Thanks for your questions, Stan. Travis wrote the piece on axiological asymmetries and he can best respond on that front. FWIW, I’ll just say that I’m not convinced that there’s a difference of an order of magnitude between the best pleasure and the worst pain—or any difference at all—insofar as we’re focused on intensity per se. I’m inclined to think it’s just really hard to say and so I take symmetry as the default position. For all that, I’m open to the possibility that pleasures and pains of the same intensity have different impacts on welfare, perhaps because some sort of desire satisfaction theory of welfare is true, we’re risk-averse creatures, and we more strongly dislike signs of low fitness than the alternative. Point is: there may be other ways of accommodating your intuition than giving up the symmetry assumption.
To your main question, we distinguish the negative and positive portions of the welfare range because we want to sharply distinguish cases where the interventions flips the life from net negative to net positive. Imagine a case where an animal has a symmetrical welfare range and an intervention moves the animal either 60% of their negative welfare range or 60% of their total welfare range. In the former case, they’re still net negative; in the latter case, they now net positive. If you’re a totalist, that really matters: the “logic of the larder” argument doesn’t go through even post-intervention in the former case, whereas it does go through in the latter.
Thanks for your questions, Stan. Travis wrote the piece on axiological asymmetries and he can best respond on that front. FWIW, I’ll just say that I’m not convinced that there’s a difference of an order of magnitude between the best pleasure and the worst pain—or any difference at all—insofar as we’re focused on intensity per se. I’m inclined to think it’s just really hard to say and so I take symmetry as the default position. For all that, I’m open to the possibility that pleasures and pains of the same intensity have different impacts on welfare, perhaps because some sort of desire satisfaction theory of welfare is true, we’re risk-averse creatures, and we more strongly dislike signs of low fitness than the alternative. Point is: there may be other ways of accommodating your intuition than giving up the symmetry assumption.
To your main question, we distinguish the negative and positive portions of the welfare range because we want to sharply distinguish cases where the interventions flips the life from net negative to net positive. Imagine a case where an animal has a symmetrical welfare range and an intervention moves the animal either 60% of their negative welfare range or 60% of their total welfare range. In the former case, they’re still net negative; in the latter case, they now net positive. If you’re a totalist, that really matters: the “logic of the larder” argument doesn’t go through even post-intervention in the former case, whereas it does go through in the latter.