1 seems like an irrelevant objection. Animal welfare interventions are marketed as Effective Altruist or utilitarian interventions because of the amount of suffering we can avert by improving conditions in factory farms or reducing the amount of food produced that way. This doesn’t imply that other people don’t have other reasons to care about animals. The OP’s argument is that the specifically utilitarian, aggregativist argument for animal welfare interventions favors wireheading chickens over other interventions pushed more frequently.
Effective altruism does not imply utilitarianism. Utilitarianism (on most definitions) does not imply hedonism. I would guess less than 10% of EAs (or of animal-focused EAs) would consider themselves thoroughgoing hedonists, of the kind that would endorse e.g. injecting a substance that would numb humans to physical pain or amputating human body parts, if this reduced suffering even a little bit. So on the contrary, I think the objection is relevant.
There can be amounts of things other than suffering, though. Caring about the “number of chickens that lead meaningful lives” doesn’t mean that one isn’t a utilitarian. (For the record, I agree with the OP that the notion of “leading meaningful lives” isn’t so important for animals, but I think it’s possible to disagree with this and still be advocating an EA intervention.)
1 seems like an irrelevant objection. Animal welfare interventions are marketed as Effective Altruist or utilitarian interventions because of the amount of suffering we can avert by improving conditions in factory farms or reducing the amount of food produced that way. This doesn’t imply that other people don’t have other reasons to care about animals. The OP’s argument is that the specifically utilitarian, aggregativist argument for animal welfare interventions favors wireheading chickens over other interventions pushed more frequently.
Effective altruism does not imply utilitarianism. Utilitarianism (on most definitions) does not imply hedonism. I would guess less than 10% of EAs (or of animal-focused EAs) would consider themselves thoroughgoing hedonists, of the kind that would endorse e.g. injecting a substance that would numb humans to physical pain or amputating human body parts, if this reduced suffering even a little bit. So on the contrary, I think the objection is relevant.
There can be amounts of things other than suffering, though. Caring about the “number of chickens that lead meaningful lives” doesn’t mean that one isn’t a utilitarian. (For the record, I agree with the OP that the notion of “leading meaningful lives” isn’t so important for animals, but I think it’s possible to disagree with this and still be advocating an EA intervention.)
There can, but in practice the amount of suffering is usually the stated reason to care.
Ah sorry, I seem to have misread your comment. Makes sense now, thanks!