It is good to be open to reconsider one’s most basic assumptions every now and then. But I was nevertheless surprised when I read this post, as it questions one of the core ideas of EA, which is that of impartiality, that is, the idea that equal interests count the same. EA without impartiality wouldn’t look very much like EA anymore. Partiality drives people to engage in causes that do significantly less good than others, because in doing so they do more good for those favored by their partial views.
In the literature, one of the main ways to oppose impartiality is by using the construct of moral status, according to which equal interests don’t always count the same. This is very different from claiming that in different situations we can have different interests. It is not against impartiality to claim that, say, the interest in not dying of a human and a mouse, or of an old human and a young human, may be different. If these interests do differ, then, as they are different interests, they count differently. This is perfectly in accordance with the idea of the equal consideration of interests. But this is totally different from saying that the equal interests of a mouse and a human, or of an old and a young humans, shouldn’t count the same, because their status is different.
As for the capacity for (positive or negative) welfare, its usefulness is very limited. It can allow you do compare the weight of different individuals only when they’re facing the same situation. But, in many other cases, considering that their capacity for welfare is relevant can drive us to make very wrong decisions. Suppose Nemo the fish has a lower capacity for welfare than Jason the human. Suppose I can choose between causing some pain to Jason or a slightly worse pain to Nemo. Other things being equal, choosing the latter would be wrong. This is because what matters for this decision is not Jason and Nemo’s capacity for welfare, but the actual interests involved, which, again, other things being equal are determined only by the actual alternative pains at stake.
In practice, most of the decisions we have to make are of this kind, as those affected by the different causes we can compare aren’t in the same situation (which is what would allow us to make our decisions on the basis of their capacity for welfare). Rather, they are in situations that differ significantly from each other.
Thanks for your comment. For what it’s worth, I am not myself very sympathetic to the hierarchical view that holds that there are differences in moral status among creatures with moral standing. However, I think there are enough thoughtful people who do endorse such a view that it would be epistemically inappropriate to completely dismiss the position. These questions are tough, and I’ve tried to reflect our deep collective uncertainty about these matters in the post.
(I should perhaps also flag that even if there are differences in moral status, there is no a priori guarantee that humans have the highest moral status. I’m currently working on a piece about the subjective experience of time, and if there are differences in characteristic temporal experience across species, humans certainly don’t come out on top of that metric. But perhaps that’s irrelevant to moral status.)
Regarding the usefulness of capacity for welfare, naturally I disagree. Take fish, for instance. Fish are a tremendously diverse group of animals, and this diversity is reflected in human exploitation of fish. (By my count, humans exploit five times as many taxonomic families of fish as they do birds.) There is prima facie good reason to think that capacity for welfare differs substantially among different families of fish. The harms we inflict on fish, through aquaculture and commercial fishing, are severe, plausibly among the worst conditions the fish could experience. If capacity for welfare differs among fish, and we are inflicting severe harm on all exploited fish, then those differences in capacity for welfare would give us reason to prioritize some types of fish over others. The fish with the greater capacity for welfare are suffering more, so easing their suffering is more urgent.
I agree that many thoughtful people reject impartiality (the majority of human beings probably reject impartiality). But this is not necessarily a reason to think there may be a sound epistemic case not to completely reject partialism. Thoughtful people can be wrong, as shown by the fact that you can find thoughtful people defending almost all kind of views, and they can be biased. And then, there are very few basic moral ideas that seem harder to abandon that how much a certain given (dis)value should count should be completely independent of the identity of the one who suffers it.
I agree that if the way different animals are affected are coincident, and if some suffer more because of some capacity they have, then knowing more about this is certainly relevant. I just don’t think the situations in which animals that are very diverse typically are are similar enough to make these comparisons. (But then I must confess I’m skeptical from the start about the whole idea that given what we know now we can really learn about the possible differences in the capacities for welfare between animals. In fact I also think it may well be the case that there aren’t significant differences in that respect at least among vertebrates and invertebrates with relatively complex nervous systems. But I think the above claim stands even if you disagree with me on this.)
Anyway, my opinions about the capacities of different animals and their usefulness in situations like the ones you mention may well be all wrong! But would you agree with the main point that what ultimately matters is not capacity for welfare but the actual interests at stake in each case?
If you accept this, then maybe you can share my concern that, when different animals are in different situations, considering capacity for welfare instead of the actual interests at stake (as it seems to happen often) can lead us to make wrong decisions.
