I’m a Senior Researcher for Rethink Priorities, a Professor of Philosophy at Texas State University, a Director of the Animal Welfare Economics Working Group, the Treasurer for the Insect Welfare Research Society, and the President of the Arthropoda Foundation. I work on a wide range of theoretical and applied issues related to animal welfare. You can reach me here.
Bob Fischer
Karma: 4,593
Thanks for this great post! Really appreciate your thinking about this important question.
Here’s one question that I’m turning over. On the face of it, you might think of the pain categories as being assessed behaviorally and relative to an individual’s capacity for welfare. So, disabling pain would be whatever pain “takes priority over most bids for behavioral execution and prevents all forms of enjoyment or positive welfare.” But then, disabling pain wouldn’t be a single pain level across species, which some might be able to feel and others not. It would be a capacity-for-welfare-neutral behavioral characterization of an internal state.
However, your post seems not to endorse this view. Instead, it seems to imply that the pain categories are indexed to humans, without any assumption that all animals can experience the same thing.I don’t necessarily have an objection to the indexed-to-humans view. However, it does seem to undermine the idea that we can look at behavior to assess the presence of a particular pain level unless we have independent reasons to think that the relevant animal is capable of that pain level. Am I understanding that correctly?
Thanks a bunch!
That’s correct.
Correct and important. Thanks for sharing.
No deadline yet. The cutoff will be determined by when the caterers need the final headcount. I would expect that to be a week or two prior to the event.
Animal Welfare Economics Conference @ PSE: Registration Open
Doing Prioritization Better
Beyond Extinction: Revisiting the Question and Broadening Our View
We discuss this in the book here. The summary:
...we’ll have to settle for some rough, intuitive sense of the space of possibilities relative to which we’re evaluating welfare ranges. We might think of them as the “realistic biological possibilities,” or something to that effect, which seems like the set of possibilities to which general physiological, cognitive, and behavioral traits might be relevant (as, again, we’ll discuss Chapters 5–7). Very roughly, these possibilities are the ones that we take to be realistic ways things could turn out for an individual based on our best biological theories and our understanding of their biological characteristics.
Of course, even if we have a tolerably good understanding of the “realistic biological possibilities,” it remains the case that a “tolerably good understanding” leaves plenty of room for disagreement about specific cases, including many that may be practically relevant. So, we aren’t going to get the fine-grained, context-sensitive picture we might have wanted—or, at least, not without further discussion about how to extend the framework that we’re developing. However, whatever the limits of this approach, it does reasonably well overall. It does a better job of limiting our attention to relevant possibilities (in one sense of “relevant”) than we’d get by considering the logical, metaphysical, or physical possibilities. Insofar as we can secure welfare-relevant biological knowledge, it does reasonably well on the epistemic criterion, and while more coarse-grained than we might like, it may still prove useful in many practical contexts. After all, the goal here is to improve interspecies welfare comparisons relative to armchair speculation. If that method is bad enough, then the bar for claiming improvement is low.
Thanks for engaging with my work, Adam!
2025 Animal Welfare Economics Conference @ PSE
Thanks for asking! I don’t believe that OUP offers it in those formats, though I would imagine it wouldn’t be hard to convert what they’ve made available. If you end up doing that, please let me know! Would be happy to circulate it.
Thanks for the productive exchange!
Fair, but there are degrees here, right? Some hypotheses are fairly tightly tied to empirical evidence while others involve many more speculative premises.
But as I said, totally makes sense to want an all-in estimate. I’ve been thinking about how to do that and hope to have something concrete to say eventually.
Strategic Directions for a Digital Consciousness Model
The thought is that we think of the Conscious Subsystems hypothesis as a bit like panpsychism: not something you can rule out, but a sufficiently speculative thesis that we aren’t interested in including it, as we don’t think anyone really believes it for empirical reasons. Insofar as they assign some credence to it, it’s probably for philosophical reasons.
Anyway, totally understand wanting every hypothesis over which you’re uncertain to be reflected in your welfare range estimates. That’s a good project, but it wasn’t ours. But fwiw, it’s really unclear what that’s going to imply in this particular case, as it’s so hard to pin down which Conscious Subsystems hypothesis you have in mind and the credences you should assign to all the variants.
Yes, Chris: we’re using a cardinal scale. To your point about estimating the average realized values of welfare, I agree that this would be highly valuable. Animal welfare scientists don’t do it because they don’t face decisions that require it. If you’re primarily responsible for studying broiler welfare, you don’t need to know how to compare broiler welfare with pig welfare. You just need to know what to recommend to improve broiler welfare. As for RP, we’d love to work on this and I’ve proposed such projects many times. However, this work has never been of sufficient interest to funders. If that changes, you can bet I’ll devote a lot of time to it!
That’s a tough one, Chris. I assume you’re looking for something like, “On a −1 to 1 scale, the average welfare of broiler chickens is −0.7, the average welfare of pigs is −0.1, the average welfare of cattle is 0.2, etc.” Is that right? The closest thing to that would be the scores that Norwood and Lusk give in Compassion by the Pound, though not for shrimp, and I also tend to think that their numbers skew high. For the most part, animal welfare scientists aren’t interested in scoring welfare on a cardinal scale, so it’s an oddity when they try. (Marc Bracke is one exception, though I don’t think you’re going to get what you want from his papers either.) I’m sorry that I can’t be of more help!
Great question, Michael. Short answer: there are bound to be lots of valuable research projects after these three; so, we’d hold the funds until we found a lab that’s willing and able to take on a sufficiently impactful project. One long-term goal is to support the many foundational research projects that need to be done on insect welfare. When we consider the sheer number of species (1M described; probably 5.5M in total) and the range of ways humans affect insects, it’s clear that we need a wide set of validated welfare indicators to make judgments about how best to help these animals.
Thanks for your question, Oscar. We have some applications outstanding but don’t know how much funding they’ll generate. In general, animal welfare funding is quite tight, with lots of worthy projects going unsupported. So, we’re almost certain to have more opportunities than resources. And given how new the field of insect welfare science is, we anticipate this problem continuing, as there are bound to be many other high-value projects like these in the coming year(s).
Thanks for your helpful reply and apologies for missing that note!