Nice piece Jason. The research Rethink Priorities did also raised my credence that invertebrates have some level of consciousness. However, I’d like to know more about how the capacity for consciousness translates to morally valuable experiences. If consciousness is on a scale from 0 to 10 and humans are at 10 and a bee is at 3, are it’s experiences 3/10th as important as mine? Or is there a further multiplier one should apply to account for ‘value of experience given level of consciousness’? If so, how would we go about determining that weighting?
In relation to compiling extant scientific research, I have a some unusual advice that I just thought of. It’s really worth looking at papers published in German from the 1950′s until the 1980′s. It’s unlikely they will be directly addressing invertebrate sentiance or welfare, but it’s likely they’ll cover many topics on your table. When I a was doing honeybee sensorimotor research, there were many ideas I had (say 20 to 40%) that I found had been really thoroughly covered during that period (often using equipment that was really quite impressive!). This body of work doesn’t receive much attention these days, but can often be found as references in papers up until the 90′s, or in current publications by older German PI’s.
Hi Gavin! Thanks for your comment. It raises an important but extremely difficult question. The short answer is that nobody really knows what to say about moral weighting. Slightly longer answer below.
First, on consciousness. Strictly speaking, I don’t think it makes sense to talk about consciousness occurring on a scale. An entity is conscious if and only if there is something it is like to be that entity. If there’s any phenomenology, no matter how faint or weird, the entity is conscious. If there’s no phenomenology, the entity is not conscious.
Nonetheless, there are some aspects of consciousness that admit of gradations, and these gradations are plausibly morally significant. I’m pretty comfortable asserting that human experiences are ‘richer,’ in some sense of the term, than fruit fly experiences, and this difference in ‘richness’ is part of what accounts for differences in the moral value of fruit fly and human experiences. But it’s not clear to me how to spell out the appropriate sense of ‘richness.’ It’s certainly not as simple as number of sensory modalities. (I don’t think Helen Keller’s experiences were worth less than my experiences.) Phenomenal intensity is probably part of the answer but again not the whole of it. Elements of cognitive, emotional, or social complexity may also help determine moral weight. Philosophers are accustomed to talking about the moral value of agency, autonomy, rationality, and self-awareness. Those things might also factor into moral weight.
As for how to determine moral weight in practice, it depends of course on how we resolve the theoretical question, but I think there’s also going to be ample uncertainty here. There are probably some rough characterizations we can make, but in general I think we know too little about most invertebrates to be able to say much about their (relative) cognitive, emotional, and social complexity. I would love to be able to spend a good chunk of my career investigating these questions!
Thanks for the research advice! I can safely say that I never would have specifically targeted German research from the 50s to the 80s on my own initiative. One worry, though: how many of those papers are exclusively in German?
Thanks Jason. The moral weighting is a tough question, so I hope you have the time to get to some conclusions about this.
With regards to the papers, around half of them are probably written in German so they are easily overlooked and why I highlighted them. Luckily many have an English abstract. Still, by the end of my PhD I knew quite a few words in German about die Bienen!
Nice piece Jason. The research Rethink Priorities did also raised my credence that invertebrates have some level of consciousness. However, I’d like to know more about how the capacity for consciousness translates to morally valuable experiences. If consciousness is on a scale from 0 to 10 and humans are at 10 and a bee is at 3, are it’s experiences 3/10th as important as mine? Or is there a further multiplier one should apply to account for ‘value of experience given level of consciousness’? If so, how would we go about determining that weighting?
In relation to compiling extant scientific research, I have a some unusual advice that I just thought of. It’s really worth looking at papers published in German from the 1950′s until the 1980′s. It’s unlikely they will be directly addressing invertebrate sentiance or welfare, but it’s likely they’ll cover many topics on your table. When I a was doing honeybee sensorimotor research, there were many ideas I had (say 20 to 40%) that I found had been really thoroughly covered during that period (often using equipment that was really quite impressive!). This body of work doesn’t receive much attention these days, but can often be found as references in papers up until the 90′s, or in current publications by older German PI’s.
Hi Gavin! Thanks for your comment. It raises an important but extremely difficult question. The short answer is that nobody really knows what to say about moral weighting. Slightly longer answer below.
First, on consciousness. Strictly speaking, I don’t think it makes sense to talk about consciousness occurring on a scale. An entity is conscious if and only if there is something it is like to be that entity. If there’s any phenomenology, no matter how faint or weird, the entity is conscious. If there’s no phenomenology, the entity is not conscious.
Nonetheless, there are some aspects of consciousness that admit of gradations, and these gradations are plausibly morally significant. I’m pretty comfortable asserting that human experiences are ‘richer,’ in some sense of the term, than fruit fly experiences, and this difference in ‘richness’ is part of what accounts for differences in the moral value of fruit fly and human experiences. But it’s not clear to me how to spell out the appropriate sense of ‘richness.’ It’s certainly not as simple as number of sensory modalities. (I don’t think Helen Keller’s experiences were worth less than my experiences.) Phenomenal intensity is probably part of the answer but again not the whole of it. Elements of cognitive, emotional, or social complexity may also help determine moral weight. Philosophers are accustomed to talking about the moral value of agency, autonomy, rationality, and self-awareness. Those things might also factor into moral weight.
As for how to determine moral weight in practice, it depends of course on how we resolve the theoretical question, but I think there’s also going to be ample uncertainty here. There are probably some rough characterizations we can make, but in general I think we know too little about most invertebrates to be able to say much about their (relative) cognitive, emotional, and social complexity. I would love to be able to spend a good chunk of my career investigating these questions!
Thanks for the research advice! I can safely say that I never would have specifically targeted German research from the 50s to the 80s on my own initiative. One worry, though: how many of those papers are exclusively in German?
Thanks Jason. The moral weighting is a tough question, so I hope you have the time to get to some conclusions about this.
With regards to the papers, around half of them are probably written in German so they are easily overlooked and why I highlighted them. Luckily many have an English abstract. Still, by the end of my PhD I knew quite a few words in German about die Bienen!