{
  "id": 1957899,
  "title": "How much can you consistently care about animal welfare?",
  "url": "https://urgent.news/2026/08/19/how-much-can-you-consistently-care-about-animal-welfare",
  "topic": "finance",
  "section": "Finance & Markets",
  "published": "2026-08-19T14:36:08.000Z",
  "source": {
    "name": "Marginal Revolution",
    "slug": "marginal-revolution",
    "url": "https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/08/how-much-can-you-consistently-care-about-animal-welfare.html"
  },
  "original_language": "en",
  "account": "In a consequentialist total utilitarian framework, the welfare costs of animal life are analyzed, taking into account the intrinsic value of sentient beings. Sentience is defined as the capacity for experiencing feelings, which can be measured through cognitive tests. By linking cognition to neuron counts, researchers attempt to quantify sentience. A broad dataset, encompassing various animal species and their neuron counts, is compiled to create a unified welfare metric. The analysis reveals that, over the past half-century, animal welfare losses have vastly exceeded the welfare gains humans have gained from population growth, by a factor of at least ten thousand. To achieve a balance, a relatively small welfare weight must be assigned to animals. Despite economic growth benefiting humans, it does not significantly mitigate the overall welfare losses. In the author's perspective, macro-level welfare comparisons are most relevant when benefits can be traded, which applies to both humans and some dogs. The author believes that non-human animal welfare should be improved at the margin, but acknowledges that it's unrealistic to expect humans to make large-scale comparisons or commit to drastic measures, such as sacrificing human welfare for biodiversity conservation. The paper's title, \"The Intrinsic Valuation of Biodiversity Loss,\" is considered somewhat misleading, as the authors are Adrien Bilal, Noémie Pinardon-Touati, and Conor Walsh. The article \"How much can you consistently care about animal welfare?\" was initially published on Marginal REVOLUTION.",
  "summary": "We explore the welfare costs of the loss of animal life in a consequentialist total utilitarian framework that incorporates the intrinsic value of living beings through their sentience. Moral philosophy and neuroscience define sentience as the capacity for valenced experience. Observable performance on cognitive tests represents a conservative lower bound on sentience under plausible…",
  "key_points": [],
  "editors_take": null,
  "illustration": null,
  "coverage": {
    "outlets": 1,
    "also_reported_by": []
  },
  "ai_generated": true,
  "disclaimer": "Summaries, key points and the editor’s take are written by software from other outlets’ reporting and may contain errors — always check the linked original."
}