Thank you so much for this comment! How to formulate hierarchicalism—and whether there’s a formulation that’s plausible—is something our team has been kicking around, and this is very helpful. Indeed, your first suggestion is something we take seriously. For example, suffering in humans feeds into a lot of higher-order cognitive processes; it can lead to despair when reflected upon, pain when remembered, hopeless when projected into the future, etc. Of course, this isn’t to say that human suffering matters more in virtue of it being human but in virtue of other properties that correlate with being human.
I agree that we presented a fairly naive hierarchicalism here: take whatever is of value, and then say that it’s more important if and because it is possessed by a human. I’ll need to think more about whether your second suggestion can be dispatched in the same way as the naive view.
Thank you so much for this comment! How to formulate hierarchicalism—and whether there’s a formulation that’s plausible—is something our team has been kicking around, and this is very helpful. Indeed, your first suggestion is something we take seriously. For example, suffering in humans feeds into a lot of higher-order cognitive processes; it can lead to despair when reflected upon, pain when remembered, hopeless when projected into the future, etc. Of course, this isn’t to say that human suffering matters more in virtue of it being human but in virtue of other properties that correlate with being human.
I agree that we presented a fairly naive hierarchicalism here: take whatever is of value, and then say that it’s more important if and because it is possessed by a human. I’ll need to think more about whether your second suggestion can be dispatched in the same way as the naive view.