Have you considered a (semi-)blind approach? Collect data on each of the species/taxa of interests into a table, but hide the species (except possibly human, as the reference?) and make moral weight judgements based on that (and the judges can do this without any formal or precise weighting of features if they prefer). You could also get separate people who do the research and prepare the table from those who make the judgements, to reduce the identifiability of the species/taxa from the data, although this risk won’t really go away.
Yeah, that’s an interesting idea. Sounds pretty good in principle, though I imagine fairly hard to implement in practice. AI Impacts did something similar last year when they investigated the relationship between neuron count and general intelligence. They prepared anonymized descriptions of the behavior of four species (two birds and two primates). Survey participants were asked to judge which animals were more intelligent on the basis of the anonymized descriptions. (The birds scored about the same as the primates.)
Have you considered a (semi-)blind approach? Collect data on each of the species/taxa of interests into a table, but hide the species (except possibly human, as the reference?) and make moral weight judgements based on that (and the judges can do this without any formal or precise weighting of features if they prefer). You could also get separate people who do the research and prepare the table from those who make the judgements, to reduce the identifiability of the species/taxa from the data, although this risk won’t really go away.
Yeah, that’s an interesting idea. Sounds pretty good in principle, though I imagine fairly hard to implement in practice. AI Impacts did something similar last year when they investigated the relationship between neuron count and general intelligence. They prepared anonymized descriptions of the behavior of four species (two birds and two primates). Survey participants were asked to judge which animals were more intelligent on the basis of the anonymized descriptions. (The birds scored about the same as the primates.)