Thanks everybody for participating in this discussion. I spent some more time on this, here are my final thoughts. I thought they would be useful to share for people who stumble on this in the future:

Empirical findings: Very uncertain that organically farmed animals have a life worth living
After posting this, I contacted Animal Equality Germany and Albert Schweizer Stiftung for their thoughts on this. Both made the point that while these labels might be marginally better, how they are implemented in practice is often far from theory (e.g., link, link) and even the highest Naturland standard is not ideal (e.g., 3.000 laying hens in one shed, temporary tethering is allowed for cattle, calves separated from mothers). When I challenged Naturland with an email about this, they claimed that due to data privacy they cannot share any animal welfare checkup reports (announced visits yearly and non-anounced visits for a randomly selected 10%) or make something like live webcams mandatory. They did link to Tierwohl.TV as a project that implemented live webcams but the project pretty much died. Given that these are probably the top 1% of organic farms and the pigs and hens don't look like living their best life, I think it's safe to conclude that "we're not there yet". Side note: check out https://welfarefootprint.org/, they do great work, exactly what I was looking for with the first question I raised above (thanks @Vasco Grilo🔸 for the pointer).

Theoretical considerations: Very uncertain that a "net positive life" is justification enough to farm
As @Stijn and @MarcKrüger pointed out, even on a theoretical level we are getting into murky territory here. Most importantly, following this logic where "a net-positive life is enough to farm animals" quickly leads us to the repugnant conclusion, which I can't stand behind. My personal ethics were strongly influenced by Singer's Practical Ethics, where he argues for preference utalitariansim, and while this of course also has it's problems, it's clear that the farmed animals would have the preference to live in shelters vs on those farms. I don't claim to have the solution to population ethics but these considerations make me uncertain enough to avoid advocating for net-positive animal farming.

Personal conclusion: Be vegan
Given all this uncertainty, for me personally the conclusion is to be vegan. A bit of history because I think it's an interesting case study on how slippery slopes work: After reading Practical Ethics 15 years ago, I decided to be vegetarian because it seemed like the easy solution. I tried the vegan at home, vegetarian when eating out for a while but always ended up eating eggs and cheese again, mostly triggered by living with people who did, inviting people over, or saying "well, I eat it anyway when eating out". Then this slowly escalated to eating meat when travelling, making exceptions for fish and sushi, and most recently eating meat when eating out after my personal trainer put me on a high protein diet, justifying this with "it's not that different from being vegetarian because animals suffer in both cases and are killed in both cases", which eventually led to this post. I think the red line that goes through this is conflict avoidance - I didn't want to go into conflict with friends, partners, colleagues, and people in general. So from now on, I'll embrace the conflict and carry some emergency vegan snacks. Wish me luck ;)

Broader conclusion: Don't advocate for consuming net-positive animal products
I think my personal story is exactly the reason why we shouldn't advocate for consuming animal products of animals that "had a good life". It's super easy to get from there into a habit of eating all kinds of animal products, especially because the places where it's most difficult to be vegan will probably care the least about animal welfare. Following this, I think the answer to question 3 in this post would be "we would consumer more". As also pointed out by @MarcKrüger  and question 2, when it comes to advocacy we of course should also take into account sustainability. It's clear that farming with higher welfare standards needs more land, and probably more resources because the animals would live longer, so also not a good idea to advocate for this (vs veganism) from a sustainability perspective. Nevertheless we should of course keep advocating for higher welfare standards for the animals that are still being farmed.

Thanks so much for writing out all of this!

I am really surprised by the 60% number. Will update my internal model ;)

And fully agree that highly intensive farming with no regulation is the worst of both worlds and very worthwhile to work on. Thank you for that work!!

Thanks! I wasn’t aware of the great work that https://welfarefootprint.org/ is doing, and your attempt to bring it to a total value is exactly what I was looking for. From what I understand the “best” scenarios (cage free hens and reformed broilers) are still below the example standard I discussed here. Would you agree?

Thanks for taking the time to write this! I think it aligns well with what somebody else had shared with me as well privately.

Let me start with where I disagree: I don't share your view that it is unethical under all circumstances to create "humans to be slaughtered". If my life ended painlessly without me knowing and affecting nobody around me in a few years because, plot twist, our universe is just one big farm of some aliens, then that would be a pity because I would've preferred to live another fourty years but I'm also grateful for the fourty years of life until that point that I wouldn't have experienced otherwise. From conversations with friends I do understand that this is not a common view and I understand if yours is different. One reason "it would be a pity" is that of course I had plans for my life and those vanish but here I share the thinking you mentioned that animals probably live a lot less in the future than we do so this might "count less".

On your false dichotomy argument: "Of course it is better to have a net-positive life then not to be born at all. But it is even better to have a net-positive and not to be killed after some (rather short) time." I agree but realistically the options are "no life" or "limited life" (becuase animals are expensive), and if those are the options then I think "limited life" is better. And if the animals truely have no concept of the future, isn't "two animals for half the time" somewhat similar to "one animal for the full time"?

