2022-Moral Weights of Animals, Considering Viewpoint Uncertainty

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Abstract

Many utilitarians would like a number to use to evaluate the moral impact of actions that affect animals. However, there is a great disagreement among scholars involved with animal ethics, both about how much different animals can suffer and how much that suffering morally matters. To illustrate this uncertainty, while showing as a proof of concept that it may be possible to produce useful estimates in spite of it, we ran a Monte Carlo simulation that samples the ranges of major viewpoints scholars hold in the field, to show a spread of uncertainty for how we should treat six representative animals: crickets, salmon, chickens, pigs, cows, and elephants. The results show that the uncertainty is very large, with a 90% confidence interval ranging between an animal having no value and being valued as much as a human being. More research, in the form of expert surveys and a thorough and rigorous literature review, would be required to produce better estimates, but as an illustration, we present 20% and 40% confidence intervals, as well as the median and geometric mean, based on weighting the theories according to our informal estimate of their prevalence in the literature.

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Author Biography

Richard Bruns is an economist specializing in cost-benefit analysis of public health policy, and is interested in applying the methods of cost-benefit analysis to a wider range of problems and decisions.

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Please make the donation in support of Richard Bruns's work at The Center for Health Security at John Hopkins University

Citation

Richard Bruns, Jim Davies (2022). Moral Weights of Animals, Considering Viewpoint Uncertainty. Seeds of Science. https://doi.org/10.53975/k36y-md1m
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