I find myself in the rather peculiar position of fully agreeing with your argument and your conclusions—but disagreeing with the critical central point upon which your argument hinges!
I do not think chickens were ever doing well. I think that “doing well” requires more than just an existence that’s pain-free relative to your ancestors’ existences, and moreover I think it’s essentially orthogonal to population size.
(The argument that population size is orthogonal to wellbeing is pretty self-explanatory so I’ll skip that and focus on the potential other requirements of “doing well”)
Imagine offering people the same deal the chickens got: “Stop scratching a living in the dirt, in constant fear of predators, and instead be owned, as a form of property, by some superior species. You’ll be fed, kept warm, protected from predators and from disaease. Some of you will live for weeks before we kill and eat you, others for years (but of course we’ll take and eat your eggs every time you ovulate), and others we’ll compel to fight to the death for our entertainment.” How far below the poverty line would you have to go—in other words, how bad would the human equivalents of “scratching a living” and “fear of predators” have to get—before most people would start to want to take that deal? I’m not convinced even the inmates of Devil’s Island would have taken that deal.
Now suppose, instead of it being a deal offered to humans at all, the superior species simply decided for us. I think most people would agree that, even if overall suffering were reduced, average lifespan were improved, deaths to predation and disease were reduced, etc. etc., that the humans who had been compelled into this arrangement, even if their lives had been entirely brutal beforehand, would not be “doing better”.
...but why? If the immediate suffering is reduced, averaged over the whole species, why can’t we say that the species is doing better? I think the answer might be some weird hybrid of game theory and deontology like “If your wellbeing is dependent on the caprices of some entity vastly more powerful than you and that doesn’t really care about you (in other words “if you’re property”..) such that you have a high quality-of-life iff the powerful entity happens to want things for itself that happen to be good for you, then you’re not doing well; what you have is just an illusion of doing well”.
In short: “doing well” = “immediate quality-of-life” + “future security”, and chickens never had the latter term.
Note that this equation doesn’t include any terms for things like “freedom” or “self-determination”; my formulation assumes those things are only valuable instrumentally, insofar as they generally provide higher security than does being some other entity’s owned property. I’m sure many would argue that “freedom” or whatever is valuable in and of itself, entirely apart from any security benefits it offers, which if it were true would strengthen the argument even further, turning it into: “doing well” = “immediate quality-of-life” + “security” + “freedom”, with chickens now missing two of the necessary terms. (But as I say, I don’t rely on “freedom” being a final value for the purposes of this argument)
I think the chicken part of your argument is entirely sound, however, since you’re essentially still making the same point that chickens never had the freedom-of-action and self-determination they’d have needed to establish sustainable future security.
I think your analogy to humans entirely survives the added “security” constraint, too: because, like chickens, we also don’t have the freedom-of-action and self-determination to establish future security for ourselves. I think our future security depends upon the caprices of vast alien entities that humans don’t control and don’t fully understand, which we happen to call “nation states” and “corporations”, that inexorably pursue their own incentive gradients (such as “profit”, “power”, etc.) regardless of what the people that comprise them might want to do, and that dictate the terms and conditions (literally as well as figuratively) of almost every aspect of our lives.
So long as what the corporations and nation states want is broadly aligned with what we want, we have a high value for the equation’s “immediate quality-of-life” term and we might think that things are going really well for us (the aforementioned “illusion of doing well”). But we’re not doing well: we need future security too, and we don’t have it.
I find myself in the rather peculiar position of fully agreeing with your argument and your conclusions—but disagreeing with the critical central point upon which your argument hinges!
I do not think chickens were ever doing well. I think that “doing well” requires more than just an existence that’s pain-free relative to your ancestors’ existences, and moreover I think it’s essentially orthogonal to population size.
(The argument that population size is orthogonal to wellbeing is pretty self-explanatory so I’ll skip that and focus on the potential other requirements of “doing well”)
Imagine offering people the same deal the chickens got: “Stop scratching a living in the dirt, in constant fear of predators, and instead be owned, as a form of property, by some superior species. You’ll be fed, kept warm, protected from predators and from disaease. Some of you will live for weeks before we kill and eat you, others for years (but of course we’ll take and eat your eggs every time you ovulate), and others we’ll compel to fight to the death for our entertainment.” How far below the poverty line would you have to go—in other words, how bad would the human equivalents of “scratching a living” and “fear of predators” have to get—before most people would start to want to take that deal? I’m not convinced even the inmates of Devil’s Island would have taken that deal.
Now suppose, instead of it being a deal offered to humans at all, the superior species simply decided for us. I think most people would agree that, even if overall suffering were reduced, average lifespan were improved, deaths to predation and disease were reduced, etc. etc., that the humans who had been compelled into this arrangement, even if their lives had been entirely brutal beforehand, would not be “doing better”.
...but why? If the immediate suffering is reduced, averaged over the whole species, why can’t we say that the species is doing better? I think the answer might be some weird hybrid of game theory and deontology like “If your wellbeing is dependent on the caprices of some entity vastly more powerful than you and that doesn’t really care about you (in other words “if you’re property”..) such that you have a high quality-of-life iff the powerful entity happens to want things for itself that happen to be good for you, then you’re not doing well; what you have is just an illusion of doing well”.
In short: “doing well” = “immediate quality-of-life” + “future security”, and chickens never had the latter term.
Note that this equation doesn’t include any terms for things like “freedom” or “self-determination”; my formulation assumes those things are only valuable instrumentally, insofar as they generally provide higher security than does being some other entity’s owned property. I’m sure many would argue that “freedom” or whatever is valuable in and of itself, entirely apart from any security benefits it offers, which if it were true would strengthen the argument even further, turning it into: “doing well” = “immediate quality-of-life” + “security” + “freedom”, with chickens now missing two of the necessary terms. (But as I say, I don’t rely on “freedom” being a final value for the purposes of this argument)
I think the chicken part of your argument is entirely sound, however, since you’re essentially still making the same point that chickens never had the freedom-of-action and self-determination they’d have needed to establish sustainable future security.
I think your analogy to humans entirely survives the added “security” constraint, too: because, like chickens, we also don’t have the freedom-of-action and self-determination to establish future security for ourselves. I think our future security depends upon the caprices of vast alien entities that humans don’t control and don’t fully understand, which we happen to call “nation states” and “corporations”, that inexorably pursue their own incentive gradients (such as “profit”, “power”, etc.) regardless of what the people that comprise them might want to do, and that dictate the terms and conditions (literally as well as figuratively) of almost every aspect of our lives.
So long as what the corporations and nation states want is broadly aligned with what we want, we have a high value for the equation’s “immediate quality-of-life” term and we might think that things are going really well for us (the aforementioned “illusion of doing well”). But we’re not doing well: we need future security too, and we don’t have it.