I love how you went from these philosophical points to more practical points at the end, so let me also come back to those. I think no matter the disagreement on the points above, we can both agree that a world without net-negative factory farmed lives is a better world. I personally don't think that alt-protein will result in everybody stopping to eat meat, it is too deeply culturally engrained in so many cultures. At the same time nobody who sees the suffering of animals is supporting these practices. So going from a messaging of "ideally everybody should be vegan and let's trust tech to solve it" to "ideally everybody should treat animal products as something sacred and really care for how they are treated" is something that probably the majority of people could get on board with.

In practice that would probably mean supporting organizations that try communicating along those lines and see if that has a better effect than advocating for a vegan diet. I could also imagine that it has the opposite effect: Normalising animal protein and a slippery slope in the direction of also eating net-negative animal protein.

Thanks! Indeed thinking along the same lines although I have a much stronger intuition that most human and wild animal lives are lives worth living.
From the comment section I liked

• The link to the talk on wild animal welfare - while it makes the point that evolution is complicated and not guranteed to increase welfare welfare for all animals, I think I share their assumption that pain is an evolutionary tool for animals to stop doing things that will harm them (which would stop working if it would be overly abundant). In a similar way pleasure can be argued to encourage taking actions to achieve fitness-improving goals, so you'd expect them to always somewhat balance out unless in niche cases where pain/pleasure don't have an effect on reproductive success (like an especially painful death, or a factory farm where activities from the animals don't have an effect on their fitness).
• The link to the neutral point discussion although most considerations seem more relevant for human lives (e.g., the ethical issues around legalising assisted suicide) I found it interesting that the estimated neutral point moves "down" as people have lower average life satisfaction (e.g., 2 for UK and 0.5 for Ghana and Kenya).

Somewhat unrelated to this but I read your work for Animal Advocacy Africa. How do you look at the welfare of animals farmed in more traditional settings there? E.g., chickens in a village or small cattle herds by roaming tribes like the Kenyan Maasai? Just from looking at them I always guessed that they have a "good life" but curious what you think! From some conversations I understood that factory farming also becomes more prominent in Kenya but the majority still seems to be farmed in more traditional settings.

Yes I heard the same. I had a brief look at their regulation and saw that "No more than 3,000 laying hens may be kept in any one shed" which seems pretty high even if they have more space per hen than with other regulations.

I'll see if I can talk to some experts and get their thoughts on these questions.

Thanks for your thoughts!

On your question: I chose organic because I had initially planned to take the EU Organic one because it’s so wide spread here and has some animal welfare standards. In the end I chose Naturland though because it seems to be stronger on animal welfare, and I wanted to make a strong case.

I am not aware of any reported malpractices as the one you cited for that label but of course there is always a chance to have these outliers.

Thanks for tagging me! Fully agree with you Joseph that an easier way to socialise with strangers at conferences would be great and that's exactly what I'm trying to do with this app. Let me know if you know anybody organising conferences or communities for whom this could be helpful.

Thanks so much for steelmanning my argument and looking for some research yourself! And I share your intuition that some consumption seems zero-sum around status. I do think though that my smartphone is giving me tons of value but that's a different discussion probably haha

Thanks for that! And for making the ideological ickyness visible. I think a lot of people, me included, feel like this. And thanks also for acknowledging the accounting part of the framework. It does rely on a similar relationship though that money spent represents value delivered. So we would have to assume that companies are more rational in their spending choices.

If I understand you correctly, you are questioning three things
1) That there is a marginal relationship between income and life satisfaction at high incomes
2) If there were a relationship, that consumption is a good predictor of contribution to life satisfaction
3) That Elon Musk could be the most impactful person alive

Let me try to address each one

1) For this I will just defer to the studies referenced in Our World In Data:  "Higher personal incomes go together with higher self-reported life satisfaction" suggests to me that also at high incomes there is a marginal relationship between income and life satisfaction.

2) If we accept 1), then it's very likely that your spending will be predictive of your life satisfaction. I share your intuition that spending becomes more volatile and impulsive, but if we consider similar amounts on a percentage level, and thereby a similar level of contribution to the WELLBY measure, I think it's fair to assume that somebody who earns $100k will be as diligent about spending $1k as a person earning $1k will be about spending $10.

3) You make the point that Elon relies on government spending. I think this is a valid one because that is far far away from actual consumer life satisfaction and the influence of each citizen and the effect on them is only very very indirect. So maybe the government just spent the money badly (I'd argue though that it's much better spent than on NASA). If, however, he would not rely on these and make most of his money directly from consumers, I think accepting 2) would have to lead us to accept 3) unless he were in some industry that tricks our consumer choices, like the addictions you mentioned, I think he doesn't.