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!

Economists on Ethics and Animals: Blackorby and Donaldson (1992)

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.

The Youth of Slaughtered Animals

In the immediately prior post I noted the young age at which farm animals are slaughtered. In his fine 2014 book Meat Logic: Why Do We Eat Animals?, author Charles Horn provides a table of "Approximate Lifespans" for pigs, cows, and chickens, with entries both for natural lifespans and for ages at slaughter. Pigs can live 10-12 years according to Horn, but are slaughtered at about 6 months; cows can live more than 20 years, but "meat" their demise after 18 months; and, chickens, which live some 8 years naturally, are killed in about 7 weeks. (Veal is another awful story altogether.) That is, chickens get less than 2 percent of their natural lives, though cows get some 8% and pigs some 5%. But given the conditions of their lives, for many of them, the brevity is surely a blessing.

Farm Animal Lives

The fact that people commonly consume meat from pigs, cattle, chickens, and so on means that there are many more of these animals on earth than there otherwise would be. (The statistics from Sapiens repeated in the immediately prior post suggest populations consisting of "about a billion sheep, a billion pigs, more than a billion cattle, and more than 25 billion chickens.") This fact is sometimes presented as a sort of defense of factory farming and human consumption of animal products: the large effective demand for animals ensures more animals are given the opportunity to live. To be an effective defense of meat consumption, however, at a minimum the "life under current conditions is better than no life" claim would have to be true. For pigs that are kept in small crates all their lives, or for chickens crammed into unholy warehouses and subjected to anesthetic-free beak trimmings, the claim itself is at least doubtful.

But if we grant that, for farmed animals, "life under current conditions is better than no life," does that admission serve to justify the pain and torture and early deaths humans inflict upon them? We surely would not think so with human victims: who would endorse, for human children, a "husbandry regime" supposedly justified by the "logic" that "it is OK if we torture you and kill you at a young age, as long as the life that we subject you to is marginally better than not having been born"? [In the background (or foreground) of many discussions of animal welfare is the question, is it morally OK to treat non-human animals with less consideration than we provide to our conspecifics? In arguing "yes," sometimes the points raised are, like the positive-value-of-life claim, surely unacceptable when applied to humans. These points are textbook examples of "begging the question," supporting unequal consideration for non-human animals with logic that would not be convincing when applied to humans: such logic can only be convincing in the case of non-human animals if you already accept that they do not merit equal consideration.]

Another point is that humans don't seem to put any moral stock in trying to maximize the number of positive-net-value lives brought into being. People with substantial resources don't feel compelled to have tons of children, even though additional children would be likely to have good lives; nor do they continually breed their pets to bring more lives into being. Is such reluctance to produce more beings capable of worthwhile lives itself immoral? If not, then is there anything immoral about the reduction of the number of farm animals on earth that would come with diminished demand for animal products?

A variation on this theme is sometimes called "the logic of the larder"; I hope to return to larder-logic in the future...