimate aims. So I agree that my argument against maximizing net aggregate welfare does not by itself settle the strategic question of which interventions are most effective in practice. That is why I framed my conclusion relatively modestly: not that abolitionist or reductionist approaches are thereby shown to be superior, but that I hope the argument encourages greater interest in nonconsequentialist foundations and in strategies that are not guided by maximizing welfare alone. In practice, I have on several occasions actively supported welfare-oriented work, including work by organizations such as ACE, despite my doubts about the underlying philosophical framework.
Thanks again for the careful engagement, Jacob!
Thanks, Vera, appreciate your responses here! I’ll have to learn more about Frick’s work at some point.
I think my key uncertainty remains what sorts of lives are acceptable to create? My intuition is that the sorts of lives cage-free layer hens live are still far from worth creating. For example, to my mind, lives of sufficient quality probably have meaningful availability of individual moderate-to-high-quality health care—so that an individual would not die due to infection of a minor wound or a condition requiring surgical intervention. I think this bar makes it quite unlikely that lives on CAFOs would ~ever be worth creating. But, perhaps that’s too high a bar, especially if chickens don’t experience, say, anxiety about uncertain health care availability as a human might, even if that health care is never needed.
Perhaps somewhat beyond the scope of your paper, although it does seem like a crux of the argument, do you have a sense for the sorts of lives you think are acceptable to create?
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.
That’s a great question, Jacob, and I don’t think I have a full answer!
I had funny conversations with my partner about this. He is (or was) an anti-natalist, and thought it is always wrong to “inflict existence” on someone. But I thought that I would always choose life over no-life, and would want to be born into virtually any context (provided the alternative is not being born at all). This is just to illustrate that people have widely different intuitions on this question.
I think the challenge for effective altruists is to find an answer to this question that is as much constrained by empirical evidence and good argument as possible.