Point 2: The Risks of Aggregating Intensities and Durations
I would be curious to know your thoughts on my post All pains are comparable?. You are welcome to comment there.
Summary
I agree there are pains which feel qualitatively different in the sense of having distinct properties. For example, annoying and excruciating pain as defined by the Welfare Footprint Institute (WFI).
Some think there are pains whose intensity is incomparably/qualitatively worse than others. For instance, some believe averting an arbitrarily short time of excruciating pain in humans is better than averting an arbitrarily long time of annoying pain in humans. In contrast, I would prefer warming up slightly cold patches of soil for sufficiently many nematodes over averting 1 trillion human-years of extreme torture.
Consider a human body as described by the state of all of its fundamental particles. Are there any 2 states which are only infinitesimally different whose pain intensities are not quantitatively comparable? I do not see how this could be possible. So I conclude the pain intensities for any 2 states of a human body are quantitatively comparable.
Hi Vasco — thanks for inviting me to comment your post. I think we’ve already clarified this in an earlier exchange and found that we’re working from genuinely different aggregation frameworks, and your nematode vs. torture example makes that divergence especially explicit. Since we’d essentially reached an “agree to disagree” already, I’ll leave it here rather than reopening a long back-and-forth.
Happy to revisit once we have a better empirical handle on ceilings / affective capacity.
Hi Wladimir.
I would be curious to know your thoughts on my post All pains are comparable?. You are welcome to comment there.
Hi Vasco — thanks for inviting me to comment your post. I think we’ve already clarified this in an earlier exchange and found that we’re working from genuinely different aggregation frameworks, and your nematode vs. torture example makes that divergence especially explicit. Since we’d essentially reached an “agree to disagree” already, I’ll leave it here rather than reopening a long back-and-forth.
Happy to revisit once we have a better empirical handle on ceilings / affective capacity.