In the most convenient world, form all the creatures on planet Earth only humans are sentient and have ethical worth. I really hope that we live in it, it would mean that there are so much less sufferings to alleviate but it's quite unlikely. There are no reasons why the universe would be so convenient. Most likely there are other sentient creatures that we are torturing with our actions to feed ourselves. And, therefore, veganism is most likely morally correct. But there are obviously less and more evil stances in between. So the idea of estimating "moral worth" of a creature based on the probability that it's sentient makes a lot of sense.
However, these numbers look crazy. In a space of all possible minds sentience may be orthogonal to intelligence, but among the kind of minds that are produced by evolution through natural selection these qualities seem to be highly correlated. And when a report estimating moral weight claims that highly intelligent octopuses, capable of solving complex puzzles, are *less* significant than chickens with tiny brains - this is a clear signal that the methodology is ridiculously off.
The fact that a chicken can in principle live longer doesn't make it more morally valuable while evaluating the evils of factory farming chickens compared to octopuses. If two creature have a life full of torture for half a year and then killed, what matters is how sentient these creatures were during this time, not how long they could have lived counter-factually. If anything, shorter life cycle of octopuses should mean that they are more likely to be sentient from earlier age, while chicken have more probability not to be conscious at the time of the slaughter.
Likewise, Tomasik calculator default values gives a chicken half the moral weight of a pig, which is bizarre if we take into account the difference in the brain size. We also need to take into account that suffering doesn't add up linearly. And the huge second order effect of climate change, towards which beef/milk industry contributes much much then poultry/eggs one.
So in the end, I don't think that the title of the post is correct. I suspect that it's quite likely that eating chicken is, in fact, more ethical than eating beef. On the other hand, turkeys seem to be about as likely to be sentient as chickens but produce more meet per death. So eating them instead of chickens seems a much safer bet.
I'm not sure I understand why you think that brain size and intelligence are the most relevant factor to determine whether a being can suffer ? Surely we'd wouldn't think that making human babies suffer is more acceptable since they have a smaller brain and can't solve complicated puzzles.
"We also need to take into account that suffering doesn't add up linearly."
How do you know that, and how do you know the weight of different kinds of suffering ?
Given these uncertainties, I think it's be risky to think eating chicken is more ethical than beef when so many more animals animals are affected (with much worse living conditions)
> I'm not sure I understand why you think that brain size and intelligence are the most relevant factor to determine whether a being can suffer ?
Because to be able to suffer one has to be sentient and it seems that brain size and intelligence is positevely correlated with being sentient as mentioned multiple times in the rethinking priorities link. This is not the full story of course, but it gives us a decent sanity check which the calculations valueing chikens more than octopuses do not pass.
> Surely we'd wouldn't think that making human babies suffer is more acceptable since they have a smaller brain and can't solve complicated puzzles.
As a matter of fact, I do believe that newborn human babies are not sentient and therefore are incapable of sufferings, but this is a red herring. We are talking about the probabilities of different species to possess sentience not different members of the same species.
> How do you know that, and how do you know the weight of different kinds of suffering ?
Torture vs dust specs mind experiment pushes my moral intuition to this conclusion. The exact coefficients are of course unknown to me, but the direction seems clear.
> For the climate, it doesn't sounds like it is the most relevant factor
I don't understand what you mean here. Beef/milk industry not being the most important factor for the climate change? Or that climate change is itself less important than chicken welfare?. The latter seem to be based on the premise that is itself under question here.
> Given these uncertainties, I think it's be risky to think eating chicken is more ethical than beef when so many more animals animals are affected (with much worse living conditions)
It's a risk either way and I'm confused why so many EAs seem to be so confident that poultry is definetely worse than beef, given all these uncertanities. But eating turkeys instead of chikens seems to be a safe bet. Do you agree?
Ok - regarding the moral weight project, it sounds like the differences in octopuses vs chicken are more linked to different elements of methodology and quality of available evidence.
It can get in the weeds and i'm not going to detail, but this podcast explains why some results are surprising (including a section on octopuses).
But basically, we shouldn't put too much weight on the exact numbers - it's more about the rough orders of magnitudes.
I understand that there are uncertainties. However, There isn't too much difference in the evidence for sentience for chicken, compared to evidence for sentience in beef. Even if there may be some brain sizes that do not support sentience, it looks likely that it's at a much lower threshhold (especially as there's some evidence for sentience in say fruit flies).
