Thanks for your response, but I don’t think you’re grasping the nettle of my objection. I agree with you that you and I both think we know something about the mental states of other adult humans and, further, human babies. I also think such assumptions are reasonable, if empirically unprovable. But that’s not my point.
In short, my challenge is: articulate and defend the method you will use to determine how much more or less happy humans are than non-humans animals in particular contexts—say the average humans vs the average factory farmed chicken.
Here’s what I think we can do with humans. We assume you and I have the same capacity for happiness. We assume we are able to learn about the experiences of others and communicate them via language, e.g. we’ve both stubbed our toes, but I haven’t broken my leg, and when you say “breaking my leg is 10x worse” I can conclude that would be true for me too. Hence, when you say “I feel 2/10″ or “I feel terrible” I might feel confident you mean the same things by those as I do.
What can do with chickens? We really have no idea what chickens’ capacities for happiness are—is it 1/10th, 1/100th, etc? It doesn’t seem at all reasonable to assume they are roughly the same as ours. The chicken cannot tell us how happy how it is relative to its maximum, our maximum, or, indeed, tell us anything at all. Of course, we may have intuitions—what we might perjoratively call “tummy feelings”—about these things. Fine. But what method do we use to assess if those intuitions are correct? The application of further intuitive reflection? Surely not. I cannot think of a justifiable empirical method to inform our priors. If you can explain why this project is not doomed, I would love to know why! But I fear it is.
Thanks for your comment. This is a complicated topic, so it’s easy for well-meaning folks to talk past one another. For that reason, I’ll encourage you again to reach out to schedule a call to discuss in further detail.
Since this area is so under-explored, I think there is a large range of reasonable expectations about the outcome of the sort of project I outline in the post. I can try to give you some insight into why I’m more optimistic than you are, but that’s not to say that your pessimism is outside the range of reasonable attitudes one could take to the project.
One reason I’m optimistic is because in my own limited experience exploring questions of comparative moral value, the returns have thus far been quite high. Let me give just one example.
The subjective experience of time is plausibly an important determinant of realized welfare and capacity for welfare. There are plausible empirical proxies we can use to approximate differences in the subjective experience of time. Critical flicker-fusion frequency (CFF) is an especially well-studied measure, so I’ll use it in this example, but I think there are probably better metrics. (I’m currently writing a report on this subject; stay tuned for details.) If CFF tracks the subjective experience of time, then higher values represent more subjective moments per objective unit of time. The typical human has a max CFF threshold of around 60 Hz. Chickens have a max CFF threshold around 87 Hz. Honey bees have a max CFF threshold of around 200 Hz. So that’s an example of a way we might directly compare three important animals on a metric that might track an important welfare determinant.
Now I’m not saying CFF is a perfect measure of the subjective experience of time. It’s not. In fact, my best guess is that there’s only a ~30% chance it tracks the subjective experience of time under the best conditions. (Again, see my forthcoming report for extensive discussion.) But the illustrative point here is that there may exist empirically measurable proxies for features we care about that allow us to compare capacity for welfare across species. If we don’t at least try to locate such proxies, we’ll never know if they exist. Given the stakes, it seems reasonable to me to devote a small fraction of our collective resources to think more carefully about these very difficult issues.
I share your overall pessimism of arriving at an answer that will actually be satisfying philosophically, but I do think research in this area is still important and useful. Our ultimately subjective judgements can be better informed.
We assume you and I have the same capacity for happiness.
I think the same problem applies here too, because of the uniqueness of humans (our nervous systems, the density of nerve endings, the thickness of our skin, etc.), although it’s much more reasonable to generalize from one human to another than between species, because of similarity. Still, I don’t think it’s actually reasonable, using the same standard; I might as well be a talking alien. And we have no way of objectively quantifying how reasonable this approximation is or whether one human’s welfare capacity is greater or lower than another’s.