Thanks for another insightful comment. I think we agree that what ultimately matters morally is realized welfare. I think we disagree about the extent and size of differences in capacity for welfare, our ability to measure capacity for welfare, and the usefulness of thinking about capacity for welfare. (Please correct me if I have misconstrued our points of agreement and disagreement!) I’ll take our points of disagreement in reverse order.
It’s certainly true that differences in capacity for welfare won’t always make a difference to the way we ought to allocate resources. If we are only alleviating mild suffering (or promoting mild pleasure) and we have reason to believe that more or less all welfare subjects have the capacity to experience welfare outcomes greater than mild suffering and mild pleasure, then capacity for welfare isn’t really relevant. But it seems to me that most of the time humans exploit nonhuman animals, they inflict what prima facie looks to be intense suffering. If that’s right, then knowing something about capacity for welfare might be important. Alleviating the suffering of the animals with a greater capacity for welfare would generally make a bigger welfare improvement.
On the second point: measuring capacity for welfare is going to be extremely difficult and doing so well is a big and long-term project. Nonetheless, I am cautiously optimistic that if we take this topic seriously, we can make real progress. Admittedly, there are a lot of ways such a project could go wrong, so maybe my optimism is misplaced. I lay out my thoughts in much more detail in the second post in this series (due to be released June 1), so maybe we should discuss the issue more then.
Finally, my reading of the literature suggests that most (though not all) plausible theories of welfare predict differences in capacity for welfare, though of course the size and extent of such differences depend on the details of the theory and various empirical facts. I would be curious to know which combination of theoretical and empirical claims you endorse that lead you to believe there aren’t significant differences in capacity for welfare across species. (If you’re right, thinking about capacity for welfare might still be useful if for no other reason than to dispel the old myth that such differences exist!)
Thanks again for reading and engaging with the post!
Thanks for reconstructing and summarizing the discussion. I think this is generally true:
I think we agree that what ultimately matters morally is realized welfare. I think we disagree about the extent and size of differences in capacity for welfare, our ability to measure capacity for welfare, and the usefulness of thinking about capacity for welfare.
I guess our strongest disagreement might be about our ability to measure capacity for welfare. And I think maybe we can agree too on some of the dangers of giving too much importance to the capacity for welfare.
Here’s why I think this. My concern is that accepting capacity for welfare as a rule of thumb to consider who counts for more often leads people to assume that the interests of certain animals count for more in general than the interests of other animals, even in situations in which the harms they are facing are less important ones. It also leads people to disregard numbers. This is one of the reasons why the interests of mammals typically get much more attention than those of invertebrates and fish(es) even when the situation of those mammals as individuals is not necessarily worse than that of a fish, and even if, due to their very different numbers, their aggregate interests should count for significantly less. This kind of mistakes are made all the time, not just among the general public, but also among animal advocates.
I suspect you’ll probably agree that this is problematic too. If that’s so, then our disagreement concerning the usefulness of thinking about capacity for welfare will be smaller than it may seem at first!
As for your question regarding the claims I endorse, axiologically, I think only experiences can be positive or negative. Of course if one defends some forms of preference-satisfactionism and certain objective list theories of welfare one will reach a different conclusion. According to these views, being able to read novels, or being a social animal, may make your capacity for welfare higher. But I don’t find those views plausible.
Concerning my views about what types of minds there may be, to a great degree I’m just agnostic about the differences in intensity of experience. Maybe things are as you think, I just think that the evidence we have doesn’t allow us to reach that conclusion. Being able to have experiences that are more complex doesn’t necessarily entail being able to have experiences that are more intense. I find it quite plausible that an animal may only have very simple experiences but equally intense to the ones that animals with complex minds could have. The point of the intensity of experiences like pain is not to help you in decision making process, like being able to deal with complex information is, but just to give you some motivation to act. I don’t think that beings with more complex minds necessarily need more motivation of this kind than those with simpler ones.
Empirically, much of the evidence about the minds of animals that are very different from us is about the complexity of the information those animals can deal with. Significantly less evidence seems to tell us something that can be relevant for drawing differences between the intensity of the experiences of different animals, and such evidence is often very uncertain. However, I can see that there are exceptions to this, such as the fact that some arthropods go on with a certain behavior despite having suffered important physical harms. This strikes me as evidence in favor of your view. But I think we would need much more in order to be able to conclude something here more conclusively. And even if it were true in this case we can’t be certain that this applies in the case of other animals like vertebrates. Maybe there is some point from which all beings have the capacity to have roughly equally intense experiences (but arthropods are below that level). We just don’t have enough evidence (or ways to get it at this point).
