1. To clarify, I donât necessarily see status-adjusted welfare as a bad term. Iâd actually say it seems pretty good, as it seems to state what itâs about fairly explicitly and intuitively.
I was just responding to the claim that itâs better than âmoral weightâ in that it sounds more agnostic between unitarian and hierarchical approaches. I see it as perhaps scoring worse than âmoral weightâ on that particular criterion, or about the same.
(But I also still think it means a somewhat different thing to âmoral weightâ anyway, as best I can tell.)
2. Iâm not confident about whether Muehlhauser meant moral status or capacity for welfare, and would guess your interpretation is more accurate than my half-remembered interpretation. Though looking again at his post on the matter, I see this sentence:
This depends (among other things) on how much âmoral weightâ we give to the well-being of different kinds of moral patients.
This sounds to me most intuitively like itâs about adjusting a given unit of wellbeing/âwelfare by some factor that âweâre givingâ them, which therefore sounds like moral status. But thatâs just my reading of one sentence.
In any case, I think I poorly expressed what I actually meant, which was related to my third point: It seems like âstatus-adjusted welfareâ is the product of moral status and welfare, whereas âmoral weightâ is either (a) some factor by which we adjust the welfare of a being, or (b) some factor that captures how intense the welfare levels of the being will tend to be (given particular experiences/âevents), or some mix of (a) and (b). So âmoral weightâ doesnât seem to include the beingâs actual welfare, and thus doesnât seem to be a synonym for âstatus-adjusted welfareâ.
(Incidentally, having to try to describe in the above paragraph what âmoral weightâ seems to mean has increased my inclination to mostly ditch that term and to stick with the âmoral status vs capacity for welfareâ distinction, as that does seem conceptually clearer.)
Thanks again. Regarding (2), I may be conflating a conversation I had with Luke about the subject back in February with the actual contents of his old LessWrong post on the topic. Youâre right that itâs not clear that heâs focusing on capacity for welfare in that post: he moves pretty quickly between moral status, capacity for welfare, and something like average realized welfare of the
âtypicalâ conscious experience of âtypicalâ members of different species when undergoing various âcanonicalâ positive and negative experiences
Frankly, itâs a bit confusing. (To be fair to Luke, he wrote that post before Kaganâs book came out.) One hope of mine is that by collectively working on this topic more, we can establish a common conceptual framework within the community to better clarify points of agreement and disagreement.
1. To clarify, I donât necessarily see status-adjusted welfare as a bad term. Iâd actually say it seems pretty good, as it seems to state what itâs about fairly explicitly and intuitively.
I was just responding to the claim that itâs better than âmoral weightâ in that it sounds more agnostic between unitarian and hierarchical approaches. I see it as perhaps scoring worse than âmoral weightâ on that particular criterion, or about the same.
(But I also still think it means a somewhat different thing to âmoral weightâ anyway, as best I can tell.)
2. Iâm not confident about whether Muehlhauser meant moral status or capacity for welfare, and would guess your interpretation is more accurate than my half-remembered interpretation. Though looking again at his post on the matter, I see this sentence:
This sounds to me most intuitively like itâs about adjusting a given unit of wellbeing/âwelfare by some factor that âweâre givingâ them, which therefore sounds like moral status. But thatâs just my reading of one sentence.
In any case, I think I poorly expressed what I actually meant, which was related to my third point: It seems like âstatus-adjusted welfareâ is the product of moral status and welfare, whereas âmoral weightâ is either (a) some factor by which we adjust the welfare of a being, or (b) some factor that captures how intense the welfare levels of the being will tend to be (given particular experiences/âevents), or some mix of (a) and (b). So âmoral weightâ doesnât seem to include the beingâs actual welfare, and thus doesnât seem to be a synonym for âstatus-adjusted welfareâ.
(Incidentally, having to try to describe in the above paragraph what âmoral weightâ seems to mean has increased my inclination to mostly ditch that term and to stick with the âmoral status vs capacity for welfareâ distinction, as that does seem conceptually clearer.)
3. That makes sense to me.
Hey Michael,
Thanks again. Regarding (2), I may be conflating a conversation I had with Luke about the subject back in February with the actual contents of his old LessWrong post on the topic. Youâre right that itâs not clear that heâs focusing on capacity for welfare in that post: he moves pretty quickly between moral status, capacity for welfare, and something like average realized welfare of the
Frankly, itâs a bit confusing. (To be fair to Luke, he wrote that post before Kaganâs book came out.) One hope of mine is that by collectively working on this topic more, we can establish a common conceptual framework within the community to better clarify points of agreement and disagreement.