So I don't see anything that would be enough to offset the massive differences in living conditions and numbers of individuals affected when comparing chicken to beef.
For the climate, have you checked the link ? It indicates that the DALY avoided by reducing animal suffering is orders of magnitudes lower than the DALYs avoided by fighting against climate change (even with uncertainty bars).
> Ok - regarding the moral weight project, it sounds like the differences in octopuses vs chicken are more linked to different elements of methodology and quality of available evidence.
As far as I understood, the fact that chickens can live longer lives than octopuses significantly contributed. Which I find to be a huge methodological mistake for reasons explained in the original comment.
> But basically, we shouldn't put too much weight on the exact numbers - it's more about the rough orders of magnitudes.
Well, I believe they got the orders of magnitudes wrong.
> There isn't too much difference in the evidence for sentience for chicken, compared to evidence for sentience in beef.
Of course there is! Brains of cows are bigger and more complex than chickens and have much higher neuron count. This is where I'd take the appropriate orders of magnitudes for moral worth, even if the exact numbers are shaky.
> Even if there may be some brain sizes that do not support sentience, it looks likely that it's at a much lower threshhold (especially as there's some evidence for sentience in say fruit flies).
It's not that some brain sizes in principle are unable to support sentience and as soon as the threshold is reached everyone is sentient. Brains do lots of stuff besides consciousness and there has to be a reason why would natural selection add this extra functionality in the first place. Bigger brains have more slack in this way, therefore we expect that creatures with them are more likely to be sentient, also because we ourselves have enormous brains and are sentient which is the only really available data point for now. As with any other complex ability we should expect consciousness to be substantially correlated with brain size/complexity/neuron count, even though there can be some outliners here and there.
> It indicates that the DALY avoided by reducing animal suffering is orders of magnitudes lower than the DALYs avoided by fighting against climate change (even with uncertainty bars).
It seem to be based on several assumptions which I do not share, including the high probability that chickens are sentient and therefore have moral worth at all - as I said, this is the exact thing under question here. Also most of the uncertainty seem to be applied to dismiss the effects of climate change, for instance the fact that it affects not only humans but all life on Earth.
Ok, I think the fundamental disagreement lies deeper than that then - about what exactly might generate sentience at all.
My prior is that I'm not sure why evolution wouldn't have included something as useful as suffering in animals. Especially as they share nociceptors and millions of years of evolution with humans.
As indicated in the 80000 hours podcast, the fact that neuroscientists use fruit flies to model depression is a very strong indicator, and these scientists are surprised by neurological similarities with humans.
Of course, it's possible that bigger brains actually mean more sentience and more moral value. But unless we can verify it, that feels mostly like guessing what the nature of sentience could be.
I prefer to assume that a similar kind of behaviour in a similar situation can lead to similar mind states.
It's not perfect. There are many uncertainties. However, unless we have A LOT of evidence that bigger brains lead to more sentience, we probably shouldn't farm dozens of chickens in terrible conditions to avoid farming one cow.
This is related to the risk aversion section of the podcast.
For the other points :
I think the welfare ranges do not take into account lifespan - these are the ranges for one hour of pleasure and suffering (or else humans and chicken would be further apart).
I agree with your point on turkeys - but turkeys still seem much worse off than cows.
> My prior is that I'm not sure why evolution wouldn't have included something as useful as suffering in animals.
This prior is fine, but you need to account for the fact that unconscious minds are possible, which we now know very well, as we can create them ourselves and make them solve complex tasks. Sentience really doesn't appear to be a necessity for information processing, more like an extra thing on top of already existent system.
> the fact that neuroscientists use fruit flies to model depression is a very strong indicator, and these scientists are surprised by neurological similarities with humans.
It is an interesting piece of evidence, but not as strong as it might seem. Our brains may have similar mechanisms relevant to similar behaviors, but then human brain may have an extra mechanism for conscious awareness of this behavior that uses the input of the previous mechanism. It totally fits with sentience being an additional entity on top of already existent systems.
> I prefer to assume that a similar kind of behaviour in a similar situation can lead to similar mind states.
I see the appeal of such heuristic but in the post-Turing test age of LLMs it seems to be kind of outdated. Now when we have direct example of entities that can express similar behavior to us for a very different reasons, I think it's wise to be open to such possibility.