Thanks again. Much (though not all) of my credence in the claim that there are significant differences in capacity for welfare across species derives from the credence I put in non-hedonistic theories of welfare. But I agree that differences in capacity for welfare don’t entail that the interests of the animal with a greater capacity ought always be prioritized over the interests of the animal with the smaller capacity. And of course I agree that numbers matter. As you know, I’m quite concerned about our treatment of some invertebrates. When I express that concern to people, many suggest that even if, say, bees are sentient, they don’t count for as much as, say, cows. I hope that thinking about both the number of exploited invertebrates and their capacity for welfare will help us figure out whether our current neglect of invertebrate welfare is justified. I suspect that when we get clear on what plausibly can and can’t influence capacity for welfare (and to what extent), we’ll see that the differences between mammals and arthropods aren’t great enough to justify our current allocation of resources. At the very least, thinking more about it might reveal that we are deeply ignorant about differences in capacity for welfare across species. We can then try to account for that uncertainty in our allocation of resources.
I agree that many thoughtful people reject impartiality (the majority of human beings probably reject impartiality). But this is not necessarily a reason to think there may be a sound epistemic case not to completely reject partialism.
I think two broad (though not necessarily knock-down) arguments against (some version of) those claims are considerations of epistemic modesty/humility and moral uncertainty. More specifically, I see that as at least a reason why it’s useful to engage with the idea of non-impartial views, and to try to leave one’s conceptual framework open to such views.
(That said, I also think there’s clear value insometimeshaving discussions that are just about one’s “independent impressions”—i.e., what one would believe without updating on the views of others. For example, that helps avoids information cascades. And I do personallyshare strong intuitions towards an impartial/unitarian approach.)
I quite appreciate the way you’ve engaged with hierarchical approaches and ensured your conceptual framework was open to such approaches, even if you personally aren’t very sympathetic towards them.
That said, I think I can see how a reader might get the impression that you’re more sympathetic to such approaches than it sounds like you are. E.g., you write:
I have suggested that we should frame the value of interventions in terms of status-adjusted welfare. If we were to compare the value of an intervention that targeted pigs with an intervention that targeted silkworms, we should consider not only the amount of welfare to be gained but also the moral status of the creatures who would gain the welfare.
To me, this reads like you’re saying not just that we should have this terminology at hand, nor just that we should be ready to ignore the welfare of entities with 0 moral status, but also that we should adjust things by moral status that varies by degrees.
And as I mentioned in another comment, to me, the term “status-adjusted welfare” also gives that impression. (I’m not saying that’s actually the literal meaning of your claims or terms, just that I can see how one might come to that impression.)
It is good to be open to reconsider one’s most basic assumptions every now and then. But I was nevertheless surprised when I read this post, as it questions one of the core ideas of EA, which is that of impartiality, that is, the idea that equal interests count the same. EA without impartiality wouldn’t look very much like EA anymore. Partiality drives people to engage in causes that do significantly less good than others, because in doing so they do more good for those favored by their partial views.
In the literature, one of the main ways to oppose impartiality is by using the construct of moral status, according to which equal interests don’t always count the same. This is very different from claiming that in different situations we can have different interests. It is not against impartiality to claim that, say, the interest in not dying of a human and a mouse, or of an old human and a young human, may be different. If these interests do differ, then, as they are different interests, they count differently. This is perfectly in accordance with the idea of the equal consideration of interests. But this is totally different from saying that the equal interests of a mouse and a human, or of an old and a young humans, shouldn’t count the same, because their status is different.
As for the capacity for (positive or negative) welfare, its usefulness is very limited. It can allow you do compare the weight of different individuals only when they’re facing the same situation. But, in many other cases, considering that their capacity for welfare is relevant can drive us to make very wrong decisions. Suppose Nemo the fish has a lower capacity for welfare than Jason the human. Suppose I can choose between causing some pain to Jason or a slightly worse pain to Nemo. Other things being equal, choosing the latter would be wrong. This is because what matters for this decision is not Jason and Nemo’s capacity for welfare, but the actual interests involved, which, again, other things being equal are determined only by the actual alternative pains at stake.
In practice, most of the decisions we have to make are of this kind, as those affected by the different causes we can compare aren’t in the same situation (which is what would allow us to make our decisions on the basis of their capacity for welfare). Rather, they are in situations that differ significantly from each other.
Hi Oscar,
Thanks for your comment. For what it’s worth, I am not myself very sympathetic to the hierarchical view that holds that there are differences in moral status among creatures with moral standing. However, I think there are enough thoughtful people who do endorse such a view that it would be epistemically inappropriate to completely dismiss the position. These questions are tough, and I’ve tried to reflect our deep collective uncertainty about these matters in the post.
