Charles Blackorby and David Donaldson, "Pigs and Guinea Pigs: A Note on the Ethics of Animal Exploitation." The Economic Journal 102: 1345-1369, November 1992.
The leading general economics journals are not exactly replete with articles centered on the treatment of nonhuman animals, but they are not totally bereft of such articles, either, thanks mainly, I think, to Blackorby and Donaldson (1992). Here are some notes about this outlier of an economics article...
Human use of animals for food and research imposes harms on animals -- but by increasing the demand for animals, these exploitative uses result in many more animals being bred than the numbers that otherwise would be brought into existence: if humans didn't eat cattle, the world would have a lot fewer cattle. (Right now, there are nearly one billion cattle in the world.) So perhaps, if the average animal has a life that is worth living, despite the human-imposed ravages, one could argue that human exploitation of animals is good, on net, for the animals. (This "logic of the larder" has come up before in Animals and Econ.) Blackorby and Donaldson offer a structured examination of the possible trade-off, where animal exploitation simultaneously imposes direct harms but indirectly increases animal populations and possibly improves some measures of overall welfare.
Comparing overall wellbeing across situations with different quantities of "beings" is not a straightforward exercise. Blackorby and Donaldson invoke "critical-level utilitarianism", which is one approach for making such comparisons. In doing so, they also employ Singeresque equal consideration, where the weight given to the wellbeing of a creature is independent of what species (human or nonhuman) the creature happens to be. So, two states of the world with equal numbers of creatures would be compared on a classical utilitarian basis, by the sum of the wellbeing of each creature.
With different numbers of creatures or different lifespans, the evaluation of social states still involves summing lifetime utilities (so it is a form of aggregate wellbeing, not per capita wellbeing, that ranks states), but with some twists. A hedonically neutral life is normalized to a lifetime utility of zero. What is summed is the excess of individuals' lifetime utilities above some specified critical value. Consider two situations (A and B) that are identical, except that state B has one more individual than does state A -- all the individuals "shared" between the two states have the exact same lifetime utility whether they are in state A or state B. Is state B preferred to state A, because B has everything A has plus one more creature? The answer depends on whether that individual's lifetime utility (in state B, the only state that has that individual) exceeds the critical value: if the creature's utility exceeds the critical value, B is better than A. If the creature's utility falls short of the critical value, A is preferred to B. "Higher" critical values, then, make it more likely that additional creatures per se do not make social states more appealing. Indeed, if the average utility is below the critical value, adding more folks with such an average utility would make the situation worse. (Classic utilitarianism can always make situations better by adding more individuals with above-neutral hedonic evaluations.) If the critical utility value is 3, "a population of [size] one with a utility equal to 4 is preferred to a population of [size] two with utilities of 4 and 2 [p. 1348]." Nonetheless, killing the person with utility of 2 does not improve the social state: that person's lifetime utility is lowered by the death, and the utility of any creature alive for any part of a "state" counts towards that state's evaluation. (But the birth of someone with a lifetime utility of 2 should be avoided, as that would lower the evaluation of the second state: killings of existing creatures and births of new ones do not have identical effects on measuring overall wellbeing!) A lifetime utility can fall below the critical value if the per-period hedonic payoff is low, or if the lifetime is short (as it is with farm animals). In principle, this set-up can provide a basis for making claims about optimal population sizes as a function of the critical wellbeing level. The authors give an example where it is better to mistreat a single mouse three times for research purposes than it is to mistreat three mice, one time each.
Further complex developments (dozens of equations, eight graphs) fill out much of the article, but from my perspective, they are of marginal interest. Section V (pages 1363-1365) and the Conclusion (1365-1367) are more pertinent; the former compares the critical-level utilitarianism framework with other ethical systems. The authors note the centrality of the critical utility level (possibly different for different species) to their framework, and suggest that for "simpler animals" who lead "less coherent lives," a sub-human critical utility level might be appropriate.
The Conclusion features the author's answers to some fundamental questions at the human/animal nexus. "There is a case for raising animals for food, but it is possible that the ethical vegetarians are right that the optimal level of meat consumption is zero [p. 1366]." The case for exploiting animals for useful medical research is stronger, but replacement and reduction and refinement are called for here, too, up to a point. Also stronger is the case for reducing our consumption of meat, and for providing better conditions for animals than profit-maximization alone would offer. A tax on exploitative uses of animals is probably helpful in moving us closer to optimal population numbers.
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