> I think the welfare ranges do not take into account lifespan
Hmm. I see. Well, then I'll try to look for the answers in the podcast, thanks for the tip.
> turkeys still seem much worse off than cows.
There are less uncertainties about turkeys. We do not have any reasons to suspect that turkeys are sentient while chickens are not.
In a world where chickens and turkeys can't suffer but cows can, switching from chicken to turkey is net neutral, while switching from chickens to cows is huge net negative, in a world where every animal suffers in the same way switching from chicken to turkeys is net positive, and from chicken to beef is even more net positive. In a world where every animal suffers but somehow proportionally to their brain size, switching from chicken to turkey is net positive, while from chicken to beef may be anything from net negative to net positive. So turkeys seem to be the safe bet, while beef is high risk high reward. And considering how much uncertainty we currently got about the matter, I think we should stick with safer options.
One must also consider elasticities of supply and demand curves: if you give up a gallon of milk, the price will in expectation drop a little, thus making other people consume more milk, though less than a gallon: roughly 0.44 of one. So buying milk is actually roughly half as bad as you claim. Here you can find estimates for those elasticities: https://reducing-suffering.org/comments-on-compassion-by-the-pound/#Elasticities.
This is ridiculous. The space of conscious suffering is vastly multidimensional. There are no 'equivalences', especially not between the gathering of a gallon of milk and 70 minutes of baby torture.
For one thing, once an animal is broken, their suffering is much lighter. It's the transition from freedom to captivity that really hurts. The process of breaking a horse is essentially torture-- that's why you hire someone else to do it. After that, the horse is willing to let you ride it for the rest of its life.
I won't contest your essentially random sentience and suffering multipliers. Still, there's a part of the calculation you must add: the difference between confinement and wild life. Wild creatures do not live idyllic lives. They spend half of their time hungry and terrified. Don't measure the difference between life as a confined animal and life as a modern human. Measure the difference between life as a confined animal and life as a wild animal.
In some cases, you will find that the confined animal lives better.
I was very rude in this comment. Feel free to be rude in return. I like a good argument.
I don't really think we know whether it's preferable to be wild, free, terrified, cold, hungry, and subject to predators vs confined bored and safe. I always firmly believed it was obviously superior for cats to be indoor only, where they're safe and live longer (and obviously better for the local birds). Now I'm not so sure. Cats sure like to roam and do their thing. I don't know how we could ever determine this.
We probably can't determine what it's like to be another creature. The subjective experience of others is a huge mystery. That's why it's called the hard problem of consciousness.
There are a few guesses, though. We can estimate the experiences of others by looking at their actions and comparing them to our actions when we were feeling certain qualia. This method is good for reasoning about other humans. It's much weaker when you're trying to understand what it's like to be a chicken, a bean sprout, or GPT-4.
Think of the suicide rate of first world vs. third world countries. This is a human analog for our wild vs. confined animals comparison. People who never experience starvation, deadly violence, or the senseless loss of loved ones in preventable ways often take their own lives more frequently than those who face such hardships. Some think that this is because self-determination, the quality of having your future decided by your actions, is fundamental to life as a human. When you don't have this, when nothing you do seems to change anything, people take the easy way out. I suppose this means that being in a cage would suck pretty bad, even if you're well-fed.
I have taken in stray cats who were so very happy to be inside and no longer cold, scared, or hungry that they never wanted to go outside ever again. And I've raised cats indoors from kittenhood who are always trying to get outside. Though the latter doesn't truly know what "outside" means, so perhaps more weight should be given to the first category. Then there are cats who have always been indoor/outdoor cats and my guess is they're most satisfied with the arrangement. Presumably virtually all creatures (including us) would ideally like to have that best of both worlds situation...the freedom to go have adventures and total autonomy and no rules or boundaries, but also risk...but also a nice safe, warm, well provisioned place to go back to whenever one chooses. I guess that's the ideal, but not an available option for almost any creature outside a few very lucky humans and cats. We don't let any other animal do that.
I was thinking the same irt keeping one's own small flock of backyard chickens for their eggs (and as pets). I've thought about this for decades and can't find a moral issue with it.
My neighbor has 4 or 5 who get to wander around the yard, clucking and scratching for insects and doing what they please all day. They go in the coop/fenced in area at night. Seems like a pretty nice life for them, that I can tell by observing them. Of course, every once in a while a raccoon or hawk gets at them and that's a pretty brutal situation. No worse though, and arguably better, than wild birds.
