Conference to be held on Friday-Saturday October 18/19, 2024. This conference is organized by the Duke Center for Law, Economics and Public Policy (CLEPP) and co-sponsored by CLEPP and the NYU Mind, Ethics, and Policy Program.  

A vast literature now exists on the ethical status of non-human animals (for short, “animals”). Much of this scholarship is utilitarian, going back to Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation (1975) and much earlier, of course, to Bentham. Another substantial portion is rights-based, as in Tom Regan’s The Case for Animal Rights (1983). Relatively less work addresses the status of animals for purposes of broadly egalitarian ethical views. “Broadly egalitarian,” here, includes telic welfare-egalitarianism, prioritarianism, and sufficientism; these views modified to incorporate considerations of desert, responsibility, or opportunity; deontic versions of these views;  relational egalitarianism; and accounts of distributive justice framed in terms of resources rather than welfare or desert/responsibility/opportunity-adjusted welfare.   

How animals figure in such views is, to be sure, a topic that some scholarship has taken up. Shelly Kagan’s How to Count Animals, more or less (2019) is a prominent recent example. But the question of animals and equality has been less central to the literature on animal ethics than other topics.

This conference, “Animals and Equality,” will focus on the role of animals in broadly egalitarian ethical views. Both philosophical scholarship and scholarship in welfare economics/social choice theory is invited. On a different axis, we invite contributions arguing that animals have full status within a broadly egalitarian view; alternatively, arguing that animals have diminished status or fall outside the scope of such view; and scholarship exploring the details of how to incorporate animals into a broadly egalitarian account. Other work on animals and broad egalitarianism also falls within the scope of the conference (for example, analyzing the questions that animal well-being poses for egalitarianism among humans).

There is limited seating space at this conference and, as of July 2024, only a few remaining spots.  Please contact Matt Adler if you are interested in attending.

The AWE Working Group—with generous support from Brown University’s Department of Economics and Center for Philosophy, Politics, and Economics—hosted an interdisciplinary conference on the economics of animal welfare on July 11 & 12, 2024. 

This conference built on successful workshops on this topic at Duke University, Stanford University, and the Paris School of Economics, including a range of topics that apply economic methods to understand how to value or improve animal welfare.

Venue: Crystal Ballroom (Room 104) | Alumnae Hall, 194 Meeting Street

Day 1 (July 11)

8:30 - 9:00 | Breakfast

9:00 - 9:20 | Welcome and Introductions 

Bob Fischer, Kevin Kuruc, Anya Marchenko

9:20 - 10:00 | TBA 

Loren Fryxell (Oxford University)

10:20 - 11:00 | “Moral Suasion and Moral Preferences”

Josh Tasoff (Claremont Graduate University) & Emiliano Huet-Vaughn (Pomona College)

11:20 - 12:00 | “Animal Quality-Adjusted Life Year - AQALY” 

Romain Espinosa (Centre national de la recherche scientifique)

12:00 - 2:00 | Lunch

2:00 - 2:40 | “The Social Value of Layer Hen Welfare: Evidence, Beliefs, and Voter Behavior”

Trevor Woolley (UC Berkeley)

3:00 - 3:15 | Coffee break

3:15 - 4:45 | Lightning talks - (20 min talk, 10 min feedback, break after second speaker)

JoJo Lee (Global Priorities Institute), Anya Marchenko (Brown University), Luis Mota (Northwestern University)

6:30 - 8:30 | Speaker dinner at Plant City

Day 2 (July 12)

8:30 - 9:00 | Breakfast

9:00 - 9:40 | “The Impact of Animal Welfare Regulations on Pork Trade: Evidence from the European Union”

Shon Ferguson (Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences)

10:00 - 10:40 | “Facilitating Disease Transmission and GHG Emissions While Taxing Us for the Results”

Jamie McLaughlin (Lewis & Clark Law School)

11:00 - 11:40 | “Welfare quantification of diseased animals in dairy production” 

Wilma Steeneveld (Utrecht University)

12:00 - 1:30 | Lunch

1:30 - 3:00 | Lightning talks

Daniel Bressler (Columbia University), Drew Burd / Aaron Leonard / Connor Murphy (University of Chicago), Jacob Schmiess (Purdue University)

3:00 - 3:30 | Coffee break

3:30 - 4:10 | Keynote 

Tyler Cowen (George Mason University)

4:30 - 5:30 | Field building discussion 

     Bob Fischer (Texas State University)

The Paris School of Economics ran the workshop "Welfare across Species" organized by the Opening Economics Chair.

