is also cited and commonly discussed in effective altruism circles. There are very few that try to tackle what it's like to be a wild animal. And to date, the vast majority of papers on the issue the moral question of what our obligations are toward wild animals. This was one of the first papers to look at this question. In addressing whether animals have positive or negative well-being, Ng arrives at what he calls “the Buddhist Premise,” a claim that under the assumptions of concave and symmetrical functions relating costs to enjoyment and suffering, we should see the dominance of suffering over enjoyment. Is their welfare positive or negative, and how can we figure that out?.Which animals have experiences - and specifically, experiences that can be said to be positive or negative? Those are the experiences we’re concerned about when trying to improve well-being.I think revisiting theory is a promising as we work to establish organizations in wild animal welfare, because the paper was one of the earliest to this question. I'm going to take for granted, and, see what we can assume. These are often controversial terms There are a lot of debates in economics about whether you can quantify and compare these things. I should also note that I'll be using the terms “suffering,” “pain,” “enjoyment,” “happiness,” and so on fairly casually. There could be more suffering than enjoyment, or more enjoyment than suffering. When the error is fixed, the balance of suffering and enjoyment can go either way. ![]() It turns out that this finding is incorrect. Among the many perceptive conclusions he offered that suffering is doomed to dominate enjoyment in the wild, based on a number of reasonable assumptions. The core of the paper is a correction of an error in a 1995 paper by my coauthor, in which he the idea of welfare biology and - in one of the first academic papers on the subject - proposed that we study wild animal well-being systematically. ![]() Our paper is called “ Does Suffering Dominate Enjoyment in the Animal Kingdom? An Update to Welfare Biology.” Today I'm going to present a paper I wrote with Yew-Kwang Ng, an economist at Fudan University, who anticipated many of the ideas in the effective altruism movement decades earlier through his work on utilitarianism. You can also watch it on YouTube and discuss it on the EA Forum. In addition to this result, Groff discusses suggestions for the empirical study of wild animal welfare.īelow is a transcript of Zach’s talk, which we’ve lightly edited for clarity. After analyzing the model used in that paper, Groff found that an error negated its original conclusion, and that evolutionary dynamics imply that enjoyment may predominate for some species. In this academic session, Zach Groff, a PhD student at Stanford University whose research areas include welfare economics, discusses a 1995 paper whose authors argued that nature contains more suffering than enjoyment.
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