This seems straightforwardly good, even, as long as you keep them in decent conditions.
Edit: I suppose you would increase suffering by buying them as chicks, since whoever is breeding them likely doesn't care about animal wellbeing. I'm not sure how significant is that, probably not that much. And you will likely treat them better than whoever else would buy them otherwise.
What’s your opinion on Wild Caught Fish? The chart has farmed fish, and I know a few pescatarians that maintain that wild caught fish is better than beef.
How ethical is lamb farming? They always seem to be omitted from anecdotes about how bad factory farming is, to the point where I’m wondering if happy lamb frolicking in a field is actually the norm for that species.
Free range chickens decimate local insect populations. They use their talons to shred apart the fecal matter where flies and beetles house their offspring and devour the defenseless baby insects. The only humane thing for us to do is to eat more chicken in defense of the insect nurseries!
I believe that evolution (both natural selection and cultural evolution) have given us a Circle of Empathy. Our empathy is not binary (we either have it or we don't) but it does drop off quite rapidly once you get outside the circle. Call this speciesism if you like — in which case, OK. I am speciesist. I think the circle is getting bigger as the generations go by but it's not big enough yet to exclude cows, pigs and chickens! Maybe one day. EXCEPT!…
Industrial farming changes my thinking a lot. In the USA, cows are raised in an absolutely horrific environment. Chickens even worse. It's different in more empathetic countries and I think that changes the calculation. If they figure out how to industrially farm octopuses (for example), I would stop eating them. I'm OK with eating the wild ones.
I think it's more complex with pigs and chickens, but it's an easy choice for cows, IMO. I eat them very rarely as a special treat and I make an effort to eat cows that have been humanely raised.
If I were the Head of the Union of Cows and humans offered me the option of a life of relative luxury (compared to living in the wild with the wolves and the leopards) but at the end of my life, they get to eat me, I would take that deal. I think if we stop eating cows, that will be the end of cows. They'll be extinct in a couple of generations. I'd rather cows stick around, even if they ultimately get eaten.
Related question: should we ban leopards from eating antelopes to save the antelopes from a horrible death. If not, why not?
I was under the impression that it's easier to find satisfactorily ethical eggs in a grocery store (https://vitalfarms.com/organic-pasture-raised-eggs/) vs. dairy. Vital farms AFAIK doesn't kill male chicks and actually lets the hens live in decent conditions.
I will look more into this because I may flip to lacto-vegetarian.
Question: how can you on the one hand claim “speciesism is wholly indefensible” but then on the other have a sentience multiplier per species? Is the latter based solely on average “natural” lifespan?
I no doubt have other issues with - and disagree with - your assertion that “speciesism is wholly indefensible”, but just starting by explaining the apparent contradiction would be helpful.
Speceisism is the claim that species matters inherently. Obviously it matters in that it correlates with other things that matter but it doesn't matter in itself. So if cows were as smart and sentient as people they'd matter as much.
But you write it as if black flies matter as much as humans. At least that’s how it plainly reads in your piece showing black flies on your chart.
And you say “wholly”. So it reads to me that you are saying it is morally indefensible to deliberately kill a silkworm or a black soldier fly. Do I have that right? And if not, then in what sense that matters is “speciesism is wholly indefensible” a meaningful statement?
Or are you in fact agreeing with my common sense intuitions but you just happen to use a very confusing phrase that to the uninitiated sounds like the opposite of what you actually mean?
I was thinking about this topic earlier today. What a remarkable coincidence! As always, this is an excellent article.
Thank you!
In the most convenient world, form all the creatures on planet Earth only humans are sentient and have ethical worth. I really hope that we live in it, it would mean that there are so much less sufferings to alleviate but it's quite unlikely. There are no reasons why the universe would be so convenient. Most likely there are other sentient creatures that we are torturing with our actions to feed ourselves. And, therefore, veganism is most likely morally correct. But there are obviously less and more evil stances in between. So the idea of estimating "moral worth" of a creature based on the probability that it's sentient makes a lot of sense.
However, these numbers look crazy. In a space of all possible minds sentience may be orthogonal to intelligence, but among the kind of minds that are produced by evolution through natural selection these qualities seem to be highly correlated. And when a report estimating moral weight claims that highly intelligent octopuses, capable of solving complex puzzles, are *less* significant than chickens with tiny brains - this is a clear signal that the methodology is ridiculously off.
