In your piece you focus on artificial sentience. But similar arguments would apply to somewhat broader categories.
Wellbeing
For example, you could expand it to creating entities that can have wellbeing (or negative elements of wellbeing) even if that wellbeing can be determined by things other than conscious experience. If there were ways of creating millions of beings with negative wellbeing, I’d be very disturbed by that regardless of whether it happened by suffering or some other means. I’m sympathetic to views where suffering is the only form of wellbeing, but am by no means sure they are the correct account of wellbeing, so maybe what I really care about is avoiding creating beings that can have (negative) wellbeing.
Interests
One could also go a step further. Wellbeing is a broad category for all kinds of things that count towards how well your life goes. But on many people’s understandings, it might not capture everything about ill treatment. In particular, it might not capture everything to do with deontological wrongs and/or rights violations, which may involve wronging someone in a way that can’t be made up for by improvements in wellbeing and can’t be cashed out purely in terms of its negative effects on wellbeing. So it may be that creating beings with interests or morally relevant interests is the relevant category.
That said, note that these are both steps towards greater abstraction, so even if they better capture what we really care about, they might still lose out on the grounds of being less compelling, more open to interpretation, and harder to operationalise.
In your piece you focus on artificial sentience. But similar arguments would apply to somewhat broader categories.
Wellbeing
For example, you could expand it to creating entities that can have wellbeing (or negative elements of wellbeing) even if that wellbeing can be determined by things other than conscious experience. If there were ways of creating millions of beings with negative wellbeing, I’d be very disturbed by that regardless of whether it happened by suffering or some other means. I’m sympathetic to views where suffering is the only form of wellbeing, but am by no means sure they are the correct account of wellbeing, so maybe what I really care about is avoiding creating beings that can have (negative) wellbeing.
Interests
One could also go a step further. Wellbeing is a broad category for all kinds of things that count towards how well your life goes. But on many people’s understandings, it might not capture everything about ill treatment. In particular, it might not capture everything to do with deontological wrongs and/or rights violations, which may involve wronging someone in a way that can’t be made up for by improvements in wellbeing and can’t be cashed out purely in terms of its negative effects on wellbeing. So it may be that creating beings with interests or morally relevant interests is the relevant category.
That said, note that these are both steps towards greater abstraction, so even if they better capture what we really care about, they might still lose out on the grounds of being less compelling, more open to interpretation, and harder to operationalise.