IF I COULD TALK TO THE ANIMALS: MEASURING SUBJECTIVE ANIMAL WELFARE HEATHER BROWNING A thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy The Australian National University December 2019 © Copyright by Heather Browning 2019 All Rights Reserved STATEMENT This thesis is solely the work of its author. No part of it has previously been submitted for any degree, or is currently being submitted for any other degree. To the best of my knowledge, all help received in preparing this thesis and all sources used have been duly acknowledged. Heather Browning December 2019 2 To Will, for his unending love and support throughout. 3 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Writing a thesis is a huge undertaking, and one that would not have been possible without the help of so many people around me along the way. To begin with, greatest thanks to my primary supervisor Kim Sterelny, for consistently providing constructive feedback on my many drafts and for his unerring ability to find the philosophical core of any problem. Thanks to the other members of my supervisory panel, Seth Lazar and Rachael Brown, for feedback on drafts, career advice and support. Thanks also to previous panel members Ben Fraser, Ray Briggs and Clive Phillips for earlier discussions and literature recommendations. I have adored being part of the ANU graduate student community, who are a constant source of inspiration and support. Being surrounded by likeminded people all in the same situation as myself helped indescribably in navigating this whole process. In particular our Kioloa workshops have been some of my best memories of my times here, for both the philosophical and social aspects. I am grateful to the staff and visitors at the Global Priorities Institute at Oxford University, where I spent the summer of 2019, who opened up my mind and my work to myriad new ideas and showed me how productive collaborative academia can be. I am also grateful to David Mellor, Mark Budolfson and Ngaio Beausoleil for taking the time to talk through some of my work and for providing fresh perspectives. Versions of these chapters have been presented at numerous conferences and workshops and benefitted greatly from the surrounding discussion, including the International Society for the History, Philosophy and Social Studies of Biology, Australasian Association of Philosophy, Sydney-ANU Philosophy of Biology workshops, Philosophy of Biology at Dolphin Beach and ANU’s PhilSoc seminars. On a more personal note, I would like to thank my family – that large collection of parents, sisters, partners and nephews - for their continuing support and for always believing that I could be Dr. Hez one day. To my brilliant partner and unofficial agent Walter Veit, for love and support and reminding me to stay passionate about philosophy. And to my husband Will, for always being there for me in all the ways I needed and who made all of this possible for me. My doctoral research was supported by an Australian Government Research Training Program (RTP) Scholarship. 4 ABSTRACT Animal welfare is a concept that plays a role within both our moral deliberations and the relevant areas of science. The study of animal welfare has impacts on decisions made by legislators, producers and consumers with regards to housing and treatment of animals. Our ethical deliberations in these domains need to consider our impact on animals, and the study of animal welfare provides the information that allows us to make informed decisions. This thesis focusses on taking a philosophical perspective to answer the question of how we can measure the welfare of animals. Animal welfare science is an applied area of biology, aimed at measuring animal welfare. Although philosophy of animal ethics is common, philosophy focussing on animal welfare science is rare. Despite this lack, there are definitely many ways in which philosophical methods can be used to analyse the methodologies and concepts used in this science. One of the aims of the work in this thesis is to remedy this lack of attention in animal welfare. Animal welfare science is a strong emerging discipline, but there is the need for conceptual and methodological clarity and sophistication in this science if it is to play the relevant informative role for our practical and ethical decision-making. There is thus is a strong role here for philosophical analysis for this purpose. The central aim of this thesis is to provide an account of how we can measure subjective animal welfare, addressing some of the potential problems that may arise in this particular scientific endeavour. The two questions I will be answering are: what is animal welfare, and how do we measure it? Part One of the thesis looks at the subjective concept of animal welfare and its applications. In