The fact that a chicken can in principle live longer doesn't make it more morally valuable while evaluating the evils of factory farming chickens compared to octopuses. If two creature have a life full of torture for half a year and then killed, what matters is how sentient these creatures were during this time, not how long they could have lived counter-factually. If anything, shorter life cycle of octopuses should mean that they are more likely to be sentient from earlier age, while chicken have more probability not to be conscious at the time of the slaughter.
Likewise, Tomasik calculator default values gives a chicken half the moral weight of a pig, which is bizarre if we take into account the difference in the brain size. We also need to take into account that suffering doesn't add up linearly. And the huge second order effect of climate change, towards which beef/milk industry contributes much much then poultry/eggs one.
So in the end, I don't think that the title of the post is correct. I suspect that it's quite likely that eating chicken is, in fact, more ethical than eating beef. On the other hand, turkeys seem to be about as likely to be sentient as chickens but produce more meet per death. So eating them instead of chickens seems a much safer bet.
I'm not sure I understand why you think that brain size and intelligence are the most relevant factor to determine whether a being can suffer ? Surely we'd wouldn't think that making human babies suffer is more acceptable since they have a smaller brain and can't solve complicated puzzles.
Overall, neuron count is probably a poor proxy for moral value : https://rethinkpriorities.org/publications/why-neuron-counts-shouldnt-be-used-as-proxies-for-moral-weight
"We also need to take into account that suffering doesn't add up linearly."
How do you know that, and how do you know the weight of different kinds of suffering ?
Given these uncertainties, I think it's be risky to think eating chicken is more ethical than beef when so many more animals animals are affected (with much worse living conditions)
For the climate, it doesn't sounds like it is the most relevant factor : https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/FzSqMzZpmHdMAft7z/founders-pledge-s-climate-change-fund-might-be-more-cost
> I'm not sure I understand why you think that brain size and intelligence are the most relevant factor to determine whether a being can suffer ?
Because to be able to suffer one has to be sentient and it seems that brain size and intelligence is positevely correlated with being sentient as mentioned multiple times in the rethinking priorities link. This is not the full story of course, but it gives us a decent sanity check which the calculations valueing chikens more than octopuses do not pass.
> Surely we'd wouldn't think that making human babies suffer is more acceptable since they have a smaller brain and can't solve complicated puzzles.
As a matter of fact, I do believe that newborn human babies are not sentient and therefore are incapable of sufferings, but this is a red herring. We are talking about the probabilities of different species to possess sentience not different members of the same species.
> How do you know that, and how do you know the weight of different kinds of suffering ?
Torture vs dust specs mind experiment pushes my moral intuition to this conclusion. The exact coefficients are of course unknown to me, but the direction seems clear.
> For the climate, it doesn't sounds like it is the most relevant factor
I don't understand what you mean here. Beef/milk industry not being the most important factor for the climate change? Or that climate change is itself less important than chicken welfare?. The latter seem to be based on the premise that is itself under question here.
> Given these uncertainties, I think it's be risky to think eating chicken is more ethical than beef when so many more animals animals are affected (with much worse living conditions)
It's a risk either way and I'm confused why so many EAs seem to be so confident that poultry is definetely worse than beef, given all these uncertanities. But eating turkeys instead of chikens seems to be a safe bet. Do you agree?
Ok - regarding the moral weight project, it sounds like the differences in octopuses vs chicken are more linked to different elements of methodology and quality of available evidence.
It can get in the weeds and i'm not going to detail, but this podcast explains why some results are surprising (including a section on octopuses).
https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/bob-fischer-comparing-animal-welfare-moral-weight/#objections-to-the-project-013425
But basically, we shouldn't put too much weight on the exact numbers - it's more about the rough orders of magnitudes.
I understand that there are uncertainties. However, There isn't too much difference in the evidence for sentience for chicken, compared to evidence for sentience in beef. Even if there may be some brain sizes that do not support sentience, it looks likely that it's at a much lower threshhold (especially as there's some evidence for sentience in say fruit flies).
So I don't see anything that would be enough to offset the massive differences in living conditions and numbers of individuals affected when comparing chicken to beef.
For the climate, have you checked the link ? It indicates that the DALY avoided by reducing animal suffering is orders of magnitudes lower than the DALYs avoided by fighting against climate change (even with uncertainty bars).
