Bob Fischer, "Why Interspecies Welfare Comparisons Are Both Important And Difficult To Make"

Humans regularly need to make decisions that involve trade-offs across species. When an action or policy might be good for some animals but bad for others, making a principled decision partly requires comparing these welfare impacts in a principled way. This, in turn, partly requires comparing welfare ranges—that is, how much pleasure, pain, and other such states animals can experience—in a principled way. However, our ability to make these comparisons is very limited at present. In this talk, Bob Fischer will discuss why interspecies welfare comparisons are both important and difficult to make. He will argue against using neuron counts as a proxy for welfare ranges and in favor of a more sophisticated framework, and will present some implications of this framework for several farmed species.