(I should perhaps also flag that even if there are differences in moral status, there is no a priori guarantee that humans have the highest moral status. I’m currently working on a piece about the subjective experience of time, and if there are differences in characteristic temporal experience across species, humans certainly don’t come out on top of that metric. But perhaps that’s irrelevant to moral status.)
Regarding the usefulness of capacity for welfare, naturally I disagree. Take fish, for instance. Fish are a tremendously diverse group of animals, and this diversity is reflected in human exploitation of fish. (By my count, humans exploit five times as many taxonomic families of fish as they do birds.) There is prima facie good reason to think that capacity for welfare differs substantially among different families of fish. The harms we inflict on fish, through aquaculture and commercial fishing, are severe, plausibly among the worst conditions the fish could experience. If capacity for welfare differs among fish, and we are inflicting severe harm on all exploited fish, then those differences in capacity for welfare would give us reason to prioritize some types of fish over others. The fish with the greater capacity for welfare are suffering more, so easing their suffering is more urgent.
Happy to talk more if you’d like.
Hi Jason,
I agree that many thoughtful people reject impartiality (the majority of human beings probably reject impartiality). But this is not necessarily a reason to think there may be a sound epistemic case not to completely reject partialism. Thoughtful people can be wrong, as shown by the fact that you can find thoughtful people defending almost all kind of views, and they can be biased. And then, there are very few basic moral ideas that seem harder to abandon that how much a certain given (dis)value should count should be completely independent of the identity of the one who suffers it.
I agree that if the way different animals are affected are coincident, and if some suffer more because of some capacity they have, then knowing more about this is certainly relevant. I just don’t think the situations in which animals that are very diverse typically are are similar enough to make these comparisons. (But then I must confess I’m skeptical from the start about the whole idea that given what we know now we can really learn about the possible differences in the capacities for welfare between animals. In fact I also think it may well be the case that there aren’t significant differences in that respect at least among vertebrates and invertebrates with relatively complex nervous systems. But I think the above claim stands even if you disagree with me on this.)
Anyway, my opinions about the capacities of different animals and their usefulness in situations like the ones you mention may well be all wrong! But would you agree with the main point that what ultimately matters is not capacity for welfare but the actual interests at stake in each case?
If you accept this, then maybe you can share my concern that, when different animals are in different situations, considering capacity for welfare instead of the actual interests at stake (as it seems to happen often) can lead us to make wrong decisions.
Thanks!
Hi Oscar,
Thanks for another insightful comment. I think we agree that what ultimately matters morally is realized welfare. I think we disagree about the extent and size of differences in capacity for welfare, our ability to measure capacity for welfare, and the usefulness of thinking about capacity for welfare. (Please correct me if I have misconstrued our points of agreement and disagreement!) I’ll take our points of disagreement in reverse order.
It’s certainly true that differences in capacity for welfare won’t always make a difference to the way we ought to allocate resources. If we are only alleviating mild suffering (or promoting mild pleasure) and we have reason to believe that more or less all welfare subjects have the capacity to experience welfare outcomes greater than mild suffering and mild pleasure, then capacity for welfare isn’t really relevant. But it seems to me that most of the time humans exploit nonhuman animals, they inflict what prima facie looks to be intense suffering. If that’s right, then knowing something about capacity for welfare might be important. Alleviating the suffering of the animals with a greater capacity for welfare would generally make a bigger welfare improvement.
On the second point: measuring capacity for welfare is going to be extremely difficult and doing so well is a big and long-term project. Nonetheless, I am cautiously optimistic that if we take this topic seriously, we can make real progress. Admittedly, there are a lot of ways such a project could go wrong, so maybe my optimism is misplaced. I lay out my thoughts in much more detail in the second post in this series (due to be released June 1), so maybe we should discuss the issue more then.
Finally, my reading of the literature suggests that most (though not all) plausible theories of welfare predict differences in capacity for welfare, though of course the size and extent of such differences depend on the details of the theory and various empirical facts. I would be curious to know which combination of theoretical and empirical claims you endorse that lead you to believe there aren’t significant differences in capacity for welfare across species. (If you’re right, thinking about capacity for welfare might still be useful if for no other reason than to dispel the old myth that such differences exist!)
Thanks again for reading and engaging with the post!
Hi Jason,
Thanks for reconstructing and summarizing the discussion. I think this is generally true:
I guess our strongest disagreement might be about our ability to measure capacity for welfare. And I think maybe we can agree too on some of the dangers of giving too much importance to the capacity for welfare.
