Espinosa and Treich (2020) on Lives Worth Living

Espinosa, Romain, and Nicolas Treich, "Animal Welfare: Antispeciesism, Veganism and a 'Life Worth Living'”. Social Choice and Welfare, 2020; available at https://doi.org/10.1007/s00355-020-01287-7.

The Espinosa and Treich article examines issues right at the heart of this blog's theme, that there is a continuum (from none to equal) of the potential "valuation" of nonhuman animals relative to humans in judging aggregate costs and benefits or overall welfare. Espinosa and Treich build upon Blackorby and Donaldson (1992), offering a model where humans utilities enter the social welfare function at full (unit) weight, while farm animals enter with weight α, 0≤α≤1. (Complete "antispeciesism" is where α=1.) The social planner maximizes social welfare by choosing the quality of life of the animals (better animal welfare costs humans more) and the number of animals raised for human consumption. Humans value eating animals and don't like to pay for better animal welfare, but humans do not directly care about the level of animal welfare. A key feature of the model is that, if animal lives are "worth living" in the sense that, thanks to decent welfare, the lived utility of animals exceeds the baseline nonexistence utility of zero, then humans might end up eating more animals, as the socially optimal number of animals is higher when animal lives have positive value. That is, better animal welfare might lead to less veganism. The higher alpha, then (equivalently, the less human-centric speciesism), the higher optimal animal welfare, and possibly, the greater the eating of animals. 

Espinosa and Treich supplement their theoretical analysis with a survey in which respondents are given capsule summaries of various living conditions for broiler chickens, and asked to indicate whether they believe if, under the specified conditions, the chickens' lives are worth living. The four lowest-welfare scenarios provided in the surveys correspond to French industrial farming conditions, and most respondents do not find the broilers' lives worth living under those conditions. Therefore, the theoretical case for veganism remains secure, at least if our factory farms are not replaced with something offering worthwhile lives for our proto-food!