Another term that might be used to capture both moral status and capacity for welfare is ‘moral weight.’ Although ‘status-adjusted welfare’ isn’t a perfect term, I think ‘moral weight’ suffers from two problems. First, to my ear, it doesn’t sound agnostic between the hierarchical approach and the unitarian approach. One informal way of describing unitarianism is ‘the view that rejects moral weights.’
1. I found that a little confusing. To me, “status-adjusted welfare” sounds notably less agnostic than does “moral weight” regarding the hierarchical and unitarian approaches.
As you note, “Unitarians assign all creatures with moral standing the same moral status, so for the unitarian, status-adjusted welfare just collapses to welfare.” So if we’re choosing to use the term “status-adjusted welfare”, I think we sound like we’re endorsing the hierarchical view—even if in reality we want to be open to saying “It turns out moral status is equal between animals, so there’s no need for status-adjustment.”
Whereas if we’re choosing to use the term “moral weight”, I think we sound like we’re open to the hierarchical view, but we at least avoid making it sound like we’re actually planning to adjust things by moral weight.
Perhaps the reason you see “status-adjusted welfare” as sounding more agnostic is because you’re imagining the adjustment as potentially being a multiplication by 0, for beings that have no moral status, rather than by a number between 0 and 1? That didn’t come to mind intuitively for me, because then I think I’d just want to say the being has no welfare. But maybe that’s me deviating from how philosophers would usually think/talk about these matters.
2. The prior point may be related to the fact that, as best I can tell, moral weight and status-adjusted welfare aren’t really different terms for the same thing (which seemed to me to be what the first sentence of that quote was implying). At least based on how I’ve seen the term used (mainly by Muehlhauser), “moral weight” seems to mean pretty much just the “moral status” component—just the term we multiply welfare by in order to get the number we really care about, rather than that final number.
So it seems like the synonym for “status-adjusted welfare” would be not “moral weight” but “moral-weight-adjusted welfare”. And that, unlike just “moral weight”, does sound to me like it’s endorsing the hierarchical view.
3. Somewhat separate point, which I’m uncertain about: I’m not sure status-adjusted welfare really “captures” capacity for welfare. Given your description, it seems status-adjusted welfare is just about multiplying the welfare the being is actually at (or a given change in welfare or something like that) by the moral status of the being—without the being’s capacity for welfare playing a role.
Did you mean that status-adjusted welfare “captures” capacity for welfare to the extent that a lower or higher capacity for welfare will tend to reduce or increase the amount of welfare that is being experienced or changed?
I’ll admit that I’m not wedded to the term ‘status-adjusted welfare.’ I agree that it is less than ideal. I don’t think ‘moral weight’ is better, but I also don’t think it’s much worse. If anyone has suggestions for a catch-all term for factors that might affect characteristic comparative moral value, I would be interested to hear them.
Interesting. My reading of Muehlhauser is that when he talks of moral weight he almost exclusively means ‘capacity for welfare’ and basically never means ‘moral status.’ From conversations with him, I get the impression he is a unitarian and so doesn’t endorse differences in moral status.
Did you mean that status-adjusted welfare “captures” capacity for welfare to the extent that a lower or higher capacity for welfare will tend to reduce or increase the amount of welfare that is being experienced or changed?
This is close to what I meant, though I grant that maybe this isn’t strong enough to qualify as ‘capturing’ capacity for welfare. The basic idea is that a unitarian and a hierarchist could in theory agree that, say, the status-adjusted welfare of a cow is generally higher than the status-adjusted welfare of a mealworm even if they disagree about the nature of moral status. The hierarchist might believe that the mealworm and the cow have the same welfare level, but the mealworm’s welfare is adjusted downward. The unitarian might believe that the cow and the mealworm have the same moral status, but the cow has a greater capacity for welfare.
1. To clarify, I don’t necessarily see status-adjusted welfare as a bad term. I’d actually say it seems pretty good, as it seems to state what it’s about fairly explicitly and intuitively.
I was just responding to the claim that it’s better than “moral weight” in that it sounds more agnostic between unitarian and hierarchical approaches. I see it as perhaps scoring worse than “moral weight” on that particular criterion, or about the same.
(But I also still think it means a somewhat different thing to “moral weight” anyway, as best I can tell.)
2. I’m 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 “moral weight” we give to the well-being of different kinds of moral patients.
This sounds to me most intuitively like it’s about adjusting a given unit of wellbeing/welfare by some factor that “we’re giving” them, which therefore sounds like moral status. But that’s 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 “status-adjusted welfare” is the product of moral status and welfare, whereas “moral weight” 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/events), or some mix of (a) and (b). So “moral weight” doesn’t seem to include the being’s actual welfare, and thus doesn’t seem to be a synonym for “status-adjusted welfare”.
