Maybe an alternative to moral status to capture “speciesist” intuitions is that we should just give more weight to more intense experiences than the ratio scale would suggest and this could apply to both suffering and pleasure (whereas prioritarianism or negative-leaning utilitarianism might apply it only to suffering, or to overall quality of a life). Some people might not trade away their peak experiences for any number of mild pleasures. This could reduce the repugnance of the repugnant conclusion (and the very repugnant conclusion, too) or even avoid it altogether if taken far enough (with lexicality, weak or strong). This isn’t the same as Mill’s higher and lower pleasures; we’re only distinguishing them by intensity, not quality, and there need not be any kind of discontinuity.
That being said, I’ve come to believe that there’s no fact of the matter about the degree to which one experience is better than another experience (for the same individual or across individuals). Well, I was already a moral antirealist, but I’m more confident in being able in principle (but not in practice) to compare welfare in different individual experiences, even between species, as better/worse, than in the cardinal welfare. Simon Knutsson has written about this here and here.
Maybe an alternative to moral status to capture “speciesist” intuitions is that we should just give more weight to more intense experiences than the ratio scale would suggest and this could apply to both suffering and pleasure (whereas prioritarianism or negative-leaning utilitarianism might apply it only to suffering, or to overall quality of a life). Some people might not trade away their peak experiences for any number of mild pleasures. This could reduce the repugnance of the repugnant conclusion (and the very repugnant conclusion, too) or even avoid it altogether if taken far enough (with lexicality, weak or strong). This isn’t the same as Mill’s higher and lower pleasures; we’re only distinguishing them by intensity, not quality, and there need not be any kind of discontinuity.
That being said, I’ve come to believe that there’s no fact of the matter about the degree to which one experience is better than another experience (for the same individual or across individuals). Well, I was already a moral antirealist, but I’m more confident in being able in principle (but not in practice) to compare welfare in different individual experiences, even between species, as better/worse, than in the cardinal welfare. Simon Knutsson has written about this here and here.