Welfare, Smiley Faces (parabolas), and the Technics of Objection

Paul Fischer
5/2017
Professor Mark Budolfson

Welfare, Smiley Faces (parabolas), and the Technics of Objection

  Wong makes the point that standard welfare units can be established in terms of how many life years are lived combined by the experiential hedonism. That is by comparing inter and intra species data for the ability to solve complex puzzles, achieve goals, and other trends it should be possible to create a concrete unit of any animals lost wellbeing should their life be truncated. Elucidating the way in which this can be useful for charities, militaries, policy leaders, and other people in need of research cannot be described effectively enough. Such an index is a holy grail for analysts.
  There can be no such standard welfare unit, however, because application to the real world does not satisfy the requirements for usability. Using the number provided in the study of 23 pigs who are worth one human, it is very apparent that taking the extremes, in which a whole nation were to be sacrificed in order to save a group of pigs with 23 times as many people, it is very unlikely that any human would make the sacrifice. It would take many more pigs to save the nation or justify a declaration of war against the nation plotting to harm these.
  Conversely, there are situations in which poaching necessitates the incarceration or execution of more than 23 humans. In this manner, the symbolic or economic value of a particular animal places it at a greater value than its human counterparts. Prosecuting such

violations are a critical part of maintaining biodiversity and describing the necessary actions to protect our environment.
  These two delimiting factors demonstrate two thresholds at which the standard usability of the welfare units are effective. In order to complete the work, it should be determined that there is not a further use for the measure by completing the analysis at a 25th and 75th percentile level of destruction, as might have been seen in human mortalities a plague borne by a rodent or in a declining bird population as suburban California housing developments expand. In the case of the latter, it can at least be said that many humans have expressed an eager desire to be inconvenienced in order to save a large number of animals. This paper will not delve further into this point.
  Establishment of the unit as a marginal unit does continue to make it useful. This opens it to use in marginal analyses of next unit purchasing power and to compare the value of consumer items across consumer price indices. I cannot take credit for that terminology, which fixes the error in Wong’s work, but instead must give that analysis to Mark Budolfson, my lecturer at UVM. It is too bad Wong did not do so when penning his research, or it could have been laudable from an interstudies perspective.
  One potential objection that is deftly avoided and disregarded by Wong is analogous to that raised by Deaton in response to Peter Singer’s statements regarding the value of a human life. He objects that once one is convinced the fundamental premise of an argument is correct, one must determine the complementary premise to be correct as well. In his case this referred to the efficacy of human rights’ groups to save a life in another country, where there is a low likelihood of long-term longevity, while the lives saved in this country have a high probability of long-term longevity.

  Similarly, it can be argued that there will be problems with implementation of the standard welfare unit once it is appropriately developed for use and comparison across species and populations (intra or inter species comparison can be obtained by holding the hedonic capacity or experiential capacity to one). This will not be a problem because Wong explicitly states that his number is for the purpose of measurement only. What is done with the measurement once it is obtained is up to the researcher. While it is Wong’s responsibility to note that the ratio found is a marginal value and will not work on individual or mass scales at the least, and may need adjustment through a graphical representation for larger populations, it is not within the scope of the paper to address objections such as those raised by Deaton. They argue against the efficacy of the system. 

Notes from Environmental Ethics

Paul Fischer

5/2/2017

Professor Mark Budolfson

Many people think factory farms are bad

$ -> poorest people another problem

.. How to invest $ to the best effect

What has primacy, child or pig?

Some see increase in factory farms as best solution to human suffering, Greenhouse gas emissions.

At what point is x years in chicken suffering equal to life years lost for humans?