it, I argue for a subjective welfare view - that animal welfare should be understood as the subjective experience of individuals over their lifetimes - and look at how the subjective welfare concept informs our ethical decision-making in two different cases in applied animal ethics. Part Two of the thesis looks more closely at the scientific role of welfare. Understanding welfare subjectively creates unique measurement problems, due to the necessarily private nature of mental states and here I address a few of these problems, including whether subjective experience is measurable, how we might validate indicators of hidden target variables such as welfare, how we can make welfare comparisons between individual animals and how we might compare or integrate the different types of experience that make up welfare. I end with a discussion of the implications of all these problems and solutions for the practice of welfare science, and indicate useful future directions for research. 5 CONTENTS 1. CHAPTER ONE – INTRODUCTION 8 1.1. THREE QUESTIONS 8 1.2. ANIMAL WELFARE SCIENCE 14 1.3. THE ROLE OF PHILOSOPHY IN ANIMAL WELFARE SCIENCE 16 1.4. OVERVIEW OF THE THESIS 17 PART ONE – THE SUBJECTIVE WELFARE CONCEPT AND ITS APPLICATIONS 20 2. CHAPTER TWO – ANIMAL WELFARE IS SUBJECTIVE WELFARE 21 2.1. INTRODUCTION 21 2.2. THE CASE FOR SUBJECTIVE WELFARE 23 2.3. OBJECTIONS TO SUBJECTIVE WELFARE 31 2.4. COMPETING ACCOUNTS 37 2.5. CONCLUSION 49 3. CHAPTER THREE – APPLICATIONS IN APPLIED ANIMAL ETHICS 50 3.1. MANAGEMENT EUTHANASIA AND ANIMAL WELFARE 50 3.2. DE-EXTINCTION AND ANIMAL WELFARE 66 3.3. CONCLUSION 85 PART TWO – MEASUREMENT OF SUBJECTIVE WELFARE 86 4. CHAPTER FOUR – MEASURING WELFARE 87 4.1. INTRODUCTION 87 4.2. MEASUREMENT SCALES AND APPLICATION TO WELFARE 91 4.3. INCOMMENSURABILITY 100 4.4. AGGREGATION 103 4.5. CONCLUSION 104 5. CHAPTER FIVE – VALIDATING WELFARE INDICATORS 105 5.1. INTRODUCTION 105 5.2. CAUSAL AND EFFECT INDICATORS 107 5.3. VALIDATION 113 5.4. ROBUSTNESS 116 5.5. APPLICATION TO THE VALIDATION PROBLEM 121 5.6. AN EXAMPLE OF THE PROCESS 132 5.7. CONCLUSION 133 6. CHAPTER SIX – INTERSUBJECTIVE WELFARE COMPARISONS 134 6.1. INTRODUCTION 134 6.2. TYPES OF ANIMAL WELFARE COMPARISON 135 6.3. THE COMPARISON PROBLEM 136 6.4. SOLVING THE COMPARISON PROBLEM 142 6.5. APPLYING THE SOLUTION TO DIFFERENT COMPARISON TYPES 159 6.6. CONCLUSION 163 7. CHAPTER SEVEN – INTEGRATING SUBJECTIVE EXPERIENCE INTO WELFARE 164 7.1. INTRODUCTION – THE PROBLEM 164 7.2. THE METAPHYSICAL QUESTION – EXISTENCE OF A COMMON CURRENCY 168 7.3. THE EPISTEMIC QUESTION – DETERMINING WEIGHTINGS 175 6 7.4. A PRAGMATIC PROPOSAL 187 7.5. CONCLUSION 189 8. CHAPTER EIGHT – CONCLUSION AND FUTURE DIRECTIONS 190 9. REFERENCES 197 7 1. CHAPTER ONE – INTRODUCTION Animal welfare is a normative as well as a scientific concept – a ‘bridging concept’ between science and ethics (Fraser, Weary, Pajor, & Milligan, 1997). Welfare plays a role within both our moral deliberations and the relevant areas of science. Animal welfare scientists study welfare, both to learn more about animals – their evolution, minds, behaviour and physiology – and for its role in normative decision-making. The study of animal welfare has impacts on decisions made by legislators, producers and consumers with regards to housing and treatment of animals. Animal welfare considerations are important because there are many human activities that use or affect animals, often involving a large degree of harm. Over 70 billion animals are farmed annually for human food production1 with around another 1-3 trillion fish caught per year2. Animals are used for biomedical and other types of research, estimated at over 25 million per year in the US alone3. They are also used for entertainment, in sports, circuses and zoos. Animals are kept as pets in our homes. Our actions also affect wild animals numbering in the trillions, both directly - through practices such as killing of pest animals - and indirectly, through our environmental impact. If we take animal welfare as a target of ethical concern, this then creates strong moral reason to evaluate the amount of harm caused to animals by humans, and act to reduce it. Our ethical deliberations in these domains need to consider our impact on animals, and the study of animal welfare provides the information that allows us to make informed decisions. 1.1. Three questions There are three broad questions that make up the study of animal welfare. The first is: what sort of moral consideration should we give non-human animals? This is primarily a philosophical question, and one that has been well-explored within moral philosophy, by writers such as Peter Singer (1995) and Tom Regan (1983). The second question is: to which animals should we extend moral consideration? This is a question