Wow, congrats!

Out of curiosity, are you able to share why you're leaving?

Exciting results! Is the RCT written up in more detail anywhere? I'm confused by the current reporting because it seems to compare pre-post intervention results, rather than treatments and controls. Also, how was the control group set up? (Eg, no intervention, active control, waitlist control etc)

I agree this would be an implication of such a bar and that it seems demanding, to say the least! I'll reiterate I have a great deal on this and related topics. That said, I do think the answer is potentially yes, or that those lives were possibly mostly instrumental in getting to a world where some lives were worth creating.

I think it's also notably "convenient" that the bar was crossed so recently; perhaps the bar is even higher and we have largely not yet reached it. Of course, this seems like a very counter-intuitive conclusion, although I think most conclusions on the topic will be.

This is a great video, congratulations to all involved! It seems like it could be valuable in getting the word out and increasing engagement on the issue. I also thought the production value was high and the story compelling.

Who is the intended audience? I think it may be too technical for a general audience, and might not be effective in conveying it's message to such an audience. Was there any audience testing involved in the script writing and production process? I would be interested to see work akin to what I've worked on re:factory farming documentaries.

Thanks, Vera, appreciate your responses here! I'll have to learn more about Frick's work at some point.

I think my key uncertainty remains what sorts of lives are acceptable to create? My intuition is that the sorts of lives cage-free layer hens live are still far from worth creating. For example, to my mind, lives of sufficient quality probably have meaningful availability of individual moderate-to-high-quality health care—so that an individual would not die due to infection of a minor wound or a condition requiring surgical intervention. I think this bar makes it quite unlikely that lives on CAFOs would ~ever be worth creating. But, perhaps that's too high a bar, especially if chickens don't experience, say, anxiety about uncertain health care availability as a human might, even if that health care is never needed.

Perhaps somewhat beyond the scope of your paper, although it does seem like a crux of the argument, do you have a sense for the sorts of lives you think are acceptable to create?

Yup, I posted a longer top-level comment.

Ah, that reasoning makes sense! From my perspective, the difference is (by definition) small, but (again, by definition) very meaningful since it differentiates lives worth creating and those that are not.

If only because I read this whole comment chain, I'll add: I agree, Vera, this sentence is logically correct, but I agree with Clara that it seems like a significant risk of misinterpretation, especially since we should expect far more people will read the abstract than the article itself.

Hi Vera, kind of you to thank me in the acknowledgements and I appreciate your thinking on this problem. I'll flag for readers that I'm on the board of Animal Charity Evaluators, which is discussed in the article, but I'm not speaking for the organization.

As you know, I'm no professional philosopher, but I thought I'd share a few thoughts:

1. Your central argument feels structurally very close to the logic of the larder—the classic position that we do animals a favor by bringing them into existence for consumption, provided their lives have net positive welfare. Do you distinguish between your position and this logic of the larder?

2. The discussion of the Cumulative Pain Framework is valuable, but whether a cage-free hen's life clears the threshold of "net positive welfare" is generally a normative judgment, not an empirical finding. Even hedonic welfare theories still have to make a normative call on how to balance pleasures and pains. Similarly, calling the threshold "a very low bar" is itself a normative stance. I'm sympathetic to Tännsjö and others who argue the conclusion isn't actually repugnant once you think carefully about what "barely worth living" means: if a life is by definition net positive, it's worth having.

3. I'm not familiar with Frick (2022), but my sense is it still proposes an axiology? To the extent that it does, it still needs to face Arrhenius's impossibility results, so it's not clear to me this actually provides an escape from the RC, unless it gives up some other desiderata.

4. Negative utilitarianism is dismissed because the surest way to minimize suffering would be to eliminate all sentient life—you call this "not an option I can take seriously," which is fair. But Frick's Procreation Asymmetry holds that there is no moral reason to create a life just because it would be net positive. Taken strictly, wouldn't this imply a world with no sentient beings is not axiologically worse than a world full of flourishing ones, ~the conclusion you aimed to avoid? (I know Frick responds to this elsewhere, but I'm curious if that coincides with your view.)

5. I fear there's some conflation between the philosophical sense of welfarism ("what is good for someone or what makes a life worth living, is the only thing that has intrinsic value") and the sense in animal advocacy of "favoring tactics and strategies that lead to on-farm improvements in the welfare of animals." It seems possible to accept many of your arguments against philosophical welfarism, while still endorsing animal advocacy welfarism. In the same vein, I think the reccommendation of turning to reducetarianism/abolitionism similarly relies on empirical facts that aren't covered: what are these (cost-)effective reducetarian/abolitionist interventions?

Thanks for the opportunity to spend some time thinking about these issues.