Applying the solution to different comparison types

As described in Section 6.2, there are three types of comparisons we might want to make – individual management decisions, use of experimental animals and resource distribution decisions. Here I will examine how the solution applies in these different cases, given the scope and limitations of the similarity assumptions, and how we might go about making comparisons in cases that aren’t covered by this method.

Management decisions for individuals require consideration of trade-offs between harms and pleasures – we might inflict current harms or prevent particular pleasures in order to decrease future harms or increase future pleasures; or we might just need to decide between sets of current conditions with different potential positives and negatives. This requires the use of intrasubjective welfare comparisons. These do not seem to be a different type of comparison in their own right, but rather a special case of intersubjective comparison, in which we consider the two ‘subjects’ to be two possible outcomes for the one individual, or different time-slices of the same individual. These seem like the least problematic type of comparison to make, as the similarity assumptions are most likely to hold in cases where we are talking about the same individual. Even if we think that individuals may change dramatically over time, we can use the inter-individual comparisons described in the next paragraph to make the necessary inferences about particular age groups, treating them as we would separate individuals.

In animal welfare science, measurements made on one group of animals will need to be compared to those made on different groups of experimental animals, as well as extrapolated to other members of the species. Both of these require that the similarity assumptions discussed in the previous section hold. In these cases, it seems highly likely that they do. Experiments of this type are almost always performed within a species, which gives us the justifications from analogy and shared evolutionary history. Further, they are often segregated for subgroups such

as age/sex classes to see if there are differences, which adds further strength to the similarity assumptions within these classes. Given our justifications for applying the similarity assumptions in these cases, we have good reason to be confident in the comparison of experimental groups in welfare studies, and the extrapolation of these results to other members of the species.

The final application of intersubjective welfare comparisons is not so simple. This is institutional (or individual) decision-making about the distribution of resources between animals in order to achieve the best outcome. In cases where a single type of animal is held, this shouldn’t be an issue, as we can use the similarity assumptions to make comparisons and apply a basic utilitarian calculus. For example, on a dairy farm, we can use the similarity assumptions to make relevant comparisons to assess whether we would have greater overall welfare benefit through the provision of soft bedding for calving or higher quality food to pregnant cows, based on comparisons of the welfare increase under each condition and the number of animals likely to be affected. But many such decisions will involve multiple species, such as governmental investment in agriculture, interventions on wildlife, and in zoo management and husbandry. Think again of our zoo manager trying to decide between underfloor heating for a lion or aquarium furniture for a group of lungfish. Here we have two such disparate species that it is unlikely that the similarity assumptions will apply. It is perfectly plausible that lungfish and lions have completely different scopes for intensity of welfare; so that the heights and depths of lion experience may just be of a different scale to that of lungfish. It is also extremely improbable that there will be overlap in the types of indicators used to measure welfare in each species, let alone that they will be subject to the same processes linking subjective welfare to indicator outcomes. All we have is information about the benefit to the individuals – we know the lion will benefit from its heating and the lungfish from their furniture, but we cannot compare either their levels of welfare, or the degree of benefit each might receive.

There does not seem to be any objective standard to which we can appeal in order to convert units of lion welfare into units of lungfish welfare, and so we cannot make meaningful comparisons. But we still want to have some means of comparing the welfare gain to the lion from its underfloor heating to the gain of the lungfish of having new logs to explore and shelter in. As it stands, the only comparison we can make will be that of valence. As the zero-line of neutral welfare experience is the same for all individuals, we can at least rank lion and lungfish welfare according to whether it occurs above or below this zero line. For example, it could be that that the lungfish are currently experiencing negative welfare through the stress of being

exposed without exhibit furniture, and the lion positive welfare, being happy enough already but simply made happier with extra heating. Here we could make a simple valence comparison and say that the lion has better welfare, without needing to know anything about magnitude. However, this will not work in cases where both are above or below the zero line as we then cannot compare how far above or below they sit and so the solution is only of limited use.

One possible solution is to use some other capability as a proxy for welfare capacity – something like cognitive complexity. The idea here being that cognitive complexity might underlie the capacity to experience certain ranges of subjective welfare, so we could take a proportional increase in welfare for a more cognitively complex species to be greater than that for a less complex species. This sort of option would be particularly appealing to those who might think that cognitive complexity is a strong influence on the type and intensity of experiential states; in this chapter – indeed most of the thesis – I have been working with the assumption that (at least in the animal case) experiential states are somewhat simple and separate from cognition except insofar as it concerns which stimuli are likely to produce which experiences. This is not an issue there is space to explore here. Evidence to the contrary would not change much of what I have had to say throughout, except in making the case more complicated. In this instance, a strong link between cognition and affect would give us more reason to try and pursue this line of capacity-based proxies.