Here’s why I think this. My concern is that accepting capacity for welfare as a rule of thumb to consider who counts for more often leads people to assume that the interests of certain animals count for more in general than the interests of other animals, even in situations in which the harms they are facing are less important ones. It also leads people to disregard numbers. This is one of the reasons why the interests of mammals typically get much more attention than those of invertebrates and fish(es) even when the situation of those mammals as individuals is not necessarily worse than that of a fish, and even if, due to their very different numbers, their aggregate interests should count for significantly less. This kind of mistakes are made all the time, not just among the general public, but also among animal advocates.
I suspect you’ll probably agree that this is problematic too. If that’s so, then our disagreement concerning the usefulness of thinking about capacity for welfare will be smaller than it may seem at first!
As for your question regarding the claims I endorse, axiologically, I think only experiences can be positive or negative. Of course if one defends some forms of preference-satisfactionism and certain objective list theories of welfare one will reach a different conclusion. According to these views, being able to read novels, or being a social animal, may make your capacity for welfare higher. But I don’t find those views plausible.
Concerning my views about what types of minds there may be, to a great degree I’m just agnostic about the differences in intensity of experience. Maybe things are as you think, I just think that the evidence we have doesn’t allow us to reach that conclusion. Being able to have experiences that are more complex doesn’t necessarily entail being able to have experiences that are more intense. I find it quite plausible that an animal may only have very simple experiences but equally intense to the ones that animals with complex minds could have. The point of the intensity of experiences like pain is not to help you in decision making process, like being able to deal with complex information is, but just to give you some motivation to act. I don’t think that beings with more complex minds necessarily need more motivation of this kind than those with simpler ones.
Empirically, much of the evidence about the minds of animals that are very different from us is about the complexity of the information those animals can deal with. Significantly less evidence seems to tell us something that can be relevant for drawing differences between the intensity of the experiences of different animals, and such evidence is often very uncertain. However, I can see that there are exceptions to this, such as the fact that some arthropods go on with a certain behavior despite having suffered important physical harms. This strikes me as evidence in favor of your view. But I think we would need much more in order to be able to conclude something here more conclusively. And even if it were true in this case we can’t be certain that this applies in the case of other animals like vertebrates. Maybe there is some point from which all beings have the capacity to have roughly equally intense experiences (but arthropods are below that level). We just don’t have enough evidence (or ways to get it at this point).
Thanks!
Hi Oscar,
Thanks again. Much (though not all) of my credence in the claim that there are significant differences in capacity for welfare across species derives from the credence I put in non-hedonistic theories of welfare. But I agree that differences in capacity for welfare don’t entail that the interests of the animal with a greater capacity ought always be prioritized over the interests of the animal with the smaller capacity. And of course I agree that numbers matter. As you know, I’m quite concerned about our treatment of some invertebrates. When I express that concern to people, many suggest that even if, say, bees are sentient, they don’t count for as much as, say, cows. I hope that thinking about both the number of exploited invertebrates and their capacity for welfare will help us figure out whether our current neglect of invertebrate welfare is justified. I suspect that when we get clear on what plausibly can and can’t influence capacity for welfare (and to what extent), we’ll see that the differences between mammals and arthropods aren’t great enough to justify our current allocation of resources. At the very least, thinking more about it might reveal that we are deeply ignorant about differences in capacity for welfare across species. We can then try to account for that uncertainty in our allocation of resources.
I found this whole comment thread interesting.
I think two broad (though not necessarily knock-down) arguments against (some version of) those claims are considerations of epistemic modesty/humility and moral uncertainty. More specifically, I see that as at least a reason why it’s useful to engage with the idea of non-impartial views, and to try to leave one’s conceptual framework open to such views.
(That said, I also think there’s clear value in sometimes having discussions that are just about one’s “independent impressions”—i.e., what one would believe without updating on the views of others. For example, that helps avoids information cascades. And I do personally share strong intuitions towards an impartial/unitarian approach.)
I quite appreciate the way you’ve engaged with hierarchical approaches and ensured your conceptual framework was open to such approaches, even if you personally aren’t very sympathetic towards them.
That said, I think I can see how a reader might get the impression that you’re more sympathetic to such approaches than it sounds like you are. E.g., you write:
To me, this reads like you’re saying not just that we should have this terminology at hand, nor just that we should be ready to ignore the welfare of entities with 0 moral status, but also that we should adjust things by moral status that varies by degrees.
And as I mentioned in another comment, to me, the term “status-adjusted welfare” also gives that impression. (I’m not saying that’s actually the literal meaning of your claims or terms, just that I can see how one might come to that impression.)