Sorry, I should say either that or imply some at-least-equally-dramatic outcome (e.g. favouring immediate human extinction in the case of most person-affecting views).
I think this is probably not true, either, or at least not in a similarly objectionable way. There are person-affecting views that would not recommend killing everyone/human extinction for their own sake or to replace them with better off individuals, when the original individuals have on average subjectively “good” lives (even if there are many bad lives among them). I think the narrow and hard asymmetric view by Thomas (2019) basically works in binary choices, although his extension to more than three options doesn’t work (I’m looking at other ways of extending it; I discuss various views and their responses to replacement cases here.)
Off the cuff though, I remain immensely sceptical that one could usefully describe ‘preference as basically an appearance of something mattering, being bad, good, better or worse’ in such a way that such preferences could be
a. detachable from conscious, and
b. unambiguous in principle, and
c. grounded in any principle that is universally motivating to sentient life (which I think is the big strength of valence-based theories)
a. I would probably say that preferences as appearances are at least minimal forms of consciousness, rather than detachable from it, under a gradualist view. (I also think hedonic states/valence should probably be understood in gradualist terms, too.)
b. I suspect preferences can be and tend to be more ambiguous than hedonic states/valence, but hedonic states/valence don’t capture all that motivates, so they miss important ways things can matter to us. I’m also not sure hedonic states/valence are always unambiguous. Ambiguity doesn’t bother me that much. I’d rather ambiguity than discounting whole (apparent) moral patients or whole ways things can (apparently) matter to us.
c. I think valence-based theories miss how some things can be motivating. I want to count everything and only the things that are “motivating”, suitably defined. Roelofs (2022, ungated)’s explicitly counts all “motivating consciousness”:
The basic argument for Motivational Sentientism is that if a being has conscious states that motivate its actions, then it voluntarily acts for reasons provided by those states. This means it has reasons to act: subjective reasons, reasons as they appear from its perspective, and reasons which we as moral agents can take on vicariously as reasons for altruistic actions. Indeed, any being that is motivated to act could, it seems, sincerely appeal to us to help it: whatever it is motivated to do or bring about, it seems to make sense for us to empathise with that motivating conscious state, and for the being to ask us to do so if it understands this.
(...)
As I am using it, ‘motivation’ here does not mean anything merely causal or functional: motivation is a distinctively subjective, mental, process whereby some prospect seems ‘attractive’, some response ‘makes sense’, some action seems ‘called for’ from a subject’s perspective. The point is not whether a given sort of conscious state does or does not cause some bodily movement, but whether it presents the subject with a subjective reason for acting.
Or, if we did instead define these appearances functionally/causally in part by their (hypothetical) effects on behaviour (or cognitive control or attention specifically), as I’m inclined to, and define motivation functionally/causally in similar terms, then we could also get universal motivation, by definition. For example, something that appears “bad” would, by definition, tend to lead to its avoidance or prevention. This is all else equal, hypothetical and taking tradeoffs and constraints into account, e.g. if something seems bad to someone, they would avoid or prevent it if they could, but may not if they can’t or have other appearances that motivate more.
I think this is probably not true, either, or at least not in a similarly objectionable way. There are person-affecting views that would not recommend killing everyone/human extinction for their own sake or to replace them with better off individuals, when the original individuals have on average subjectively “good” lives (even if there are many bad lives among them). I think the narrow and hard asymmetric view by Thomas (2019) basically works in binary choices, although his extension to more than three options doesn’t work (I’m looking at other ways of extending it; I discuss various views and their responses to replacement cases here.)
a. I would probably say that preferences as appearances are at least minimal forms of consciousness, rather than detachable from it, under a gradualist view. (I also think hedonic states/valence should probably be understood in gradualist terms, too.)
b. I suspect preferences can be and tend to be more ambiguous than hedonic states/valence, but hedonic states/valence don’t capture all that motivates, so they miss important ways things can matter to us. I’m also not sure hedonic states/valence are always unambiguous. Ambiguity doesn’t bother me that much. I’d rather ambiguity than discounting whole (apparent) moral patients or whole ways things can (apparently) matter to us.
c. I think valence-based theories miss how some things can be motivating. I want to count everything and only the things that are “motivating”, suitably defined. Roelofs (2022, ungated)’s explicitly counts all “motivating consciousness”:
Or, if we did instead define these appearances functionally/causally in part by their (hypothetical) effects on behaviour (or cognitive control or attention specifically), as I’m inclined to, and define motivation functionally/causally in similar terms, then we could also get universal motivation, by definition. For example, something that appears “bad” would, by definition, tend to lead to its avoidance or prevention. This is all else equal, hypothetical and taking tradeoffs and constraints into account, e.g. if something seems bad to someone, they would avoid or prevent it if they could, but may not if they can’t or have other appearances that motivate more.