Monetizing Lives—Realigning Agricultural Economics and Animal Ethics

The interest of agricultural economists in questions of animal welfare has been steadily growing. This conceptual review examines whether the methodological approaches used in this literature are consistent with the normative frameworks established by animal ethicists. We find that descriptive work—including preference elicitation among consumers and farmers and institutional approaches to implementing better conditions for farmed animals—is broadly compatible with animal ethics. However, the literature that assigns monetary values to the lives of non-human animals is more difficult to align with animal ethics principles. Comparing the human life valuation literature with nascent approaches to animal life valuation, we show that methodological differences can be identified as speciesist, and that assigning monetary values to animal lives is likely to remain fundamentally anthropocentric, because money itself is an exclusively human social institution.