Thanks for your interest in our work!

I think the traditional settings are better for animal welfare, though there are huge differences and I've come to realise that traditional vs. intensive is a bit of a false dichotomy (but it's useful for communication purposes). To lay out my perspective in a bit more detail (I am not an animal scientist or anything and more of a generalist researcher who has read some of the work done by Welfare Footprint Project an others, attended some webinars, etc.):

• I assume the worst settings to be the highly intensive settings without any proper regulations (e.g., factory farms in Europe have at least some welfare standards that they need to adhere to, while in many African countries this does not exist which can lead to really bad outcomes). The growth of factory farming in regions without proper regulation worries me a lot.
• Second worst are probably intensive settings with better regulations (e.g., factory farms in the U.S. with enriched cages).
• I also think that traditional/smallholder settings can be quite bad for animals, if their owners do not have the resources to provide proper care for them (e.g., adequate feed, housing, etc.). The upside here is that there usually aren't that many animals farmed in those settings, but the quality of life can be quite bad as well, I think.
• Semi-intensive or somewhat more financially stable forms of smallholder farming seem better. Not sure where you live, but I am thinking about smaller farmers as they still exist in Europe for example, where they are able to provide proper housing, feed, etc. and have not intensified their production as much.
• The best are probably the kind of settings you envision, where farmers have the required resources and intentionally give animals more space and care about their welfare (organic, pasture-raised, etc.). But I imagine this to be more of a Global North phenomenon.

All of these categories are of course still heavy simplifications (e.g., enriched battery cages and deep littre systems for hens could both fall into the better-regulated factory farming settings category). And of course none of this tells us much about which (if any) of these lives are net positive/negative, but we already discussed that :)

You may find the concept of a "animal welfare Kuznetz curve" interesting. Though I'm not sure how strong the evidence behind this is.

Sorry for the long answer, but hope it's relevant/interesting. I think our top priority should be to avoid the worst outcome on this list (the first bullet point), which is what we are trying to do at AAA. Also because the numbers in that category could grow massively (also think about largely unregulated industries such as shrimp or insect farming).

Final point: I think people strongly underestimate the extent to which animal agriculture is already industrialised in parts of Africa (I did so too before digging deeper into this). This 2022 source cites 60% of hens in Africa being kept in cages. There tend to be a lot of smallholder farmers, but they keep quite a small number of animals per capita, so their animal numbers are outweighed by bigger industrial producers.

Thanks for raising this question, it's something I have thought a lot about as well.

You may find this post interesting, which I wrote just a few weeks ago.

TL;DR: I think it is extremely unclear which lives are net positive or negative and knowing the answer to this question is extremely hard. Factoring in this uncertainty leads to a stronger emphasis on (1) welfare-improving interventions (e.g., moving from factory farming to organic farming) and (2) interventions that reduce the number of lives that very likely seem not worth living (e.g., those of layer hens in battery cages).

I am quite skeptical whether different types of animals in organic farming conditions have lives worth living. But it seems like a reasonable strategy to try to move in this direction.

Thanks for writing this up and for highlighting this weakness in our prioritisation report (example 1).

Since the publication of this report (which was quite an early piece of research for me), I've built a lot more of these models and strongly agree that it's important to not just blindly use a weighted average. (Didn't change anything about our research outcomes in this case, but it could have important effects elsewhere.) Geometric mean is important. I also sometimes use completely different scoring tools (e.g., multiplication, more BOTEC style, as MichaelStJules has commented). It's always helpful from my experience to experiment with different methods/perspectives.
 

Thanks for your comment Cameron and the work you're doing! Wild animal suffering is an area that I think is highly important but I struggle to think very clearly about. That's why I only mentioned it briefly. Thank you for elaborating further on this and linking some resources.

I strongly agree with your point about reducing suffering without affecting population size (significantly). As I wrote in reply to Mo's comment, I think that welfare-improving interventions that do not have strong population effects seem more promising, if we are uncertain about the net value of affected lives (as I am).

I am adding here in anonymized form some feedback I received privately and my responses, since I think this may be helpful to others.

First, here is the feedback:

I was recently reminded of how important these considerations around moral uncertainty are when we had a discussion about this with X. Although all of us were interested in global health/development, we ended up having quite different moral intuitions on saving lives vs. the value of improving them. These differences led us to choosing to work on very different projects with very different people than we would have chosen without these conversations.

