Thanks for the comment. The question of value lexicality is a big issue, and I can’t possibly do it justice in these comments alone, so if you want to schedule a call to discuss in more detail, I’m happy to do so.
That caveat aside, I’m pretty skeptical consent-based views can ground the relevant thresholds in a way that escapes the arbitrariness worry. The basic concern is that we can expect differences in ability to consent across circumstances and species that don’t track morally relevant facts. A lot hangs on the exact nature of consent, which is surprisingly hard to pin down. See recent debates about the nature of consent in clinical trials, political legitimacy, human organ sales, sex, and general decision-making capacity.
I think the word “consent” might have been a somewhat poor choice, since it has more connotations than we need. Rather, the concept is closer to “bearability” or just the fact that an individual’s personal preferences seem to involve lexicality, which the two articles I linked to get into. For suffering, it’s when someone wants to make it stop, at any cost (or any cost in certain kinds of experiences, say, e.g. any number of sufficiently mild pains, or any amount of pleasure).
There are objections to this, too, of course:
1. We have unreliable intuitions/preferences involving large numbers (e.g. a large number of pin pricks vs torture).
2. We may be trying to generalize from imagining ourselves in situations like sufficiently intense suffering in which we can’t possibly be reflective or rational, so any intuitions coming out of this would be unreliable. Lexicality might happen only (perhaps by definition) when we can’t possibly be reflective or rational. Furthermore, if this is the case, then this is a reason against the conjunction of trusting our own lexicality directly and not directly trusting the lexicality of nonhuman animals, including simpler ones like insects.
3. We mostly have unreliable intuitions about the kinds of intense suffering people have lexical preferences about, since few of us actually experience it.
That being said, I think each of these objections cuts both ways: they only tell us our intuitions are unreliable in these cases, they don’t tell us whether lexicality should be accepted or rejected. I can think of arguments for each:
1. We should trust personal preferences (at least when informed by personal experience), even when they’re unreliable, unless they are actually inconsistent with intuitions we think are more important and less unreliable, which isn’t the case for me, but might be for others.
2. We should reject unreliable personal preferences that cost us uniformity in our theory. (The personal preferences are unreliable either way, but accommodating lexical ones make our theory less uniform, assuming we want to accept aggregating in certain ways in our theory in the first place, which itself might be contentious.)
I would be happy to discuss over a call, but it might actually be more productive to talk to Magnus Vinding if you can, since he’s read and thought much more about this.
Hi Michael,
Thanks for the comment. The question of value lexicality is a big issue, and I can’t possibly do it justice in these comments alone, so if you want to schedule a call to discuss in more detail, I’m happy to do so.
That caveat aside, I’m pretty skeptical consent-based views can ground the relevant thresholds in a way that escapes the arbitrariness worry. The basic concern is that we can expect differences in ability to consent across circumstances and species that don’t track morally relevant facts. A lot hangs on the exact nature of consent, which is surprisingly hard to pin down. See recent debates about the nature of consent in clinical trials, political legitimacy, human organ sales, sex, and general decision-making capacity.
I think the word “consent” might have been a somewhat poor choice, since it has more connotations than we need. Rather, the concept is closer to “bearability” or just the fact that an individual’s personal preferences seem to involve lexicality, which the two articles I linked to get into. For suffering, it’s when someone wants to make it stop, at any cost (or any cost in certain kinds of experiences, say, e.g. any number of sufficiently mild pains, or any amount of pleasure).
There are objections to this, too, of course:
1. We have unreliable intuitions/preferences involving large numbers (e.g. a large number of pin pricks vs torture).
2. We may be trying to generalize from imagining ourselves in situations like sufficiently intense suffering in which we can’t possibly be reflective or rational, so any intuitions coming out of this would be unreliable. Lexicality might happen only (perhaps by definition) when we can’t possibly be reflective or rational. Furthermore, if this is the case, then this is a reason against the conjunction of trusting our own lexicality directly and not directly trusting the lexicality of nonhuman animals, including simpler ones like insects.
3. We mostly have unreliable intuitions about the kinds of intense suffering people have lexical preferences about, since few of us actually experience it.
That being said, I think each of these objections cuts both ways: they only tell us our intuitions are unreliable in these cases, they don’t tell us whether lexicality should be accepted or rejected. I can think of arguments for each:
1. We should trust personal preferences (at least when informed by personal experience), even when they’re unreliable, unless they are actually inconsistent with intuitions we think are more important and less unreliable, which isn’t the case for me, but might be for others.
2. We should reject unreliable personal preferences that cost us uniformity in our theory. (The personal preferences are unreliable either way, but accommodating lexical ones make our theory less uniform, assuming we want to accept aggregating in certain ways in our theory in the first place, which itself might be contentious.)
I would be happy to discuss over a call, but it might actually be more productive to talk to Magnus Vinding if you can, since he’s read and thought much more about this.