• Date: June, 8-9, 2023

• Location: Paris School of Economics
  48 boulevard Jourdan, 75014 Paris, room R2-21 (2nd floor) and hall

• Organization : François Libois, Marc Fleurbaey, Rafael Schütz and Stéphane Zuber.

This workshop was jointly organized at the Paris School of Economics by the two teams that develop interdisciplinary collaborations and activities with philosophy and with environmental sciences. A previous workshop on climate and biodiversity, in 2021, gathered economists, philosophers, and environmental specialists from various disciplines (geosciences, zoology, earth sciences) and generated stimulating exchanges on the differences and links between climate and biodiversity research.

In this workshop, the question of assessing biodiversity from the viewpoint of welfare was the focus. Every discipline is facing important challenges in this respect. The evaluation of environmental policies can no longer be solely made in terms of ecosystem services for humanity, and this point is forcefully made by the IPBES. For economists, this means that the measurement of “social welfare” must be extended to accommodate the well-being of non-human species. For philosophers, conceptualizing the new relation between humans and non-humans in terms of similarity in sentience, or in terms of rights and personhood, raises many issues. For ethologists and zoologists, new understanding of the specific worldview and quality of life of other species is challenging old assumptions. For conservation biologists, the preservation of the status quo among species is challenged by alternative perspectives recognizing the value of individual organisms.

The conference gathered scholars from the three domains (economics, philosophers, environmental and natural scientists) to share recent progress in our respective fields and above all to candidly expose the challenges and open questions in matters related to well-being in various species. There was a special focus on work that shed light on the assessment of tradeoffs between the conflicting interests of various species, as well as the possible synergies among species, for defining responsible biodiversity policies.

This workshop was organized at the Paris School of Economics because economists there are very active on the topic of animal welfare (Animal Rights Law and Animal Welfare Policy is one subfield in the official profession’s classification of topics), and one of the organizers of this workshop organized a workshop on the Economics of Animal Welfare in Stanford in 2022. 

Thursday, June 8

9:00-10:30
Stéphane Zuber (PSE, CNRS): Separable social welfare functions for multi-species populations

Audrey Maille (MNHN): Co-existing with other primates : welfare issues in captivity and in the wild

11:00-12:30
Walter Veit (University of Bristol): From Life History Complexity to Welfare Comparisons

Eleftheria Triviza (University of Mannheim): Eating Habits, Food Consumption, and Health: The Role of Early Life Experiences

14:00-15:30
Matilda Gibbons (University of Pennsylvania): Can Insects Feel Pain?

Bob Fischer (Texas State University): A method for making interspecies welfare comparisons

16:00-17:30
Lynne Sneddon (University of Gothenburg): Pain and sentience in fishes

Heather Browning (University of Southampton): The Underdetermination Problem for Interspecies Welfare Comparisons

18:00-19:00
Gilles Boeuf (Museum National d’Histoire Naturelle, Paris): How to take animal behavior into account?

Friday, June 9

9:00-10:30
Rafael Schütz (PSE, Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne): Does it take a stick to eat a carrot? Estimating the animal welfare impacts of food consumption and Pigouvian pricing

Jonathan Birch (LSE): Animal sentience and interspecies welfare comparisons

11:00-12:30
Romain Espinosa (CIRED) & Nicolas Treich (TSE):  The Animal Welfare Levy

Leisha Hewitt (Adelaide University): Transforming policy into meaningful animal welfare improvements

14:00-15:30

Kevin Kuruc (University of Texas at Austin): What should we pay to avert the life of a farmed animal?

Nicolas Delon (New College of Florida): Agency and Welfare across Species

Closing

Date

Tue, Jul 12 2022, 8:30am - 4:00pm PDT

Location

Margaret Jacks Hall, Building 460, Room 426

450 Jane Stanford Way, Stanford

ORGANIZED BY

• Marc Fleurbaey, Paris School of Economics

• Caroline Hoxby, Stanford University

• Lisa Kramer, University of Toronto

• Nicolas Treich, Toulouse School of Economics

• With the assistance of Zach Freitas-Groff, Stanford University

On July 12 2022, SITE hosted its first-ever session on The Economics of Animal Welfare. The session brought together theoretical work on animal wellbeing and empirical work on supply and demand forces on animal welfare. 

