Bob Fischer, "Why interspecies welfare comparisons are both important and difficult to make"

This talk took place on February 7, 2023 and was hosted by the NYU Mind, Ethics, and Policy Program.

About the talk
Humans regularly need to make decisions that involve trade-offs across species. When an action or policy might be good for some animals but bad for others, making a principled decision partly requires comparing these welfare impacts in a principled way. This, in turn, partly requires comparing welfare ranges—that is, how much pleasure, pain, and other such states animals can experience—in a principled way. However, our ability to make these comparisons is very limited at present. In this talk, Bob Fischer will discuss why interspecies welfare comparisons are both important and difficult to make. He will argue against using neuron counts as a proxy for welfare ranges and in favor of a more sophisticated framework, and will present some implications of this framework for several farmed species.

About the speaker
Bob Fischer is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Texas State University, a Senior Research Manager at Rethink Priorities, and the Director of the Society for the Study of Ethics and Animals. His most recent books are Animal Ethics—A Contemporary Introduction, published by Routledge in 2021, and Weighing Animal Welfare: Comparing Well-being Across Species, which is forthcoming from Oxford University Press.

About the host
The NYU Mind, Ethics, and Policy Program is dedicated to advancing understanding of the consciousness, sentience, sapience, and moral, legal, and political status of nonhumans, including animals and artificial intelligences. We believe that all beings with the capacity to suffer deserve to be treated with respect and compassion, and that our policies and practices should reflect this. Our goal is to promote research and scholarship that will help to shape a more just and humane world for all.*
*As it happens, this program description was co-authored by GPT-3, a large language model!

Thank you to our co-sponsors for your generous support of this event:
• NYU Center for Bioethics
• NYU Animal Studies