Cognitive complexity as a proxy is a commonly used division to separate out human welfare from that of other animals (McMahan, 2002). It is also becoming increasingly common in calculations of animal suffering under different production regimes, e.g. for use in Effective Altruism initiatives29_{. Different proxies have been considered here, including brain size,}

number of neurons, and connective complexity. There is perhaps some intuitive pull to the idea that size or complexity of the brain may relate to the potential breadth and depth of subjective experience. We might want to think that perhaps the pain of a cat just cannot reach the same intensity as that of a human.

The problem with this solution is that it relies on an assumption about the relationship between cognitive complexity and welfare, for which there does not seem to be a method of validation without running into the problems already described in this chapter. We do not have direct access to information about the welfare capacity of different organisms, thus we cannot simply check whether cognitive complexity correlates with welfare potential. We would instead need to make assumptions about these links, and these assumptions would then need to

be made explicit, and justification provided for them. As it stands, we don’t currently have strong reason to think that cognitive complexity correlates with welfare capacity (Browning, 2019b). Future work in understanding the mechanisms for production of sentient experience may provide answers leading to valid proxies, but this is not yet the case. What would be required would be an overall theory of cognitive function and affect, that could be tested independently of these problems.

Instead, in these situations in which we do not think the similarity assumptions hold, we may take the third solution described earlier for the human case and look at alternative methods of decision-making that do not involve direct comparisons between welfare. As described in Section 6.4.1, use of an alternative proxy is unlikely to help in the animal case. Neither are the alternative ethical frameworks of maximin, Pareto, or sufficient threshold. The most promising alternative is probably an equal consideration of interests view, where the interests of each individual are given the same weighting, regardless of absolute strength (Fleurbaey, 2016). This would fit in with a Kantian-style ethics in which each individual holds the same moral status (Sebo, 2018)30_{. This would ensure that a lungfish gets its best possible welfare and a lion}

gets its, despite potential differences in intensity between them. This is not because we have strong reason to think that the maximum welfare of a lungfish and that of a lion are of a similar level, but because we assign the same value (a moral value, rather than a measurable empirical welfare value) to the welfare of each. That is, we could say that allowing a lungfish to achieve its maximum welfare level is of equal moral importance as allowing a lion to achieve its, even if it turns out that the lion actually experiences three times the welfare intensity at its maximum than the lungfish do. In the absence of any decisive information about the relative welfare of the different species, this seems like perhaps the most sensible principle to apply.

Once we apply such a principle, we can then use something like the zero-one rule and assign the 0-1 scores to the maximum and minimum welfare levels of each animal, based on the relative importance of these states rather than their comparative value. Using these, we can then make our decisions through assessing different actions based on how far up their own scale each species might move – for instance, we might prefer the lungfish furniture if we have a 20% increase for each of the 10 animals, where the lion only has a 30% increase for the single individual. Instead of comparing improvements on a single objective scale of absolute ‘welfare units’, we would instead compare how much difference they make relative to the individuals 30 _{There is also the possibility of exploring different degrees of moral status, though this is likely to rely on the}

types of considerations discussed throughout the chapter – if a lungfish and a lion have a different moral status, it is most likely to be a result of their different welfare capacity (which we’ve established we can’t determine).

under consideration and rate them this way. This situation, while not empirically ideal, seems

to capture much of what is important when making such decisions, such as giving equal weight to the interests of different individuals.

In the absence of the possibility of making determinate comparisons, an equal consideration view is perhaps the best we can do. Whatever principles we use for ethical decision-making in these cases of uncertainty about comparative welfare, they are likely to be specific to context and background values. Despite how one decides to make decisions in these cases, what is most important to highlight is that we shouldn’t attempt to make direct comparisons of welfare, as this is highly unlikely to lead to reliable results of the type we want.

6.6. Conclusion

When measuring animal welfare, there is a problem in making comparisons between individuals, as doing so relies on background assumptions about similarity that require justification. In the case of animals of the same species, we have reasons of parsimony arising from analogy and shared evolutionary history that can justify the use of these assumptions. In the case of comparisons across species, we cannot justify such assumptions and instead need to use different ethical or distributive principles to make the decisions in which we may otherwise have wanted to use comparisons.