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.)
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.)