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).
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).