Erich_Grunewald 🔸 comments on Really radical empathy

[Erich_Grunewald 🔸]

Thanks for writing this, it’s very interesting.

Instead, I might describe myself as a preferentialist or subjectivist about what matters, so that what’s better is just what’s preferred, or what would be better according to our preferences, attitudes or ways of caring, in general.

This sounds similar to Christine Korsgaard’s (Kantian) view on value, where things only matter because they matter to sentient beings (people, to Kant). I think I was primed to notice this because I remember you had some great comments on my interview with her from four years ago.

Quoting her:

Utilitarians think that the value of people and animals derives from the value of the states they are capable of – pleasure and pain, satisfaction and frustration. In fact, in a way it is worse: In utilitarianism, people and animals don’t really matter at all; they are just the place where the valuable things happen. That’s why the boundaries between them do not matter. Kantians think that the value of the states derives from the value of the people and animals. In a Kantian theory, your pleasures and pains matter because you matter, you are an “end in yourself” and your pains and pleasures matter to you.

I guess “utilitarianism” above could be replaced with “hedonism” etc. and it would sort of match your writing that hedonism etc. is “guilty [...] of valuing things in ways that don’t match how we care about things”. Anyway, she discusses this view in much greater detail in Fellow Creatures.

See also St. Jules, 2024 and Roelofs, 2022 (pdf) for more on ways of caring and moral patienthood, using different terminology.

Fyi, the latter two of these links are broken.

[MichaelStJules]

Thanks Erich!

Yes, it is pretty close to Korsgaard! I think I actually had Korsgaard in mind and might have checked some of her shorter pieces while working on this, although “object views” ended up being what I actually wanted here. Also, there’s this piece by Jeff Sebo explaining Korsgaard’s constructivism.

Fyi, the latter two of these links are broken.

Fixed! Thanks.