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.

A Moral Obligation of Assistance from Hardin and Deaton

Paul Fischer

2/21/2017

Professor Mark Budolfson

A Moral Obligation of Assistance from Harden and Deaton

This paper will analyze the moral obligations which exist to provide for social communication and governance factors in primitive models of economic and environmental exchange. There are multiple ways of accomplishing this goal, ad to do so logical premises will be expounded while confounding arguments are presented and summarized. Finally, the use of the Franciscan paradox and the recently revealed resolution to that paradox which had been lost for over 700 years will be used to resolve any remaining reservations in relation to the expansion of correct and dismissed outcome scenarios.

Monetary Grounds for Providing Assistance: Economy and Indifference

Deaton identifies a monetary grounds for assistance to developing nations on the basis that the cost of saving a life there runs an average of a thousand times less than a similar operation in the developed world (Deaton, 268). He then proceeds to identify four possible reason for the discrepancy in efficacy of aid provided which include moral indifference, misunderstanding, misdirection, or inefficiency or harm of the aid which is being provided (270).

This last reason is featured in Harden as primary grounds for attacking the argument. Allowing Indian populations to swell by allocating sufficient aid resources would ultimately result in the destruction of the entire population, accordingly, as the environment is degraded it is argued. The critical piece of data which is missed in this critique is the expansion of the economy with the allocation of aid, which empirically is greater than the value of the aid itself (Deaton, 273).

In order to properly analyze this topic, it is necessary to deconstruct the argument, which will draw from lecture (Budolfson, lecture). For a first example, it can be viewed as an example in which a man is walking by a drowning child. Then no effort produces a very great impact and there are virtually no qualifications, assuming bene faccii, that the aid would not be provided. This is not always the case however, so some complexity must be introduced.

Goats and the Exclusion of Monopoly

The question of competition is addressed in Harden implicitly with the discussion of illegal immigrants. To address this question, one can imagine 5 families which are competing for equal share of a pasture while maintaining maximum efficiency. The pasture, however, can only support 17 goats before the entirety of the system collapses, making the 18th goat a negative decision no matter what. It should be seen as obvious that each family would take 3 goats and raise them on the pasture.

Due to the primitive nature of this construct there can be no sharing the property; that is more realistic for real-world economic scenarios in which two industries are not compatible on the same river: the factors of production must belong to one family or the other. There are two or three fair weather solutions which maximize the solution which compromise giving the bonus goats to one or two of the families or of creating a 6th smaller family which has only two goats.

At this point, the importance of a monopoly as a factor arises. Either way, a war between the families creates a family with the extra goats as the smallest family is consumed or the largest family begins to pick off the others. Maximum efficiency is offered at the cost of enslavement of 80% of the population, assuming actions in the greatest self-interest.

The only effective way to resolve this proposal is to publicly raise the two extra goats and sacrifice them, and this effectively prevents any of the families from cheating while offering the least cost to efficiency as security against enslavement. In terms of aid this constitutes an extension of Deaton’s argument in which the economic proceeds from the previous generation using aid is used to guarantee the larger amounts of aid required by a following generation. That is an effective and airtight solution to the premises which have been offered using the logical sequences which are assumed in analysis.

Fishermen and Temporal Constraints to the Catch

Sara Ostrum offers a slight shift in the analysis by pointing to fishermen who are able to share the proceeds, which applies to microeconomic competition. In this case, monopoly is assumed as no one can effectively monitor or determine the efficacy of any group of fishermen, and the solution is found in temporal boundaries whereby the fishermen divide the amount of time spent in the the fishing zone rather than the catch or product. This introduces two new concepts in form, that of positive incentivization and of natural regulation.

Rather than affording fines or punishments to the fishermen, a coffeehouse which is the favorite place for all of the fishermen to visit serves as an incentive for them to stay out of the water when they are not permitted to fish (Ostrum, 20). This effectively prevents monopoly while standardizing the catch of individual fishermen. It would not work for the families of shepherds because a family could not raise all those goats without enslaving other families. That is an example of a slight shift in premises resulting in quite radically different optimal solutions.

The Franciscan Paradox Revisited

The lost manuscript of St. Francis of Assisi was recently discovered and presented at the University of Vermont. He was a Saint famous for becoming naked as he gave his belongings away to people in the middle of the street. While coming from a wealthy family, he had an intense conversion in 1205 and, by the time he was Stigmatized, gathered a following which included Bishops and Popes. It was well known at the time that Francisco alto Christo and that his life would touch millions for generations. Franciscan friars remain a dominant force in the Catholic Church and his teachings are holy for Christians of all denominations.

His paradox occurs after the decision to provide aid has been made. As he became more famous, he realized that the value of his power was greater than it had been even as the son of a wealthy merchant. Justifying the incentive to give as a selfless act with the reality that power can be obtained by giving gifts has become known as the Franciscan Paradox and remains the final consideration in determination of whether to donate or provide aid. The official answer was largely lost for 700 years, but the new documents provide context to the quote “we cannot fit a square into a circle every day” as part of a Franciscan prayer. Of course the temporal nature of the argument plays a critical role in interpretation of this as well: the natural solution which presents is that there will not always be times of need. Goodness of intent can be assumed, as long as the provider does not then try to expand their power by creating problems once their aid has been received.

References:

Mark Budolfson, “Environmental Ethics: Philosophy and Logic”, Spring 2017

Angus Deaton, "How to help those left behind", in The Great Escape

Garrett Hardin, "The Tragedy of the Commons", Science

Elinor Ostrom et al., "Revisiting the Commons", Science