Week 3 - Radical Empathy
Impartiality & Radical Empathy
The case for caring about animal welfare
Factory Farming – 80,000 Hours Problem Profile
This post excludes wild animal welfare
Humility - Acknowledging Past Moral Mistakes
human sacrifice, gladiatorial combat, public executions, witch hunts, and slavery
Why care?
When to morally consider?
If you can make others better off — i.e. increase wellbeing — that’s a good thing to do.
It’s even better to make more individuals better off than fewer.
This is true equally, no matter who those individuals are (as long as, and to the extent that, they are capable of wellbeing).
The hedonistic view
where what matters is the degree of positive vs negative experienced mental states (e.g. happiness vs pain)
The preference satisfaction view
where wellbeing means getting what you (perhaps most deeply) want
Objective list theories
where wellbeing consists of achieving things on a ‘list’ of objectively good states or events, e.g. friendship, knowledge, happiness, love, virtue, wisdom, and health
Nonhuman Animals are probably sentient
Broad similarity with humans
Neurobiological features
e.g., a large brain and a centralised, complex nervous system.
Clear and complex nociception
the physical states and behaviours associated with feeling pain in humans
For example, having fibres that respond to dangerous stimuli (known as “nociceptors”), protective behaviour like wound guarding or limping, responding to painkillers, and learning to avoid things that cause nociceptors to fire.
Other indicators of cognitive ability
like play behaviour89, grief behaviour, mirror self-recognition, tool use, language capabilities, or theory of mind.
Scale
Kill 1.5-4.5 Trillions of farmed animals / year
Trying to compare nonhuman farmed animal deaths to human deaths would be 60 million to 800 billion humans per year
Similar to scale of the immediate consequences of a large nuclear war.
Over the course of a few decades is something like 100 times larger than the scale of the immediate consequences of a large nuclear war.
Vertebrates (e.g. cows, chickens, fish)
Kill somewhere between 400 billion and 3 trillion vertebrates
Most for food, few for sports, experiments
probably 120–210 billion vertebrates alive in farms at any given time
Invertebrates (e.g. octopuses, insects, crabs, snails, shrimp)
1.6–4.5 trillion farmed animals killed per year
350–700 billion animals alive in farms at any given time
Suffering during living
Poor methods for pre-slaughter stunning, and for slaughter itself
Extremely crowded and dirty living conditions
High rates of disease and injury
Particularly poor conditions during transport
Occasional withdrawals of food and water for extended periods
High rates of painful procedures, often carried out without anaesthetic
~95% in factory farms i.e., bad welfare conditions
Trend is increasing
Neglectedness
Approx. 3,000 people working on reducing factory farming suffering
Approx. $400 million dedicated
Comparing with global development (around $70 billion) or climate change (around $60 billion).
Tractability
Development of a really good alternative to meat
Competitive with meat on price, taste, and convenience
Smart
Stop advocating to prevent even more suffering
Anima International were campaigning to end live sales of carp in Poland.
They became worried about carp being replaced with salmon, a carnivorous fish, and as a result increasing the number of fish farmed overall — and so ended their campaign.
Animal agriculture industry won’t fight
Technologies to prevent the conception of male chicks or immunocastration for piglets
Could substantially improve the lives of farmed animals — and many have only small costs for farmers (e.g. in-ovo-sexing, which ensures all chicks born are female, increases the costs of egg production by around 1–3 cents per egg).
Leverage
Corporate Campaigns
companies such as Burger King, Unilever, and Chipotle have agreed to the Better Chicken Commitment, switching to higher-welfare slaughter methods and slower-growing breeds of broiler chicken
Animal Rights
Alternative proteins
Cultured Meat
Facilitators
Economic Efficiency
Hindrances
Taste
Cost of change
Infrastructure Change
Social Norms
Familiarity
Food Safety
Religion
Strategies for improving animal welfare
Last updated