#182 – Bob Fischer on comparing the welfare of humans, chickens, pigs, octopuses, bees, and more

80,000 Hours Podcast

"[One] thing is just to spend time thinking about the kinds of things animals can do and what their lives are like. Just how hard a chicken will work to get to a nest box before she lays an egg, the amount of labour she’s willing to go through to do that, to think about how important that is to her. And to realise that we can quantify that, and see how much they care, or to see that they get stressed out when fellow chickens are threatened and that they seem to have some sympathy for conspecifics.

"Those kinds of things make me say there is something in there that is recognisable to me as another individual, with desires and preferences and a vantage point on the world, who wants things to go a certain way and is frustrated and upset when they don’t. And recognising the individuality, the perspective of nonhuman animals, for me, really challenges my tendency to not take them as seriously as I think I ought to, all things considered." — Bob Fischer

In today’s episode, host Luisa Rodriguez speaks to Bob Fischer — senior research manager at Rethink Priorities and the director of the Society for the Study of Ethics and Animals — about Rethink Priorities’s Moral Weight Project.

Links to learn more, summary, and full transcript.

They cover:

• The methods used to assess the welfare ranges and capacities for pleasure and pain of chickens, pigs, octopuses, bees, and other animals — and the limitations of that approach.
• Concrete examples of how someone might use the estimated moral weights to compare the benefits of animal vs human interventions.
• The results that most surprised Bob.
• Why the team used a hedonic theory of welfare to inform the project, and what non-hedonic theories of welfare might bring to the table.
• Thought experiments like Tortured Tim that test different philosophical assumptions about welfare.
• Confronting our own biases when estimating animal mental capacities and moral worth.
• The limitations of using neuron counts as a proxy for moral weights.
• How different types of risk aversion, like avoiding worst-case scenarios, could impact cause prioritisation.
• And plenty more.

Chapters:

• Welfare ranges (00:10:19)
• Historical assessments (00:16:47)
• Method (00:24:02)
• The present / absent approach (00:27:39)
• Results (00:31:42)
• Chickens (00:32:42)
• Bees (00:50:00)
• Salmon and limits of methodology (00:56:18)
• Octopuses (01:00:31)
• Pigs (01:27:50)
• Surprises about the project (01:30:19)
• Objections to the project (01:34:25)
• Alternative decision theories and risk aversion (01:39:14)
• Hedonism assumption (02:00:54)

Producer and editor: Keiran Harris
Audio Engineering Lead: Ben Cordell
Technical editing: Simon Monsour and Milo McGuire
Additional content editing: Katy Moore and Luisa Rodriguez
Transcriptions: Katy Moore