That being said, I don’t think you always need this assumption for humans anyway, e.g. if you’re randomly sampling humans to survey from the same distribution that you’re generalizing to (or sampling humans to generalize to), since the estimator can be chosen to be statistically unbiased, regardless of how well it measures what we actually care about. (However, in practice, the distributions often aren’t the same, and we know of generalizability issues due to that, e.g. WEIRD. You can adjust/match/control for certain characteristics, but you can never really eliminate all bias. And for something subjective like welfare, we can’t bound the bias from the underlying concept we care aout, either, even if it were possible to bound the statistical bias, for the same reason we can’t bound how different my experience of a toe stub is from yours.)
On the other hand, we can’t do this with nonhuman animals, since we’re sampling from humans and generalizing beyond humans. The distributions are definitely not the same.
Right. My thought is that we assume humans have the same capacity on average, because while there might be differences, we don’t know which way they’ll go so they should ‘wash out’ as statistical noise. Pertinently, this same response doesn’t work for animals because we really don’t know what their relatively max capacities are.
FWIW, the analogue to my response here would be to say we can expect all chickens to have approximately the same capacity as each other, even if individuals chickens differ. The claim isn’t about humans per se, but about similarities borne out of genetics.
My thought is that we assume humans have the same capacity on average, because while there might be differences, we don’t know which way they’ll go so they should ‘wash out’ as statistical noise.
In another comment, I mentioned that I think this is actually only fair to assume while we don’t know much about the individual humans. We could break this symmetry pretty easily.
FWIW, the analogue to my response here would be to say we can expect all chickens to have approximately the same capacity as each other, even if individuals chickens differ. The claim isn’t about humans per se, but about similarities borne out of genetics.
Since humans also differ from each other genetically, isn’t the distinction here just a matter of degree?
You might also think you can generalize between you and I using a symmetry argument, but this is only by willful ignorance. We could learn more about each other in a way that would suggest one of us experiences certain things more intensely than the other (e.g. based on the sizes of the parts of our brains used for processing emotion, our personalities or experiences) and ignoring these differences would be the same philosophically as ignoring the differences between humans and chickens. We might learn differences that go in each direction for you and I, resulting in a moral complex cluelessness, but the same can actually happen with nonhuman animals, too: there are reasons to believe some nonhuman animals could typically experience some things more intensely than us, e.g. our better awareness of the context around an experience can reduce its intensity, and some animals have faster processing times. It’s plausible enough to me that dogs have higher highs in practice than me (although maybe I’m capable of higher highs; they just don’t happen).
Thanks for your response, but I don’t think you’re grasping the nettle of my objection. I agree with you that you and I both think we know something about the mental states of other adult humans and, further, human babies. I also think such assumptions are reasonable, if empirically unprovable. But that’s not my point.
In short, my challenge is: articulate and defend the method you will use to determine how much more or less happy humans are than non-humans animals in particular contexts—say the average humans vs the average factory farmed chicken.
Here’s what I think we can do with humans. We assume you and I have the same capacity for happiness. We assume we are able to learn about the experiences of others and communicate them via language, e.g. we’ve both stubbed our toes, but I haven’t broken my leg, and when you say “breaking my leg is 10x worse” I can conclude that would be true for me too. Hence, when you say “I feel 2/10″ or “I feel terrible” I might feel confident you mean the same things by those as I do.
What can do with chickens? We really have no idea what chickens’ capacities for happiness are—is it 1/10th, 1/100th, etc? It doesn’t seem at all reasonable to assume they are roughly the same as ours. The chicken cannot tell us how happy how it is relative to its maximum, our maximum, or, indeed, tell us anything at all. Of course, we may have intuitions—what we might perjoratively call “tummy feelings”—about these things. Fine. But what method do we use to assess if those intuitions are correct? The application of further intuitive reflection? Surely not. I cannot think of a justifiable empirical method to inform our priors. If you can explain why this project is not doomed, I would love to know why! But I fear it is.
Hi Michael,
Thanks for your comment. This is a complicated topic, so it’s easy for well-meaning folks to talk past one another. For that reason, I’ll encourage you again to reach out to schedule a call to discuss in further detail.
Since this area is so under-explored, I think there is a large range of reasonable expectations about the outcome of the sort of project I outline in the post. I can try to give you some insight into why I’m more optimistic than you are, but that’s not to say that your pessimism is outside the range of reasonable attitudes one could take to the project.
