Cowen, Tyler - "Market Failure for the Treatment of Animals"

Argument:

Emphasizes the importance of making sure that policies encourage collective action by looking at several areas of regulation. (1) Cowen examines the often maligned and undervalued animal welfare movement. The movement cannot rely on individual actions because of the externalities of the market. For example, individual purchase and release of animals creates a free rider problem where all "animal altruists experience an improvement in welfare" (40). Instead we need to create policies that internalize all relevant externalities, such as happy meat programs (even granting the issues of monitoring and enforcement), because they lead to more effective collective action and mass change of our treatment of animals. Two criteria for evaluating the effectiveness of different policies would be willingness to pay (as in happy meat or social taxes) and willingness to be paid (i.e. to allow current treatment of animals to continue). (2) as Cowen notes, these externalities can be remedied if animals can trade with human - a farm animal offering affection if made a pet, for instance. Unfortunately, there is both a limited amount of space in certain categories such as pet, and in other categories, such as factory farming, no cooperation is needed from animals, leaving them with nothing to offer. Thus, Cowen argues that we need to tax "less salubriuous sectors and subsidize the allocation of that animal to a more salubrious sector" (42).This can be accomplished through government planning techniques or coordinated boycott. This seems to require a group agreement on which sector counts as worst in order to levy mass action, though. 

Important Quotations:

"I wish to examine and evaluate the human treatment of animals from the perspective of a very simple form of utilitarianism, namely economic ordinalism. Under this ordinal standard we use only the information contained in (human) market demand curves. Animals therefore 'count' only insofar as there exists a willingness to pay or be paid for their welfare" (39).

"I have sympathy for cardinal approaches, but it is difficult to produce agreement on how much an animal should count for, relative to a human being. I therefore examine what kinds of policy conclusions follow from a minimalist ordinal framework, counting only human willingness to pay" (39).

"Singer conjectures what utilitarianism would mean for the treatment of animals, but does not provide any formal derivation of his claims. Singer advocates complete vegetariansim, does not wear leather, and has written a book called /Animal Liberation/. But the intuition that animals matter does not suffice to support these claims... piecemeal reforms sometimes will make animals worse off rather than better off" (39-40).

"Markets, however, do not take into account one relevant welfare externality. Reallocating some animals to a friendlier sector will improve the welfare of animal lovers. Animal altruists would be willing to pay some amount to bring such a reallocation about if they could act collectively" (40).

"The simplest form of the argument does not require interpersonal or interspecies utility comparisons of this nature" (40)

"The existence of property rights in animals does not eliminate the basic externality problem...If I  buy  an  animal  to  liberate  it,  many  animal  altruists  experience  an  improvement  in  welfare.  Given  this  free  rider  problem,  not enough  animal  liberation  will  occur, relative to  an  optimum,  at  least  assuming  that  all  the  animal  altruists cannot contract with each other at low cost. By assumption,  animal  lovers  cannot  act  collectively  to  buy  up animals and reallocatc them across sectors. " (40)

"We have arrived at animal reallocation [between better categories such as pet and worse cat. such as slaughter animal] as the central and robust policy recommendation" (42)

"...whether zero meat consumption is desirable in ordinal utilitarian terms... The welfare costs of this offense [meat eating], as measured by willingness to pay to stop meat eating, must be weighed against the consumer surplus enjoyed by meat eaters. The current preponderance of meat eaters implies some positive amount of meat eating as an optimum, but smaller than what we observe under laissez-faire (42). 

Connections or Lingering Questions:

In what ways do the categories "better" and "worse" lead to reductive analogies (e.g. animal industries vs. pollutive industries)? Even if we work within the minimalist framework he sets up, the physical and health damage caused by dirtier industries seems to be the driving force behind the taxing and subsidies, not the affective damage done by what we value...

How does one decide "better," "medium," and "worse sector[s], as ranked in terms of their salubriousness for the animals"? More importantly, there seems to be something flawed with the assumption everything operates on a continuum in that it oversimplifies human relations to animals, which is inadequately covered by his justification for a reductive ordinal approach.