> Ok - regarding the moral weight project, it sounds like the differences in octopuses vs chicken are more linked to different elements of methodology and quality of available evidence.
As far as I understood, the fact that chickens can live longer lives than octopuses significantly contributed. Which I find to be a huge methodological mistake for reasons explained in the original comment.
> But basically, we shouldn't put too much weight on the exact numbers - it's more about the rough orders of magnitudes.
Well, I believe they got the orders of magnitudes wrong.
> There isn't too much difference in the evidence for sentience for chicken, compared to evidence for sentience in beef.
Of course there is! Brains of cows are bigger and more complex than chickens and have much higher neuron count. This is where I'd take the appropriate orders of magnitudes for moral worth, even if the exact numbers are shaky.
> Even if there may be some brain sizes that do not support sentience, it looks likely that it's at a much lower threshhold (especially as there's some evidence for sentience in say fruit flies).
It's not that some brain sizes in principle are unable to support sentience and as soon as the threshold is reached everyone is sentient. Brains do lots of stuff besides consciousness and there has to be a reason why would natural selection add this extra functionality in the first place. Bigger brains have more slack in this way, therefore we expect that creatures with them are more likely to be sentient, also because we ourselves have enormous brains and are sentient which is the only really available data point for now. As with any other complex ability we should expect consciousness to be substantially correlated with brain size/complexity/neuron count, even though there can be some outliners here and there.
> It indicates that the DALY avoided by reducing animal suffering is orders of magnitudes lower than the DALYs avoided by fighting against climate change (even with uncertainty bars).
It seem to be based on several assumptions which I do not share, including the high probability that chickens are sentient and therefore have moral worth at all - as I said, this is the exact thing under question here. Also most of the uncertainty seem to be applied to dismiss the effects of climate change, for instance the fact that it affects not only humans but all life on Earth.
Ok, I think the fundamental disagreement lies deeper than that then - about what exactly might generate sentience at all.
My prior is that I'm not sure why evolution wouldn't have included something as useful as suffering in animals. Especially as they share nociceptors and millions of years of evolution with humans.
As indicated in the 80000 hours podcast, the fact that neuroscientists use fruit flies to model depression is a very strong indicator, and these scientists are surprised by neurological similarities with humans.
Of course, it's possible that bigger brains actually mean more sentience and more moral value. But unless we can verify it, that feels mostly like guessing what the nature of sentience could be.
I prefer to assume that a similar kind of behaviour in a similar situation can lead to similar mind states.
It's not perfect. There are many uncertainties. However, unless we have A LOT of evidence that bigger brains lead to more sentience, we probably shouldn't farm dozens of chickens in terrible conditions to avoid farming one cow.
This is related to the risk aversion section of the podcast.
For the other points :
I think the welfare ranges do not take into account lifespan - these are the ranges for one hour of pleasure and suffering (or else humans and chicken would be further apart).
I agree with your point on turkeys - but turkeys still seem much worse off than cows.
> My prior is that I'm not sure why evolution wouldn't have included something as useful as suffering in animals.
This prior is fine, but you need to account for the fact that unconscious minds are possible, which we now know very well, as we can create them ourselves and make them solve complex tasks. Sentience really doesn't appear to be a necessity for information processing, more like an extra thing on top of already existent system.
> the fact that neuroscientists use fruit flies to model depression is a very strong indicator, and these scientists are surprised by neurological similarities with humans.
It is an interesting piece of evidence, but not as strong as it might seem. Our brains may have similar mechanisms relevant to similar behaviors, but then human brain may have an extra mechanism for conscious awareness of this behavior that uses the input of the previous mechanism. It totally fits with sentience being an additional entity on top of already existent systems.
> I prefer to assume that a similar kind of behaviour in a similar situation can lead to similar mind states.
I see the appeal of such heuristic but in the post-Turing test age of LLMs it seems to be kind of outdated. Now when we have direct example of entities that can express similar behavior to us for a very different reasons, I think it's wise to be open to such possibility.
> I think the welfare ranges do not take into account lifespan
Hmm. I see. Well, then I'll try to look for the answers in the podcast, thanks for the tip.
> turkeys still seem much worse off than cows.
There are less uncertainties about turkeys. We do not have any reasons to suspect that turkeys are sentient while chickens are not.
