Lots of interesting ideas. This one I didn’t understand “Does our other work focused on excruciating pain (e.g. humane chicken slaughter) make up for potentially more excruciating pain in cage-free systems?”
— if you’re willing, could you please explain this like I’m 5?
Suppose cage-free increases excruciating pain compared to caged.
Is the total increase in excruciating pain across all (the sum total of) cage-free work from our community smaller than the total reduction in excruciating pain from all of our other work, e.g. CO2 stunning for chickens, other humane slaughter work, other welfare work, across species?
If yes, and if there are no other increases in excruciating pain (or they’re small enough), then we could still say our community is preventing more excruciating pain than it’s causing, overall. Our portfolio could still be robustly positive across different views on pain intensity tradeoffs. I think I’d be pretty satisfied with that, even if it is causing some excruciating pain (that is outweighed by reductions).
(Alternatively, we could try to compensate the specific animals we expect to cause more excruciating pain to, but that seems much harder on worldviews according to which excruciating pain matters way more than disabling pain.)
Oh right got it. Thank you. But if (I emphasize: IF) we thought cage-free was negative we could choose to not do that bit right? The sign of the overall portfolio doesn’t seem relevant to that decision
Yes, we could just remove it if we thought it was net negative overall.
Cage-free could turn out to be one of the best things we can do to reduce disabling pain, but slightly bad for excruciating pain, so that it’s just unclear whether it’s net good or bad under wide uncertainty about pain intensity tradeoffs. If it looks very good on views where disabling-excruciating pain tradeoffs are more modest and only somewhat bad and in the end outweighed on views with much more weight to excruciating pain, removing it from the portfolio could be a mistake.
Got it, makes sense. I’m not sure it makes sense to think of these pain levels as discrete categories, but I think your point holds even if we’re just using them to gesture at rough areas on a spectrum
Lots of interesting ideas. This one I didn’t understand “Does our other work focused on excruciating pain (e.g. humane chicken slaughter) make up for potentially more excruciating pain in cage-free systems?” — if you’re willing, could you please explain this like I’m 5?
Suppose cage-free increases excruciating pain compared to caged.
Is the total increase in excruciating pain across all (the sum total of) cage-free work from our community smaller than the total reduction in excruciating pain from all of our other work, e.g. CO2 stunning for chickens, other humane slaughter work, other welfare work, across species?
If yes, and if there are no other increases in excruciating pain (or they’re small enough), then we could still say our community is preventing more excruciating pain than it’s causing, overall. Our portfolio could still be robustly positive across different views on pain intensity tradeoffs. I think I’d be pretty satisfied with that, even if it is causing some excruciating pain (that is outweighed by reductions).
(Alternatively, we could try to compensate the specific animals we expect to cause more excruciating pain to, but that seems much harder on worldviews according to which excruciating pain matters way more than disabling pain.)
Oh right got it. Thank you. But if (I emphasize: IF) we thought cage-free was negative we could choose to not do that bit right? The sign of the overall portfolio doesn’t seem relevant to that decision
Yes, we could just remove it if we thought it was net negative overall.
Cage-free could turn out to be one of the best things we can do to reduce disabling pain, but slightly bad for excruciating pain, so that it’s just unclear whether it’s net good or bad under wide uncertainty about pain intensity tradeoffs. If it looks very good on views where disabling-excruciating pain tradeoffs are more modest and only somewhat bad and in the end outweighed on views with much more weight to excruciating pain, removing it from the portfolio could be a mistake.
See also my related post Hedging against deep and moral uncertainty.
Got it, makes sense. I’m not sure it makes sense to think of these pain levels as discrete categories, but I think your point holds even if we’re just using them to gesture at rough areas on a spectrum