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
Strategic Directions for a Digital Consciousness Model
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).
Resource Allocation: A Research Agenda
Answering on behalf of Arthropoda Foundation. We’ve summarized our funding priorities here. Everything we raise will go toward funding insect welfare science (as we have no staff or overhead), with a particular focus on humane slaughter, nutrition and living conditions, and implementable welfare assessment tools.
Support Insect Welfare
OP funded several scientists working on insect sentience and welfare. Arthropoda Foundation was formed to centralize and assist in the funding situation for those scientists. However, we’ve not yet replaced all the funding from GVF. For more on our funding priorities, see our post for Marginal Funding Week.
Support Critical Research on Insect Welfare
I really appreciate your work, Richard, and over the last few years, I’ve loved the opportunity to work on some foundational problems myself. Increasingly, though, I’d like to see more philosophers ignore foundational issues and focus on what I think of as “translational philosophy.” Is anyone going to give a new argument for utilitarianism that significantly changes the credences of key decision-makers (in whatever context)? No, probably not. But there are a million hard questions about how to make existing policies and decision-making tools more sensitive to the requirements of impartial beneficence. I think the model should be projects like Chimpanzee Rights vs., say, the kinds of things that are likely to be published in top philosophy journals.
I don’t have the bandwidth to organize it myself right now, but I’d love there to be something like a “Society for Translational Philosophy” that brings like-minded philosophers together to work on more practical problems. There’s a ton of volunteer labor in philosophy that could be marshaled toward good ends; instead, it’s mostly frittered away on passion projects (which I say as someone who has frittered an enormous amount of time away on passion projects; my CV is chaos). A society like that could be a very high-leverage opportunity for a funder, as a small amount spent on infrastructure could produce a lot of value in terms of applicable research.
The Welfare of Digital Minds: A Research Agenda
Valuing Impacts Across Species: A Research Agenda
Thank you, Maya!
Really appreciate this, Aaron! Very good of you!
Thanks so much!
Call for Abstracts: Economics of Animal Welfare Conference @ Paris School of Economics
Thanks for asking, Nick! Although we tried to make it as accessible as possible, it’s still pitched to academics first and foremost. For those who just want the big picture, this podcast episode is probably the best option right now. We’re also working on an article-length overview, but it may be a few months before that’s available. I’ll share it here when it is!
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.