In a world where chickens and turkeys can't suffer but cows can, switching from chicken to turkey is net neutral, while switching from chickens to cows is huge net negative, in a world where every animal suffers in the same way switching from chicken to turkeys is net positive, and from chicken to beef is even more net positive. In a world where every animal suffers but somehow proportionally to their brain size, switching from chicken to turkey is net positive, while from chicken to beef may be anything from net negative to net positive. So turkeys seem to be the safe bet, while beef is high risk high reward. And considering how much uncertainty we currently got about the matter, I think we should stick with safer options.
I'm not convinced we shouldn't eat animals (if they have a better than nothing life seems fine to me) but I'm only here to ask a practical question:
How do you find humanely raised beef/dairy without paying extra for all sorts of bullshit about GMO free/no corn feed/organic?
One must also consider elasticities of supply and demand curves: if you give up a gallon of milk, the price will in expectation drop a little, thus making other people consume more milk, though less than a gallon: roughly 0.44 of one. So buying milk is actually roughly half as bad as you claim. Here you can find estimates for those elasticities: https://reducing-suffering.org/comments-on-compassion-by-the-pound/#Elasticities.
Oh interesting.
This is ridiculous. The space of conscious suffering is vastly multidimensional. There are no 'equivalences', especially not between the gathering of a gallon of milk and 70 minutes of baby torture.
For one thing, once an animal is broken, their suffering is much lighter. It's the transition from freedom to captivity that really hurts. The process of breaking a horse is essentially torture-- that's why you hire someone else to do it. After that, the horse is willing to let you ride it for the rest of its life.
I won't contest your essentially random sentience and suffering multipliers. Still, there's a part of the calculation you must add: the difference between confinement and wild life. Wild creatures do not live idyllic lives. They spend half of their time hungry and terrified. Don't measure the difference between life as a confined animal and life as a modern human. Measure the difference between life as a confined animal and life as a wild animal.
In some cases, you will find that the confined animal lives better.
I was very rude in this comment. Feel free to be rude in return. I like a good argument.
I don't really think we know whether it's preferable to be wild, free, terrified, cold, hungry, and subject to predators vs confined bored and safe. I always firmly believed it was obviously superior for cats to be indoor only, where they're safe and live longer (and obviously better for the local birds). Now I'm not so sure. Cats sure like to roam and do their thing. I don't know how we could ever determine this.
We probably can't determine what it's like to be another creature. The subjective experience of others is a huge mystery. That's why it's called the hard problem of consciousness.
There are a few guesses, though. We can estimate the experiences of others by looking at their actions and comparing them to our actions when we were feeling certain qualia. This method is good for reasoning about other humans. It's much weaker when you're trying to understand what it's like to be a chicken, a bean sprout, or GPT-4.
Think of the suicide rate of first world vs. third world countries. This is a human analog for our wild vs. confined animals comparison. People who never experience starvation, deadly violence, or the senseless loss of loved ones in preventable ways often take their own lives more frequently than those who face such hardships. Some think that this is because self-determination, the quality of having your future decided by your actions, is fundamental to life as a human. When you don't have this, when nothing you do seems to change anything, people take the easy way out. I suppose this means that being in a cage would suck pretty bad, even if you're well-fed.
I have taken in stray cats who were so very happy to be inside and no longer cold, scared, or hungry that they never wanted to go outside ever again. And I've raised cats indoors from kittenhood who are always trying to get outside. Though the latter doesn't truly know what "outside" means, so perhaps more weight should be given to the first category. Then there are cats who have always been indoor/outdoor cats and my guess is they're most satisfied with the arrangement. Presumably virtually all creatures (including us) would ideally like to have that best of both worlds situation...the freedom to go have adventures and total autonomy and no rules or boundaries, but also risk...but also a nice safe, warm, well provisioned place to go back to whenever one chooses. I guess that's the ideal, but not an available option for almost any creature outside a few very lucky humans and cats. We don't let any other animal do that.
Moo.
Too bad that the healthiest sources of protein are the least utility-maximizing!
It’s true, though dairy is pretty fine on both counts. You could also eat plants.
Cultivated chicken is almost there!
What about pasture-raised eggs?
Unclear, but my article is about meat eating in typical circumstances
I was thinking the same irt keeping one's own small flock of backyard chickens for their eggs (and as pets). I've thought about this for decades and can't find a moral issue with it.
