As an example of how capacity for welfare might be distinct from moral status, one might be a hedonist about welfare (and thus think that capacity for welfare is wholly determined by possible range of valenced experience and maybe subjective experience of time) but think that moral status is determined by degree of autonomy or rationality. The precise definition of welfarism is contentious, so I’ll leave it to you to decide if that’s a violation of welfarism.
I don’t see how you could motivate that if we accept welfarism (unless we accept objective list theories, but again, that seems to be through welfare capacity). Why are degree of autonomy and rationality non-instrumentally relevant? Why not the width of the visible electromagnetic spectrum, or whether or not an individual can see at all, or other senses?
That strikes me as the wrong result.
I really don’t know. It’s hard for me to have an intuition either way since both seem wrong to me, anyway. It seems better to me to double penalize an individual for things that are relevant to welfare than to non-instrumentally penalize individuals based on things which are at most instrumentally relevant to welfare.
I don’t see how you could motivate that if we accept welfarism (unless we accept objective list theories, but again, that seems to be through welfare capacity). Why are degree of autonomy and rationality non-instrumentally relevant? Why not the width of the visible electromagnetic spectrum, or whether or not an individual can see at all, or other senses?
I really don’t know. It’s hard for me to have an intuition either way since both seem wrong to me, anyway. It seems better to me to double penalize an individual for things that are relevant to welfare than to non-instrumentally penalize individuals based on things which are at most instrumentally relevant to welfare.