I think the argument against hierarchicalism goes a little quickly. In particular, whether it’s so easy to dismiss depends on how exactly you’re thinking of the role of experiences in grounding value. There’s one picture where experiences just are all there is—an experience of X degree of pleasure itself directly makes the world Y amount better. But there’s another picture, still compatible with utilitarianism, that isn’t so direct. In particular, you might think that all that matters is well-being (and you aggregate that impartially, etc.), and that the only thing that makes something better or worse off is the intrinsic qualities of its experiences. Here experiences don’t generate value floating freely, as it were—they generate value by promoting well-being.
That view has two places you might work in hierarchicalism. One, you might say the very same experience contributes differently to the well-being of various creatures. For instance, maybe even if a shrimp felt ecstatic bliss, that wouldn’t increase its well-being as much as the same bliss would increase a human’s. Two, you might say the well-being of different creatures counts differently. One really great shrimp life might not count as much as one really great human life.
I think both of these ways of blocking the argument have some plausibility, at least enough to warrant not dismissing hierarchicalism so quickly. To me at least, the first claim seems pretty intuitive. The extent to which a given pain makes a being worse off depends on what else is going on with them. And you might argue that the second view is still a bias in favor of one’s own species or whatever, but at any rate that isn’t made obvious by the mere fact that the quality of experiences is the only thing that makes a life better or worse, because on this view the creature is not just an evaluatively irrelevant location of the thing that actually matters (experiences), but rather it’s a necessary element of the evaluative story that actually makes the experience count for something. From that perspective the nature of the creature could matter.
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.
I think the argument against hierarchicalism goes a little quickly. In particular, whether it’s so easy to dismiss depends on how exactly you’re thinking of the role of experiences in grounding value. There’s one picture where experiences just are all there is—an experience of X degree of pleasure itself directly makes the world Y amount better. But there’s another picture, still compatible with utilitarianism, that isn’t so direct. In particular, you might think that all that matters is well-being (and you aggregate that impartially, etc.), and that the only thing that makes something better or worse off is the intrinsic qualities of its experiences. Here experiences don’t generate value floating freely, as it were—they generate value by promoting well-being.
That view has two places you might work in hierarchicalism. One, you might say the very same experience contributes differently to the well-being of various creatures. For instance, maybe even if a shrimp felt ecstatic bliss, that wouldn’t increase its well-being as much as the same bliss would increase a human’s. Two, you might say the well-being of different creatures counts differently. One really great shrimp life might not count as much as one really great human life.
I think both of these ways of blocking the argument have some plausibility, at least enough to warrant not dismissing hierarchicalism so quickly. To me at least, the first claim seems pretty intuitive. The extent to which a given pain makes a being worse off depends on what else is going on with them. And you might argue that the second view is still a bias in favor of one’s own species or whatever, but at any rate that isn’t made obvious by the mere fact that the quality of experiences is the only thing that makes a life better or worse, because on this view the creature is not just an evaluatively irrelevant location of the thing that actually matters (experiences), but rather it’s a necessary element of the evaluative story that actually makes the experience count for something. From that perspective the nature of the creature could matter.
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.