One reason I’m optimistic is because in my own limited experience exploring questions of comparative moral value, the returns have thus far been quite high. Let me give just one example.
The subjective experience of time is plausibly an important determinant of realized welfare and capacity for welfare. There are plausible empirical proxies we can use to approximate differences in the subjective experience of time. Critical flicker-fusion frequency (CFF) is an especially well-studied measure, so I’ll use it in this example, but I think there are probably better metrics. (I’m currently writing a report on this subject; stay tuned for details.) If CFF tracks the subjective experience of time, then higher values represent more subjective moments per objective unit of time. The typical human has a max CFF threshold of around 60 Hz. Chickens have a max CFF threshold around 87 Hz. Honey bees have a max CFF threshold of around 200 Hz. So that’s an example of a way we might directly compare three important animals on a metric that might track an important welfare determinant.
Now I’m not saying CFF is a perfect measure of the subjective experience of time. It’s not. In fact, my best guess is that there’s only a ~30% chance it tracks the subjective experience of time under the best conditions. (Again, see my forthcoming report for extensive discussion.) But the illustrative point here is that there may exist empirically measurable proxies for features we care about that allow us to compare capacity for welfare across species. If we don’t at least try to locate such proxies, we’ll never know if they exist. Given the stakes, it seems reasonable to me to devote a small fraction of our collective resources to think more carefully about these very difficult issues.
I share your overall pessimism of arriving at an answer that will actually be satisfying philosophically, but I do think research in this area is still important and useful. Our ultimately subjective judgements can be better informed.
I think the same problem applies here too, because of the uniqueness of humans (our nervous systems, the density of nerve endings, the thickness of our skin, etc.), although it’s much more reasonable to generalize from one human to another than between species, because of similarity. Still, I don’t think it’s actually reasonable, using the same standard; I might as well be a talking alien. And we have no way of objectively quantifying how reasonable this approximation is or whether one human’s welfare capacity is greater or lower than another’s.
That being said, I don’t think you always need this assumption for humans anyway, e.g. if you’re randomly sampling humans to survey from the same distribution that you’re generalizing to (or sampling humans to generalize to), since the estimator can be chosen to be statistically unbiased, regardless of how well it measures what we actually care about. (However, in practice, the distributions often aren’t the same, and we know of generalizability issues due to that, e.g. WEIRD. You can adjust/match/control for certain characteristics, but you can never really eliminate all bias. And for something subjective like welfare, we can’t bound the bias from the underlying concept we care aout, either, even if it were possible to bound the statistical bias, for the same reason we can’t bound how different my experience of a toe stub is from yours.)
On the other hand, we can’t do this with nonhuman animals, since we’re sampling from humans and generalizing beyond humans. The distributions are definitely not the same.
Right. My thought is that we assume humans have the same capacity on average, because while there might be differences, we don’t know which way they’ll go so they should ‘wash out’ as statistical noise. Pertinently, this same response doesn’t work for animals because we really don’t know what their relatively max capacities are.
FWIW, the analogue to my response here would be to say we can expect all chickens to have approximately the same capacity as each other, even if individuals chickens differ. The claim isn’t about humans per se, but about similarities borne out of genetics.
In another comment, I mentioned that I think this is actually only fair to assume while we don’t know much about the individual humans. We could break this symmetry pretty easily.
Since humans also differ from each other genetically, isn’t the distinction here just a matter of degree?
You might also think you can generalize between you and I using a symmetry argument, but this is only by willful ignorance. We could learn more about each other in a way that would suggest one of us experiences certain things more intensely than the other (e.g. based on the sizes of the parts of our brains used for processing emotion, our personalities or experiences) and ignoring these differences would be the same philosophically as ignoring the differences between humans and chickens. We might learn differences that go in each direction for you and I, resulting in a moral complex cluelessness, but the same can actually happen with nonhuman animals, too: there are reasons to believe some nonhuman animals could typically experience some things more intensely than us, e.g. our better awareness of the context around an experience can reduce its intensity, and some animals have faster processing times. It’s plausible enough to me that dogs have higher highs in practice than me (although maybe I’m capable of higher highs; they just don’t happen).