I wanted to quickly share some reflections that I had on the article based on the thoughts that I have collected on this issue over the last couple of weeks (apologies for this being not super well laid out):

• Before vs. after birth: in the article you seem to be making a distinction between GHD extending lives and AW reducing the number of animals suffering. In theory there are two ways to reduce the number of animals suffering, (a) by killing more of them faster and (b) by preventing them from coming into existence in the first place. Your argument seems mainly based on scenario (a). (a) also feels morally very different from (b) although they end up with the same number of sentient beings alive and suffering. I am wondering if this factor also makes up part of your preference for one over the other in addition to the arguments you are making? Translating this into the GHD space, family planning vs. letting very sick people die faster feels morally very different.
• Non/somewhat-utilitarian perspectives: I would argue that there is quite a bit of moral uncertainty on measuring the value of life in utilitarian terms and what the unit of measurement should be. It also seems like most value systems/religions place quite a large value on saving a life and this seems to push against the general norm which might be an indicator that we are crossing some moral guardrails. I personally place quite a bit of value in my moral parliament on preference utilitarianism. This in turn leads me to believe that in theory people who perceive their lives as net negative could take their own life if they choose to do so (although there is quite a bit of complexity around that of course).
• Letting the same argument lead us to GHD as the answer: One could argue that the unit of suffering could be made up by the following factors: [Sentience of experience x level of suffering of that experience]. The level of suffering for most animals seems a lot higher than the level of suffering for most people. Having said that, regarding sentience, the certainty is higher in humans than in most animals. Potentially, these factors could somewhat cancel themselves out? If you then want to apply the same framework (being uncertain if lives are net positive) to humans, that could lead to cause areas such as family planning and mental health.

Implications/ questions/ takeaways:

• FAW implications: It seems like we are roughly working on the following categories in animal advocacy: (1) bringing less of them into existence and (2) making their lives better while they are in existence. If we have high certainty that their lives are net negative, should we look more into approaches that reduce their lifespan/killing large proportions of them faster?
• GHD implications: If one would apply the same arguments to GHD, maybe focusing on family planning or mental health could be a good place to land? One could also argue that family planning would be the ultimate FAW intervention if it counterfactually reduces the number of people born.

And here is my response:

Thanks for sharing those reflections. Some thoughts/responses:

• In the context of farmed animals, I think that "killing more of them faster" could have quite a few negative flow-through effects. For instance, broiler chickens are bred exactly in a way that makes them grow and gain mass very quickly, which leads to a lot of welfare problems because their bodies cannot handle it. Also, I fear that just making this process more efficient will simply then lead to higher production capacity and even more animals being farmed (rebound effect - if something becomes more efficient, you don't necessarily reduce the effort spent on it (effort in this case being animal life years) but rather increase output). In theory, yes, killing animals faster could be an option. But I think it is better to pursue options that either lead to less animals being farmed or lead to better life quality. There might be some kind of intervention though that avoids the negative externalities I mentioned and I'd be super interested to hear about such ideas.
• Yes, 100% agreed on the non-utilitarian perspectives. I also wrote a post about this a while ago, that we should put some weight on "common sense morality". I think "saving a life is good" is about as common sense as it gets.
• On the point about "people who perceive their lives as net negative could take their own life", I would refer to the sections where I outline that I am unsure whether we can accurately evaluate the value of our own lives. I think we have very basic instincts that lead us to strongly avoid the suicide option, whether that is rational or not. It's also very important to think about the probably extremely negative effects of someone taking their own life on their environment (family, friends, etc.). So I think there are very good reasons that there are strong social norms against this and I wouldn't want to change that.
• Yes, I agree that we should also apply uncertainty to the sentience of animals. But most AW interventions simply have way stronger welfare effects (excluding the uncertainty around their sentience) that you would have to be extremely uncertain about animal sentience. I don't think that is warranted. I think Rethink Priorities' work on this quite clearly favours AW interventions, even if you factor in significant uncertainty about animal sentience (see their post for the debate week here). As I wrote under "Context and epistemic status" this is closer to the actual reason why I prioritise AW over GHD.
• I strongly agree with you about family planning. I think that these interventions often have positive impacts on the lives already lived, they address the meat eater problem, and they also hedge our bets against the uncertainty that we may be unintentionally increasing the amount of net negative lives on the planet. I love the work Family Empowerment Media is doing, for example.

Hope this is helpful!

Thank you Johannes!

Thank you Mo, you are a well of great resources, as always!

1) The neutral point debate is fascinating and something I should have been aware of. I will dig deeper into this! The IDInsight study is also very interesting and relevant. However, I think it doesn't fully address my skepticism about how rationally we as humans can think about the net value of our own and other lives. I realise that this kind of skepticism is hard to address via studies, but I think there are better ways than surveying people due to the reasons I mentioned.

2) I agree that we should put weight on different moral theories and that those will favour saving lives over not doing so to a very large extent (except for maybe antinatalism and a few others). This is a reason why I am very uncertain about the view I outlined.

Overall, these kinds of considerations lead me to think that it is probably better to save lives than not and this is why I am NOT saying that the number of sentient lives should be reduced across the board. But I have significant uncertainty around this, which somewhat move the needle towards (1) welfare-improving interventions that do not have strong population effects (e.g., cage-free egg campaigns or mental health interventions) and (2) interventions that reduce the number of some of the worst lives lived (e.g., diet change campaigns which lead to less animals being farmed (mostly in factory farms)).

Oh, nice, I didn't see that. Thanks so much Sebastian!

Thanks for the initiative Abraham! This seems like an interesting and valuable experiment.

One crucial question I have: Is it somehow possible to make sure that I can make tax deductible donations? I live in Germany and Effektiv Spenden does not cover all of these cause area options, as far as I know / can see. For instance, I don't think I could donate tax-deductibly to any of the EA Community Building options from Germany.