I found the claim of animals not making assessments of their lives interesting.
[One might] insist that all sentient creatures can make overall assessments of their lives.
This is not credible. To make progress, let’s try to be a bit more precise about where the line is. Plausibly, self-awareness is a necessary condition for being able to make an overall evaluation of one’s life—if a creature lacks a sense of itself, it cannot have a view on how its life is going.
I just skimmed that part of your paper, so I apologize if this point is moot due to how you define having a view on one’s life. What do you think about a hypothetical animal that has an internal tracking system for how good everything is going. For example, the animal might take accumulated information about the whole last year into account when considering an option to drastically change its circumstances. More concretely, an animal might be deciding to change territory because finding food and mates has been rough, and the neighborhood getting worse. This doesn’t seem to entail self-awareness.
That’s a nice point. What life satisfaction views require more specifically is not just that the entity thinks about its life as a whole, but that it thinks about its life as a whole and makes a judgement about how its life is going overall. It’s rather implausible animals do that latter thing, which means they have no well-being on this theory.
I found the claim of animals not making assessments of their lives interesting.
I just skimmed that part of your paper, so I apologize if this point is moot due to how you define having a view on one’s life. What do you think about a hypothetical animal that has an internal tracking system for how good everything is going. For example, the animal might take accumulated information about the whole last year into account when considering an option to drastically change its circumstances. More concretely, an animal might be deciding to change territory because finding food and mates has been rough, and the neighborhood getting worse. This doesn’t seem to entail self-awareness.
Related: optimism and pessimism bias. Even honeybees.
That’s a nice point. What life satisfaction views require more specifically is not just that the entity thinks about its life as a whole, but that it thinks about its life as a whole and makes a judgement about how its life is going overall. It’s rather implausible animals do that latter thing, which means they have no well-being on this theory.