Thank you so much.
This is a concise synopsis of how net suffering/revealed preference nor reflective preference capture what seems to me to be optimal outcomes.
It seems self evident to me, but actually articulating that suffering is not the whole point, but neither is sentience, is proving tricky and making me question if I’m actually just Wrong About It. (Also I’m not very familiar with the philosophy in this area)
I’m not sure I understand number 2 - are humans imposing their human reflectance desires as surrogate for the non-humans? Or are humans attempting to interpret what the non-humans reflectance values would be, and imposing those? Saying reflective desires of humans made me initially interpret it as simply balancing human desires against non-human desires for cooperative living, but I no longer think that is the meaning you were intending to convey.
In 2, we’d ask a human about their own preferences concerning their own suffering and their other desires, and average over multiple humans.
The weight we give to nonhuman animals’ desires relative to humans depends on 3, their revealed preferences, or the weights nonhuman animals give to their own desires through their actual choices/behaviours, which we can observe, and 1, which tells you how to make tradeoffs between humans’ revealed preferences and animals reflective preferences by identifying something to normalize both scales by.
Basically, we have two separate welfare scales: humans’ reflective preferences as their own welfare (2), and nonhuman animal species’ revealed preferences as their own welfare (3), and we use 1 to put them on a common scale.
I’ve made some edits to the post to try to make this a bit clearer.
Thank you so much. This is a concise synopsis of how net suffering/revealed preference nor reflective preference capture what seems to me to be optimal outcomes.
It seems self evident to me, but actually articulating that suffering is not the whole point, but neither is sentience, is proving tricky and making me question if I’m actually just Wrong About It. (Also I’m not very familiar with the philosophy in this area)
I’m not sure I understand number 2 - are humans imposing their human reflectance desires as surrogate for the non-humans? Or are humans attempting to interpret what the non-humans reflectance values would be, and imposing those? Saying reflective desires of humans made me initially interpret it as simply balancing human desires against non-human desires for cooperative living, but I no longer think that is the meaning you were intending to convey.
Thank you! :)
In 2, we’d ask a human about their own preferences concerning their own suffering and their other desires, and average over multiple humans.
The weight we give to nonhuman animals’ desires relative to humans depends on 3, their revealed preferences, or the weights nonhuman animals give to their own desires through their actual choices/behaviours, which we can observe, and 1, which tells you how to make tradeoffs between humans’ revealed preferences and animals reflective preferences by identifying something to normalize both scales by.
Basically, we have two separate welfare scales: humans’ reflective preferences as their own welfare (2), and nonhuman animal species’ revealed preferences as their own welfare (3), and we use 1 to put them on a common scale.
I’ve made some edits to the post to try to make this a bit clearer.
Thanks, I get it now