8:00 AM - 8:30 AM PDT

Check-In and Breakfast

8:30 AM - 8:40 AM PDT

Welcome Introduction

8:40 AM - 9:30 AM PDT

Dean Spears (University of Texas at Austin), Stephane Zuber (Paris School of Economics), and Mark B. Budolfsonc (Rutgers University)

Separable Social Welfare Evaluation for Multi-Species Populations

9:30 AM - 10:20 AM PDT

Romain Espinosa (CNRS)

Animals and Social Welfare

10:20 AM - 10:50 AM PDT

Coffee Break

10:50 AM - 11:40 AM PDT

Zach Freitas-Groff (Stanford University) and Carl Meyer (Stanford University)

The Inelasticity of Meat Consumption

11:40 AM - 12:30 PM PDT

Andrew Jalil (Occidental College), Joshua Tasoff (Claremont Graduate University), and Arturo Vargas-Bustamante (University of California, Los Angeles)

Diet Change for Good: The Long-Term Effects of a Climate-Change Educational Intervention

12:30 PM - 1:45 PM PDT

Lunch

1:45 PM - 2:35 PM PDT

Kevin Kuruc (The University of Oklahoma) and Jonathan McFadden (USDA)

Monetizing the Externalities of Animal Agriculture: Insights from an Inclusive Welfare Function

2:35 PM - 3:25 PM PDT

Stephanie Wang (University of Pittsburgh), Lydia Mechtenberg (University of Hamburg), Grischa Perino (University of Hamburg), Nicolas Treich (University Toulouse Capitole), and Jean-Robert Tyran (University of Vienna)

Self-Signaling in Voting

3:25 PM - 3:40 PM PDT

Daniel Sumner (UC Davis), Hanbin Lee (UC Davis), and Richard Sexton (UC Davis)

Voter-Approved Proposition to Raise California Pork Prices

3:40 PM - 4:00 PM PDT

Open Discussion

Duke’s Center for Law, Economics, and Public Policy hosted a conference on “Animals and Social Welfare” on November 1-2, 2019. The focus of the conference was how animal well-being should be incorporated into the normative frameworks of welfare economics. The standard frameworks (namely cost-benefit analysis and social welfare functions) focus exclusively on the well-being (usually, the preferences) of human persons. However, it is increasingly recognized by philosophers, and in wider social discourse, that non-human animals (or at least a subset thereof) also have ethical standing.

Friday, November 1

8:00-8:30 Breakfast

8:30-10:00 Session 1

Matthew Adler, "Animal Well-Being and the Frameworks of Welfare Economics"

Mark Budolfson, "Valuing Animal Welfare in Policy and Decision Models"

10:00-10:30 Break

10:30-12:30 Session 2

  Eden Lin, "Variabilism and Cross-Species Welfare Comparisons"

  Adam Shriver, "Interspecies Comparisons of Suffering"

  Paula Casal, "The Conditional Value of Tradition"

12:30-1:30 Lunch

1:30-3:30 Session 3

  Nicolas Treich, "Animal Welfare: Antispeciesism, Veganism, and a Life Worth Living"

  Martin Van der Linden, "If you're an egalitarian, how come you eat meat?"

  Olof Johansson-Stenman, "Endogenous Ethics and Cultured Meat"

3:30-4:00 Break

4:00-5:30 Session 4

  Sarah Hannan, "What can theories of children's well-being tell us about non-human animal well-being?"

  David Plunkett, "Well-Being, Equality, and Conceptual Engineering"

Saturday, November 2

8:30-9:00 Breakfast

9:00-10:30 Session 5

  Marc Fleurbaey and Christy Leppanen, "Toward a Theory of Ecosystem Well-Being"

  Dean Spears, "Animals and Separability of Social Welfare"

10:30-11:00 Break

11:00-12:30 Session 6

  Clare Palmer, "Farm Animal Welfare"

  Martin Smith, "The Future of Global Seafood Markets"

12:30-1:30 Lunch

1:30-3:00 Session 7

  Jeff Sebo, "Animal Welfare and the Problem of Other Minds"

  Ron Kagan, "Ethics and economics: how to consider and calculate captive exotic animal welfare"

3:00-3:30 Wrap Up Discussions