My neighbor has 4 or 5 who get to wander around the yard, clucking and scratching for insects and doing what they please all day. They go in the coop/fenced in area at night. Seems like a pretty nice life for them, that I can tell by observing them. Of course, every once in a while a raccoon or hawk gets at them and that's a pretty brutal situation. No worse though, and arguably better, than wild birds.
This seems straightforwardly good, even, as long as you keep them in decent conditions.
Edit: I suppose you would increase suffering by buying them as chicks, since whoever is breeding them likely doesn't care about animal wellbeing. I'm not sure how significant is that, probably not that much. And you will likely treat them better than whoever else would buy them otherwise.
Most of the chick breeders grind up baby males.
Right. Maybe a well-lived chicken life is worth that, though. Depends on the elasticities again.
They seems to be the ~best generic label, see https://thehumaneleague.org/article/cage-free. I don't know how to estimate how much numerically better they are, though.
Thanks for the article, you bring forth a very good point, this is worth keeping in mind
What’s your opinion on Wild Caught Fish? The chart has farmed fish, and I know a few pescatarians that maintain that wild caught fish is better than beef.
Unclear but probably bad--Tomasik has a good piece on that.
How ethical is lamb farming? They always seem to be omitted from anecdotes about how bad factory farming is, to the point where I’m wondering if happy lamb frolicking in a field is actually the norm for that species.
Free range chickens decimate local insect populations. They use their talons to shred apart the fecal matter where flies and beetles house their offspring and devour the defenseless baby insects. The only humane thing for us to do is to eat more chicken in defense of the insect nurseries!
Wouldn't that mean you shouldn't eat them?
I believe that evolution (both natural selection and cultural evolution) have given us a Circle of Empathy. Our empathy is not binary (we either have it or we don't) but it does drop off quite rapidly once you get outside the circle. Call this speciesism if you like — in which case, OK. I am speciesist. I think the circle is getting bigger as the generations go by but it's not big enough yet to exclude cows, pigs and chickens! Maybe one day. EXCEPT!…
Industrial farming changes my thinking a lot. In the USA, cows are raised in an absolutely horrific environment. Chickens even worse. It's different in more empathetic countries and I think that changes the calculation. If they figure out how to industrially farm octopuses (for example), I would stop eating them. I'm OK with eating the wild ones.
I think it's more complex with pigs and chickens, but it's an easy choice for cows, IMO. I eat them very rarely as a special treat and I make an effort to eat cows that have been humanely raised.
If I were the Head of the Union of Cows and humans offered me the option of a life of relative luxury (compared to living in the wild with the wolves and the leopards) but at the end of my life, they get to eat me, I would take that deal. I think if we stop eating cows, that will be the end of cows. They'll be extinct in a couple of generations. I'd rather cows stick around, even if they ultimately get eaten.
Related question: should we ban leopards from eating antelopes to save the antelopes from a horrible death. If not, why not?
Chickens don't lay eggs under stress.
I was under the impression that it's easier to find satisfactorily ethical eggs in a grocery store (https://vitalfarms.com/organic-pasture-raised-eggs/) vs. dairy. Vital farms AFAIK doesn't kill male chicks and actually lets the hens live in decent conditions.
I will look more into this because I may flip to lacto-vegetarian.
Question: how can you on the one hand claim “speciesism is wholly indefensible” but then on the other have a sentience multiplier per species? Is the latter based solely on average “natural” lifespan?
I no doubt have other issues with - and disagree with - your assertion that “speciesism is wholly indefensible”, but just starting by explaining the apparent contradiction would be helpful.
Speceisism is the claim that species matters inherently. Obviously it matters in that it correlates with other things that matter but it doesn't matter in itself. So if cows were as smart and sentient as people they'd matter as much.
But you write it as if black flies matter as much as humans. At least that’s how it plainly reads in your piece showing black flies on your chart.
And you say “wholly”. So it reads to me that you are saying it is morally indefensible to deliberately kill a silkworm or a black soldier fly. Do I have that right? And if not, then in what sense that matters is “speciesism is wholly indefensible” a meaningful statement?
Or are you in fact agreeing with my common sense intuitions but you just happen to use a very confusing phrase that to the uninitiated sounds like the opposite of what you actually mean?
I did not in fact write that. Speceisism is wholly indefensible in that caring about species in itself is indefensible.