My intuition is that while more complex minds (e.g. adults) can contextualize experiences, this goes both ways. E.g. a family member could contextualize her surgery to remove a cancer, which made it less bad than it would have been to a child experiencing the pain without understanding of why it was in their best interest. But after it became clear that she was going to die, the remaining 18 months of her life was much worse for her because of that knowledge and the anxiety and depression it brought. I guess I’d expect that children’s most extreme experiences of pain and unhappiness are more severe, but that context brings both positive and negative experiences closer to the middle for adults.
(I tried to think of times when deeper understanding a situation might bring an adult greater satisfaction and triumph than a child has, but it’s extremely hard to top a delighted three-year-old.)
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.
I agree that adult suffering (and young-adult suffering) can differ from child suffering in ways that make things worse for the adult.
For example, older people have known people close to them for longer, and formed deeper relationships; I wouldn’t be surprised if a sixteen-year-old found it more difficult to recover from a parent’s death than a six-year-old.
The same goes for other kinds of unfortunate events; a six-year-old might not be able to contextualize the pain from illness, but if I knew I were going to spend a month sick in bed exactly once during my life, I think I’d rather it happen at age six (I miss school, watch cartoons, and catch up later) than thirty-six (I have to renege on a complex network of obligations to my employer and my children, losing opportunities that I may never be able to recover).
I think the adult suffering from anticipation (and from uncertainty) is limited, via both contextualization and hedonic adaptation. I’m unsure how the balance of intense pleasure / pain works for children. They may experience pleasure more intensely, but I don’t see it as much. And it’s plausible that animals also experience pleasure more intensely, but I’m agnostic about that claim.
Interesting, I hadn’t thought about this!
[content note: death, cancer]
My intuition is that while more complex minds (e.g. adults) can contextualize experiences, this goes both ways. E.g. a family member could contextualize her surgery to remove a cancer, which made it less bad than it would have been to a child experiencing the pain without understanding of why it was in their best interest. But after it became clear that she was going to die, the remaining 18 months of her life was much worse for her because of that knowledge and the anxiety and depression it brought. I guess I’d expect that children’s most extreme experiences of pain and unhappiness are more severe, but that context brings both positive and negative experiences closer to the middle for adults.
(I tried to think of times when deeper understanding a situation might bring an adult greater satisfaction and triumph than a child has, but it’s extremely hard to top a delighted three-year-old.)
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.
I agree that adult suffering (and young-adult suffering) can differ from child suffering in ways that make things worse for the adult.
For example, older people have known people close to them for longer, and formed deeper relationships; I wouldn’t be surprised if a sixteen-year-old found it more difficult to recover from a parent’s death than a six-year-old.
The same goes for other kinds of unfortunate events; a six-year-old might not be able to contextualize the pain from illness, but if I knew I were going to spend a month sick in bed exactly once during my life, I think I’d rather it happen at age six (I miss school, watch cartoons, and catch up later) than thirty-six (I have to renege on a complex network of obligations to my employer and my children, losing opportunities that I may never be able to recover).
I think the adult suffering from anticipation (and from uncertainty) is limited, via both contextualization and hedonic adaptation. I’m unsure how the balance of intense pleasure / pain works for children. They may experience pleasure more intensely, but I don’t see it as much. And it’s plausible that animals also experience pleasure more intensely, but I’m agnostic about that claim.