Any view that doesn’t put them on a precise cardinal scale is susceptible to Dutch Book arguments.
This would only tell us that our preferences over pleasure and suffering (and everything else!) must be measurable on a cardinal scale (up to affine transformations), but it doesn’t tell us that there is one objective scale that should work for everyone. The preference-based scales are definitely different across people, and there’s no way to tell which preferences are right (although you might be able to rule out some).
Quantifications always seem arbitrary, but it’s clear that there is some quantity involved-unfathomable bliss is far better than a cupcake- even if it’s hard to quantify.
I’m a moral realist, so I don’t care only about what things people actually care about. I care about what we would care about if we were perfectly rational.
I suspect there’s actually no definitely correct cardinal scale when it comes to hedonic intensity, so there’s no very precise way we ought to care about tradeoffs between intensities (or between pleasure and suffering).
There might be arguments that can give us bounds, e.g. if a pattern of activation responsible for pleasure happens twice as many times per second in a brain experiencing A than in a brain experiencing B (by activating more neurons in the same pattern, or activating the same neurons more often, or both), then we might think there’s twice as much pleasure in A than B per second. Similarly for suffering. However,
This doesn’t tell us how to compare pleasure and suffering.
These arguments lose their applicability across brains when they’re sufficiently different; they might use totally different patterns of activations, and just counting neurons firing per second is wrong.
It’s not clear this is the right approach to consciousness/hedonic intensity in the first place (although it seems fairly intuitive to me, and I assign it considerable weight).
This would only tell us that our preferences over pleasure and suffering (and everything else!) must be measurable on a cardinal scale (up to affine transformations), but it doesn’t tell us that there is one objective scale that should work for everyone. The preference-based scales are definitely different across people, and there’s no way to tell which preferences are right (although you might be able to rule out some).
I suspect there’s actually no definitely correct cardinal scale when it comes to hedonic intensity, so there’s no very precise way we ought to care about tradeoffs between intensities (or between pleasure and suffering).
There might be arguments that can give us bounds, e.g. if a pattern of activation responsible for pleasure happens twice as many times per second in a brain experiencing A than in a brain experiencing B (by activating more neurons in the same pattern, or activating the same neurons more often, or both), then we might think there’s twice as much pleasure in A than B per second. Similarly for suffering. However,
This doesn’t tell us how to compare pleasure and suffering.
These arguments lose their applicability across brains when they’re sufficiently different; they might use totally different patterns of activations, and just counting neurons firing per second is wrong.
It’s not clear this is the right approach to consciousness/hedonic intensity in the first place (although it seems fairly intuitive to me, and I assign it considerable weight).