Jonathan Birch

This dissertation examines the discipline of animal welfare science, focusing on two foundational questions: what the purpose of animal welfare science should be, and what ‘animal welfare’ is. These are sources of longstanding disagreement, but the debates and any discussions of their implications rarely make it into the published literature. I aim in this work to evidence and explain the disagreements about these questions and to suggest ways forward. I begin with an exploratory survey of the animal welfare research community, focusing on questions to do with researcher beliefs and values about what animal welfare is, what the field should be doing, and how well it is currently doing it. The survey indicates, among other things, widespread disagreement within animal welfare science about what animal welfare is. I show that this disagreement has been exploited in practice to legitimise practices harmful to the welfare of farmed animals, which motivates a conceptual engineering project aimed at developing a definition of animal welfare fit for collective uptake by the field. I propose four desiderata for such a definition: permissiveness about plausible constituents of welfare, theoretical grounding, amenability to scientific enquiry, and entrenchment in the field’s existing language and commitments. I evaluate Nussbaum’s extension of the Capabilities Approach to all sentient animals (ECA), which is inspirational for its focus on flourishing independent of human interests in animal lives, but ultimately does not have sufficient theoretical grounding for the constituents of flourishing that it picks out. Taking lessons from the ECA, I argue against a simple form of hedonism – the valence aggregation model (VAM) – that is gaining prominence in animal welfare science and, develop in response a characterisation of welfare as holistic self-maintenance (HSM). Under this framework, an animal fares well to the extent that they flourish across bodily, agential, social, ecological, and narrative dimensions of their lives, each with both objective and subjective components. This project is intended to support animal welfare science’s progress towards understanding animal welfare and away from the influence of the animal industries.