I think that it is possible to buy that humans only have 14 times as painful maximum pains/pleasurable maximal pleasure than bees, and still think 14 bees=1 human is silly. You just have to reject hedonism about well-being. I have strong feelings about saving humans over animals, but I have no intuition whatsoever that if my parents’ dog burns her paw it hurts less than when I burn my hand. The whole idea that animals have less intense sensations than us seems to me less like a commonsense claim, and more like something people committed to both hedonism and antispeciesism made up to reconcile their intuitive repugnant at results like 10 pigs or whatever=1 human. (Bees are kind of a special case because lots of people are confident they aren’t conscious at all.)
I think that it is possible to buy that humans only have 14 times as painful maximum pains/pleasurable maximal pleasure than bees, and still think 14 bees=1 human is silly. You just have to reject hedonism about well-being. I have strong feelings about saving humans over animals, but I have no intuition whatsoever that if my parents’ dog burns her paw it hurts less than when I burn my hand. The whole idea that animals have less intense sensations than us seems to me less like a commonsense claim, and more like something people committed to both hedonism and antispeciesism made up to reconcile their intuitive repugnant at results like 10 pigs or whatever=1 human. (Bees are kind of a special case because lots of people are confident they aren’t conscious at all.)