Executive summary: The author uses basic category theory to argue, in a reflective and somewhat speculative way, that once we model biological systems, brain states, and moral evaluations as categories, functors, and a natural transformation, it becomes structurally clear that shrimp’s pain is morally relevant and that donating to shrimp welfare is a highly cost-effective way to reduce suffering.
Key points:
The author introduces categories, functors, and natural transformations as very general mathematical tools that can formalize relationships and arguments outside of pure mathematics, including in ethics and philosophy of mind.
They define a category BioSys whose objects are biological systems (including humans and shrimp) and whose morphisms are qualia-preserving mappings between causal graphs of conscious systems, assuming at least a basic physicalist functionalist view.
They introduce two functors from BioSys to the category Meas of measurable spaces: a brain-state functor that represents biological systems as measurable brain states, and a moral evaluation functor that maps systems to measurable spaces of morally relevant mental states.
They argue there is a natural transformation between these two functors, given by measurable maps that “forget” non-morally-relevant properties, and that this captures two ways of evaluating shrimp’s moral worth: comparing shrimp’s morally relevant states directly to humans’ or first embedding shrimp’s full mental state space into that of other animals or humans and only then forgetting irrelevant details.
The author claims that people often underweight shrimp’s moral value because they focus on morally relevant properties only after seeing them as “shrimp properties,” whereas comparing shrimp’s full pain system to that of humans, fish, or lobsters and then evaluating moral worth more naturally reveals that shrimp have significant morally relevant properties.
They suggest that, under any reasonable moral evaluation consistent with this framework, cheap interventions that prevent intense shrimp suffering (such as donating to shrimp welfare organizations) rank very highly among possible moral interventions, and they sketch further category-theoretic directions (e.g. adjunctions, limits, and a category of interventions) for future investigation.
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Executive summary: The author uses basic category theory to argue, in a reflective and somewhat speculative way, that once we model biological systems, brain states, and moral evaluations as categories, functors, and a natural transformation, it becomes structurally clear that shrimp’s pain is morally relevant and that donating to shrimp welfare is a highly cost-effective way to reduce suffering.
Key points:
The author introduces categories, functors, and natural transformations as very general mathematical tools that can formalize relationships and arguments outside of pure mathematics, including in ethics and philosophy of mind.
They define a category BioSys whose objects are biological systems (including humans and shrimp) and whose morphisms are qualia-preserving mappings between causal graphs of conscious systems, assuming at least a basic physicalist functionalist view.
They introduce two functors from BioSys to the category Meas of measurable spaces: a brain-state functor that represents biological systems as measurable brain states, and a moral evaluation functor that maps systems to measurable spaces of morally relevant mental states.
They argue there is a natural transformation between these two functors, given by measurable maps that “forget” non-morally-relevant properties, and that this captures two ways of evaluating shrimp’s moral worth: comparing shrimp’s morally relevant states directly to humans’ or first embedding shrimp’s full mental state space into that of other animals or humans and only then forgetting irrelevant details.
The author claims that people often underweight shrimp’s moral value because they focus on morally relevant properties only after seeing them as “shrimp properties,” whereas comparing shrimp’s full pain system to that of humans, fish, or lobsters and then evaluating moral worth more naturally reveals that shrimp have significant morally relevant properties.
They suggest that, under any reasonable moral evaluation consistent with this framework, cheap interventions that prevent intense shrimp suffering (such as donating to shrimp welfare organizations) rank very highly among possible moral interventions, and they sketch further category-theoretic directions (e.g. adjunctions, limits, and a category of interventions) for future investigation.
This comment was auto-generated by the EA Forum Team. Feel free to point out issues with this summary by replying to the comment, and contact us if you have feedback.