Thanks for your comment! I’m happy to chat in more detail if you’d like to set up a call.
While capacity and moral weight are important parameters, I think there also remains significant empirical uncertainty about actual experience as well.
I agree, and I fully support more research aimed at figuring out how to measure realized welfare. For many comparisons of specific interventions, learning more about the realized welfare of a given group of animals (and how a change in conditions would affect realized welfare) is going to be much more action-relevant than information about capacity for welfare. Considerations pertaining to capacity for welfare are most pertinent to big-picture questions about how we should allocate resources across fairly distinct types of animals (e.g., chickens vs. fish vs. crustaceans vs. insects). I think some uncertainties surrounding capacity for welfare can be resolved without fully solving the problem of how to measure realized welfare in every case. Of course, measuring realized welfare and measuring capacity for welfare share many of the same conceptual and practical hurdles, so we may be able to make progress on the two in tandem.
While this is not exactly the same task as assessing capacity for welfare and moral status, it seems analogous and illustrative of the need for a hybrid approach.
Not sure how much we disagree here. I certainly think all-things-considered expert judgments have an important role to play in assessing capacity for welfare. The post emphasizes the atomistic approach because it’s a lot more complicated (and thus warrants deeper explanation) and also because it’s much more likely to uncover action-relevant information that our untutored all-things-considered judgments may miss. (I liken the project to RP’s previous work on invertebrate sentience, which required many subjective judgment calls but ultimately whose main contribution was a compilation of hard data on 53 empirically measurable features that are relevant to assessing whether or not an animal is sentient.)
This seems very unlikely to be the correct taxa in my opinion. First, taxa above genus or family are generally arbitrary in scope. Second, relevant traits would likely be heterogeneous within such a broad group.
Yeah, I could be convinced that order is the wrong taxonomic rank. My main concern is tractability. The scale of the potential project is already so enormous, and moving from order to family could easily add another 500-1000 hours of work. My hope was that we would be able to discern some broad trends at the level of order (which could be refined in the future). But if neither time nor money were a particular concern, then, for the reasons you outline, I think family would be a much better rank at which to investigate these questions.
Hi Jacob,
Thanks for your comment! I’m happy to chat in more detail if you’d like to set up a call.
I agree, and I fully support more research aimed at figuring out how to measure realized welfare. For many comparisons of specific interventions, learning more about the realized welfare of a given group of animals (and how a change in conditions would affect realized welfare) is going to be much more action-relevant than information about capacity for welfare. Considerations pertaining to capacity for welfare are most pertinent to big-picture questions about how we should allocate resources across fairly distinct types of animals (e.g., chickens vs. fish vs. crustaceans vs. insects). I think some uncertainties surrounding capacity for welfare can be resolved without fully solving the problem of how to measure realized welfare in every case. Of course, measuring realized welfare and measuring capacity for welfare share many of the same conceptual and practical hurdles, so we may be able to make progress on the two in tandem.
Not sure how much we disagree here. I certainly think all-things-considered expert judgments have an important role to play in assessing capacity for welfare. The post emphasizes the atomistic approach because it’s a lot more complicated (and thus warrants deeper explanation) and also because it’s much more likely to uncover action-relevant information that our untutored all-things-considered judgments may miss. (I liken the project to RP’s previous work on invertebrate sentience, which required many subjective judgment calls but ultimately whose main contribution was a compilation of hard data on 53 empirically measurable features that are relevant to assessing whether or not an animal is sentient.)
Yeah, I could be convinced that order is the wrong taxonomic rank. My main concern is tractability. The scale of the potential project is already so enormous, and moving from order to family could easily add another 500-1000 hours of work. My hope was that we would be able to discern some broad trends at the level of order (which could be refined in the future). But if neither time nor money were a particular concern, then, for the reasons you outline, I think family would be a much better rank at which to investigate these questions.
Again, happy to talk more if you’re interested!
Thanks for the helpful clarifications and responses, Jason. I don’t have anything to add at this point, but look forward to reading more of your work!