This chapter justifies the book’s moral foundation, rooted in sentientism. Sentience, understood as the ability to feel, is interpreted as the capacity for welfare. The chapter also identifies the species possessing this ability and, therefore, belonging to the moral community.

This chapter presents the social welfare function approach. It discusses how to directly incorporate animal welfare into the social objective. It explores the distinction between utility potentials, introduced earlier, and moral weights, introduced in this chapter, while also introducing the challenges of population ethics.

This chapter begins by exploring the motivations behind pet ownership, then introduces a simple economic model in which a pet owner decides on medical expenditures and pet insurance. It concludes with a broader discussion on the economics of pets.

This chapter presents an economic model of the meat paradox, where consumers experience both pleasure from eating meat and disutility from harming animals. It incorporates a cognitive dissonance framework to examine how individuals manage this psychological conflict. The chapter explores the effects of meat taxation within this model and concludes with a broader discussion on its key assumptions and implications.

This chapter explores studies in psychology and related disciplines on human–animal relationships. It examines anthropomorphism, the tendency to attribute human-like traits to animals, and its opposite, anthropodenial – the refusal to acknowledge similarities between humans and animals. It also discusses the meat paradox: the psychological conflict between valuing animal welfare and consuming meat.

This chapter extends the canonical model by studying decisions about both the quantity and quality of animal lives. The quality dimension reflects animal welfare standards. The paper analyzes how increasing antispeciesism – i.e., assigning a higher moral weight to animals in the social welfare function – affects both of these choices.

This chapter explores various approaches to welfare in economics and animal sciences, along with the concept of a “life worth living,” which is central to this book. It also discusses the complex issue of wild animal welfare.

This chapter examines how markets influence decisions regarding animals. It begins by analyzing the supply side, focusing on production costs associated with improving animal welfare. It then explores whether markets erode moral considerations and discusses corporate social responsibility strategies, specifically voluntary actions taken by firms to enhance animal welfare.

This chapter discusses briefly several topics: social influences, political aspects, the role of information and education, the impact of innovations, and the compassionate conservation literature.

This chapter focuses on games with unawareness, where the players may be unaware of some of the choices that others can make. The player’s view specifies the choices in the game that he is aware of. The chapter starts by explaining how a game with unawareness can be viewed as a collection of one-person decision problems. Subsequently, it is shown how belief hierarchies about choices and views can be visualized by means of a beliefs diagram, and mathematically encoded by means of an epistemic model with types. This is used to provide a formal definition of common belief in rationality. It is shown that the choices which are possible under common belief in rationality can be characterized by iterated strict dominance for unawareness. The chapter finally turns to the scenario of fixed beliefs on views, where the players hold some pre-specified beliefs about the opponents’ views.