It seems like from an evolutionary perspective, children have a higher incentive to communicate their emotions and adults have a higher incentive to take action in response. I worry that this throws off our calibration of the magnitude of their respective experiences.
I also think kids are built to strongly signal to adults (“this is bad, fix it”/”this is good, more of this”), but my impression is that they do that by giving accurate signals—they do feel quite distressed when they’re acting distressed. They do seem to change emotion much faster than adults, which I think can throw off adult intuitions about how real the child’s emotions are. I wonder if something like cortisol levels would be helpful in comparing.
I agree. I’m extremely wary of suggestions that you can compare the strength of children & adults’ emotions/pain from their behaviour (or perhaps any other way). So it seems to me the only reasonable assumption is that they are the same for all humans who are fully conscious. (I.e. possibly lower for young babies, some mentally disabled; though the precautionary principle suggests we shouldn’t assume this.)
I agree that it is morally justifiable to treat them as equal absent convincing evidence, but I don’t think it’s correct to claim we should assume they are equal.
It seems like from an evolutionary perspective, children have a higher incentive to communicate their emotions and adults have a higher incentive to take action in response. I worry that this throws off our calibration of the magnitude of their respective experiences.
I also think kids are built to strongly signal to adults (“this is bad, fix it”/”this is good, more of this”), but my impression is that they do that by giving accurate signals—they do feel quite distressed when they’re acting distressed. They do seem to change emotion much faster than adults, which I think can throw off adult intuitions about how real the child’s emotions are. I wonder if something like cortisol levels would be helpful in comparing.
I agree. I’m extremely wary of suggestions that you can compare the strength of children & adults’ emotions/pain from their behaviour (or perhaps any other way). So it seems to me the only reasonable assumption is that they are the same for all humans who are fully conscious. (I.e. possibly lower for young babies, some mentally disabled; though the precautionary principle suggests we shouldn’t assume this.)
I agree that it is morally justifiable to treat them as equal absent convincing evidence, but I don’t think it’s correct to claim we should assume they are equal.