Effective towards what altruists see as humanities and environmental challenges, will yield implicit judgements of chicken lifeyears to human life years

Articulation of the concept of a standard welfare unit (SWU)

Experiential wellbeing x duration of life x hedonic capacity

Expeientail wellbeing measures welfare within a species

Hedonic capacity measures wellbeing across different species

This will yield a ratio allowing inferring of the way that effective altruists assume if we were to get an animal to happy farm environment this would make some quantity difference to the life of the animal, and

 implicit in this is the view that a human life is worth 23.4 times as much as an animal’s life, or is the argument that this is a measure of a humans’s life is 23 times as effective as the life of an animal on a happy farm

Measurement of the direction of philanthropic adjustments

Questions of which charities to invest in ultimately and why

Kevin Wong tries to answer which questions will be directed towards

Angus Deaton objections to charities as a description  of the realistic estimates of informations available and the efficacy of the charities

Maybe Angus Deaton is right, maybe not, the question for Wong is what questions need to be answered to prove that an animals life can be measured or valued in a certain way and that a human’s life can be measured in a certain way

Numbers that the effective altruists think are correct

No philosophical conclusion help us see the way you have to think through tings to find what ultimately matters towards understanding how this trade off works and the way that deacon thinks about the quality of aid and other impacts.

There is no judgement that this is the correct way to value human lives, but this is how they are actually valued and optimal allocation of animal vs. human lives, some of those assumptions could be incorrect

Nothing in Wong’s work depends on Deaton’s work, these are independent relationships

Furthermore we can set aside whether these concepts are counterproductive for what we are doing here which is more of a philosophical discussion about the certainty of saving a human life year vs. a human life year in a certain way.

Different objections:

Look if we have to choose between 24 pigs and a person the person is always chosen so 24 cannot be even close to the right number so the law fails

Suppose what Wong did was that he told you what he believed to be the right number and why, you could argue that circumstances would change so that this would no longer be the wright number, but ecosystem dynamics would change in a particular way such that extinction would lead to a disaster, basically a good worry

The sort of number that he has here given the way things currently are, on the margin this law remains true and is implicit in the judgement of effective altruists.

It would be perfectly consistent for them to change this update. Empirical change should not be considered in this systemic evaluation of the value conceptually presented here

The underlying equations he is trying to highlight here would stay the same within the systemic margins

By establishing this value as a marginal value, this becomes a useful tool, without it Wong must provide a parabola of efficacy

Change in standard units of welfare = change in experiential wellbeing (intraspecies) times duration of life times hedonic capacity (interspecies)

Effective altruist endorsement from Peter Singer is the endorsement of the following equation:

SWU’s recovered/ Total cost of Intervention

How many happy animal life years are saved per total investment … unit that is the same between the good and is more effective of measure than Peter Singer’s quality adjusted life years

So in charities affecting humans, the hedonic capacity is assumed to be 1, and is not necessary because other species are not considered, in quality of life indices

Establishment of a legal and regulatory system has additional benefits such as basic governance, and could be very important in a way

In the case of a meteor that might hit some chickens or some humans, is the intent of these numbers to reflect.

These numbers cannot reflect whatever he wants, but these numbers can be selected in a way as to make the ration or one or 2 or .1 as a selector basis arbitrary

Arbitrage of the relationship is not completely accurate, but there is no deep truth towards having a specific value of one unless you are not looking at other species for the hedonic capacity

Our species has a 100% capacity to have wellbeing because we have the greatest value there is, this is in conflict to the example of poaching, where people may be incarcerated for the sake of an animal or even put to death. This is appropriate because of the conceptual parabola that exists empirically around these values as discussed above (that should be noted as marginal in nature).

So to use this anthropologically you can imagine a philosophy accident in which one with 42 years left to live is only left with 50% of their original 70% of experiential well being

One can then use the formula to place the value in life years of the accident as 14 life years of the optimal life and 21 years of the person’s life

Relative to the best life a pig could have

1. Best life a pig could have
2. How good is a life on a farm in Vermont
3. How bad is the life on the factory farm

The best possible life for a pig would be 100%

Standard American farm operation decreases the quality of life index of a pig measured by:

Life expectancy (nutrition)

Infectious disease (health)

interspecies compatibility coefficient (social)

Complex cognitive evaluations and long-term planning are components to hedonic capacity

There must be some way of quantifying different values, e.g.. if entire country is going to starve, we would have to do this at some point

How much would we be willing to pay to avoid such an outcome, implicit in that must be some way of assigning perfectly precise weights to these things

Multiple values with different weights attached to them could easily provide tradeoffs between these valuable items, but at certain thresholds.