(Incidentally, having to try to describe in the above paragraph what “moral weight” seems to mean has increased my inclination to mostly ditch that term and to stick with the “moral status vs capacity for welfare” 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. You’re right that it’s not clear that he’s 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
“typical” conscious experience of “typical” members of different species when undergoing various “canonical” positive and negative experiences
Frankly, it’s a bit confusing. (To be fair to Luke, he wrote that post before Kagan’s 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.
Thanks for this post—I found it very interesting and very clearly written and reasoned! I learned a lot, and have added it to my list of sources relevant to the idea of “moral weight”.
1. I found that a little confusing. To me, “status-adjusted welfare” sounds notably less agnostic than does “moral weight” regarding the hierarchical and unitarian approaches.
As you note, “Unitarians assign all creatures with moral standing the same moral status, so for the unitarian, status-adjusted welfare just collapses to welfare.” So if we’re choosing to use the term “status-adjusted welfare”, I think we sound like we’re endorsing the hierarchical view—even if in reality we want to be open to saying “It turns out moral status is equal between animals, so there’s no need for status-adjustment.”
Whereas if we’re choosing to use the term “moral weight”, I think we sound like we’re open to the hierarchical view, but we at least avoid making it sound like we’re actually planning to adjust things by moral weight.
Perhaps the reason you see “status-adjusted welfare” as sounding more agnostic is because you’re imagining the adjustment as potentially being a multiplication by 0, for beings that have no moral status, rather than by a number between 0 and 1? That didn’t come to mind intuitively for me, because then I think I’d just want to say the being has no welfare. But maybe that’s me deviating from how philosophers would usually think/talk about these matters.
2. The prior point may be related to the fact that, as best I can tell, moral weight and status-adjusted welfare aren’t really different terms for the same thing (which seemed to me to be what the first sentence of that quote was implying). At least based on how I’ve seen the term used (mainly by Muehlhauser), “moral weight” seems to mean pretty much just the “moral status” component—just the term we multiply welfare by in order to get the number we really care about, rather than that final number.
So it seems like the synonym for “status-adjusted welfare” would be not “moral weight” but “moral-weight-adjusted welfare”. And that, unlike just “moral weight”, does sound to me like it’s endorsing the hierarchical view.
3. Somewhat separate point, which I’m uncertain about: I’m not sure status-adjusted welfare really “captures” capacity for welfare. Given your description, it seems status-adjusted welfare is just about multiplying the welfare the being is actually at (or a given change in welfare or something like that) by the moral status of the being—without the being’s capacity for welfare playing a role.
Did you mean that status-adjusted welfare “captures” capacity for welfare to the extent that a lower or higher capacity for welfare will tend to reduce or increase the amount of welfare that is being experienced or changed?
Hi Michael,
Thanks for your comment.
I’ll admit that I’m not wedded to the term ‘status-adjusted welfare.’ I agree that it is less than ideal. I don’t think ‘moral weight’ is better, but I also don’t think it’s much worse. If anyone has suggestions for a catch-all term for factors that might affect characteristic comparative moral value, I would be interested to hear them.
Interesting. My reading of Muehlhauser is that when he talks of moral weight he almost exclusively means ‘capacity for welfare’ and basically never means ‘moral status.’ From conversations with him, I get the impression he is a unitarian and so doesn’t endorse differences in moral status.
This is close to what I meant, though I grant that maybe this isn’t strong enough to qualify as ‘capturing’ capacity for welfare. The basic idea is that a unitarian and a hierarchist could in theory agree that, say, the status-adjusted welfare of a cow is generally higher than the status-adjusted welfare of a mealworm even if they disagree about the nature of moral status. The hierarchist might believe that the mealworm and the cow have the same welfare level, but the mealworm’s welfare is adjusted downward. The unitarian might believe that the cow and the mealworm have the same moral status, but the cow has a greater capacity for welfare.
1. To clarify, I don’t necessarily see status-adjusted welfare as a bad term. I’d actually say it seems pretty good, as it seems to state what it’s about fairly explicitly and intuitively.
I was just responding to the claim that it’s better than “moral weight” in that it sounds more agnostic between unitarian and hierarchical approaches. I see it as perhaps scoring worse than “moral weight” on that particular criterion, or about the same.
(But I also still think it means a somewhat different thing to “moral weight” anyway, as best I can tell.)
2. I’m 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 it’s about adjusting a given unit of wellbeing/welfare by some factor that “we’re giving” them, which therefore sounds like moral status. But that’s 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 “status-adjusted welfare” is the product of moral status and welfare, whereas “moral weight” 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/events), or some mix of (a) and (b). So “moral weight” doesn’t seem to include the being’s actual welfare, and thus doesn’t seem to be a synonym for “status-adjusted welfare”.
(Incidentally, having to try to describe in the above paragraph what “moral weight” seems to mean has increased my inclination to mostly ditch that term and to stick with the “moral status vs capacity for welfare” 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. You’re right that it’s not clear that he’s 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, it’s a bit confusing. (To be fair to Luke, he wrote that post before Kagan’s 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.