ABSTRACT
Welfare, harm, and benefit can be understood either individually or collectively. Harm, for instance, is individual when a living creature is sickened or wounded or killed. Biotic welfare is, roughly, physical health. But the biotic welfare of an organism is not merely the totality of its autopoietic functions; it is also their mutual integration into the organism’s self-sustaining goal-directed behavior. The biotic welfare of a human is enormously greater than the biotic welfare of a bacterium. Sentience evolved, no doubt, because it promotes biotic welfare, hence survival and reproduction. Welfare in sentient animals is therefore complex, having both a positive biotic component that may be low or high and a hedonic component that ranges from negative to positive. Welfare assessments, even for the very humble organisms, might usefully be incorporated into conservation biology. The aggregate welfare of the species at a given time could then be obtained as the product of that average with the species population at that time.
