- Authors: Dean Spears, Mark Budolfson
- Chapter in: The Routledge Handbook of Animal Ethics
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Abstract
Animals, like humans, experience different levels of well-being depending on decisions made by others. As a result, the well-being of animals must be included in any full accounting of the well-being consequences of decisions. However, this is almost never done in large-scale policy analyses and investment analyses, even though it is common to quantify the consequences for human welfare in these decision analyses. This is partly due to prejudice, but increasingly also because we do not currently have good methods for quantifying animal well-being consequences and putting them on the same scale as quantified human well-being consequences. We might call this ‘the problem of interspecies comparisons.’ This important barrier to including animal well-being in decision-making is the result of an insufficiently developed theory and practice of animal well-being and its relation to human well-being. This handbook chapter explains the problem of interspecies comparisons, explains recent research that develops methods to overcome this problem, and includes animal welfare in rigorous policy and investment analysis (e.g., in analyses of optimal public policies, analyses of optimal philanthropic investment, and so on).