Fair Social Ordering, Egalitarianism, and Animal Welfare

Abstract

We study fairness in economies where humans consume one private good and one public good representing the welfare of other species. We show that a social evaluator cannot be egalitarian with respect to humans while always respecting humans’ unanimous preferences. One solution is to respect unanimous preferences only when doing so does not lead to a decrease in the welfare of other species. Social preferences satisfying these properties reveal surprising connections between concerns for other species, egalitarianism among humans, and unanimity: the latter two imply a form of dictatorship from humans with the strongest preference for the welfare of other species. (JEL D11, D63, H41)

Animal welfare is a stronger determinant of public support for meat taxation than climate change mitigation in Germany

“…Moreover, participants might expect additional individual benefits from paying an animal welfare tax because they associate healthier or tastier products with higher animal welfare standards. In the latter case, participants would consider animal welfare not only as a public good 67 , but would also derive private benefits from improving rearing conditions (for similar thoughts regarding labelling antibiotic use on meat products, see refs. 41 , 60 ).…”

Animals and social welfare

“…Johansson-Stenman (2018) recently noted that animal welfare has formed part of utilitarian philosophy since its very beginning starting with Bentham (1780) and Mill (1852), and more recently with Singer (1975). Given the considerable influence of the utilitarian framework in economic theory, an increasing number of economists have proposed the introduction of animal welfare into normative economics (e.g., Fleurbaey and Van Der Linden (2021); Carlier and Treich (2020); Kuruc and McFadden (2020)), and therefore into cost-benefit analyses. Although many contributions in Agricultural Economics have estimated the altruistic gains of improving animal welfare via willingness-to-pay (Lagerkvist and Hess, 2011;Clark et al, 2017), conventional costbenefit analyses still lack the appropriate tools with which to consider the welfare impact on animals themselves.…”