I don’t know the weeds of the moral parliament view, but my suspicion is that this argument relies on too low of a level of ethical views (that is, “not meta enough”). That’s still just a utilitarian frame with empirical uncertainty. The kind of “credences on different moral views” I have in mind is more like:
I want my moral actions to be guided by some mix of like, 25% bullet-biting utilitarianism (in which case, insects are super important in expectation), 25% virtue ethics (in which case they’re a small consideration—you don’t want to go out of your way to hurt them, but you’re not obligated to do much in particular, and you should be way more focused on people or other animals who you have relationships with and obligations towards), 15% some kind of “stewardship of humanity” (where you maybe just want to avoid actively being a monster but should be focused elsewhere), 10% libertarianism (where it’s quite unclear how you’d treat insects), and 25% spread across other views, which mostly just points towards not being super-fanatical about any of the others. So something like 30% of me thinks insect suffering is a big deal, which is enough for me to take it seriously but not enough for me to drop the stuff that more like 75% of me thinks is a big deal; in other words I think it’s moderately important.
I don’t know what my actual numbers are, and I’m not sure each of these views is really what the respective philosophy would say about insect welfare; I’m just saying, it’s easy in this kind of framework to wind up having lots of moderate priorities that each seem extremely important on certain ethical views.
I don’t know the weeds of the moral parliament view, but my suspicion is that this argument relies on too low of a level of ethical views (that is, “not meta enough”). That’s still just a utilitarian frame with empirical uncertainty. The kind of “credences on different moral views” I have in mind is more like:
I don’t know what my actual numbers are, and I’m not sure each of these views is really what the respective philosophy would say about insect welfare; I’m just saying, it’s easy in this kind of framework to wind up having lots of moderate priorities that each seem extremely important on certain ethical views.