I broadly agree. With that said, I’m skeptical of the “all species are literally equal” angle.
Suppose that when you were in pain, there was a pill that made you very stupid, but you experienced the pain just as intensely. Would it be worth taking the pill? If being unintelligent makes your pain less bad, then the pill would make the pain less bad. But this is clearly crazy. Pain is bad because of how it feels—but how it feels has absolutely nothing to do with how smart the victim of it is.
Aren’t most drugs that temporarily “make you very stupid” commonly used to self-medicate in exactly this manner? Maybe that’s a coincidence—anything psychoactive is likely to interfere with the nervous system, or whatever—but it still feels like a point of evidence against your argument, not for it.
Is babies’ pain irrelevant because babies are dumb? No!
I also think it’s plausible that babies are an exception in our intuition for obvious evolutionary/cuteness reasons, and/or they may differ in moral value only because they grow up into sapient adults. (Potentially even with trauma being passed on from infancy to adulthood, although I admit that’s a bit dubious.)
Suppose we killed all humans except the most mentally enfeebled. Would their pain stop being bad? What if they had babies for many generations, such that almost all humans who ever lived were very unintelligent? Of course not!
Honestly, yes, my intuition is that a human-descended species that have completely lost their sapience are no longer meaningfully human, and are more morally equivalent to other animals than modern humans.
Some humans are severely mentally enfeebled. Some might even be as enfeebled as fish. Is their pain mostly irrelevant? No, of course not. [...] Maybe what matters is that fish are part of an unintelligent species. But why does species matter? It seems like the badness of your pain depends on facts about you, rather than about others. But whether your species is intelligent is a fact about others. So it can’t affect the badness of pain.
Even if all you care about is intelligence (or associated cognitive machinery), there’s obvious reasons to be more cautious in your treatment of members of a normally-sapient species that have some kind of deficiency. At the extreme end, nonverbal autistic people and coma patients with locked-in syndrome may be verifiably of standard human intelligence, yet appear at first glance to lack all cognitive facilities.
For similar reasons, even absent any other data about their intelligence and capacity for feeling, it makes some sense to have a higher prior on beings having similar subjective experience to you the more similar they are.
If you eat fish, that is probably the worst thing you’re doing, unless you’re a serial killer.
Even if they are a serial killer, if you genuinely value fish equally to humans, that’s nowhere near as bad right? They’d have to be, like, a high-ranking Nazi to even come close to eating fish.
I somehow suspect you don’t actually prefer Nazi serial killers to pescatarians.
Also, are fish actually the most important thing, here,
if we’re weighing every life equally? The obvious reductio-ad-absurdam argument would be bacteria, who we routinely kill in their billions and trillions. Maybe we can throw those, and maybe even plants, out because they lack a nervous system. But many microorganisms do have rudimental nervous systems. If a fish is horrifically eaten alive by parasites, does the happiness of the swarming parasites outweigh the agony of the fish?
Personally, I think a sliding scale makes more sense and accords more with my intuition, with varying weight assigned based on intelligence or complexity or whatever.
While I do think the surveying of farmed fish is abhorrent… I don’t think I would feel OK with subjecting a single human to the same fate to save a hundred fish, and I do think I would be willing to condemn a hundred fish to a factory farm to save one human from that date. So I think my discount rate is even lower than the 1% “conservative” estimate you gave. Unfortunately, scope sensitivity makes it kind of difficult to make these kind of extreme judgements. I am confident that slowly and painfully torturing an animal to death over the course of months for a tasty sandwich does not feel OK to me.
I broadly agree. With that said, I’m skeptical of the “all species are literally equal” angle.
Aren’t most drugs that temporarily “make you very stupid” commonly used to self-medicate in exactly this manner? Maybe that’s a coincidence—anything psychoactive is likely to interfere with the nervous system, or whatever—but it still feels like a point of evidence against your argument, not for it.
I don’t think so, but this was in fact the medical consensus until recently. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pain_in_babies#Late_19th_century
I also think it’s plausible that babies are an exception in our intuition for obvious evolutionary/cuteness reasons, and/or they may differ in moral value only because they grow up into sapient adults. (Potentially even with trauma being passed on from infancy to adulthood, although I admit that’s a bit dubious.)
Honestly, yes, my intuition is that a human-descended species that have completely lost their sapience are no longer meaningfully human, and are more morally equivalent to other animals than modern humans.
Even if all you care about is intelligence (or associated cognitive machinery), there’s obvious reasons to be more cautious in your treatment of members of a normally-sapient species that have some kind of deficiency. At the extreme end, nonverbal autistic people and coma patients with locked-in syndrome may be verifiably of standard human intelligence, yet appear at first glance to lack all cognitive facilities.
For similar reasons, even absent any other data about their intelligence and capacity for feeling, it makes some sense to have a higher prior on beings having similar subjective experience to you the more similar they are.
Even if they are a serial killer, if you genuinely value fish equally to humans, that’s nowhere near as bad right? They’d have to be, like, a high-ranking Nazi to even come close to eating fish.
I somehow suspect you don’t actually prefer Nazi serial killers to pescatarians.
Also, are fish actually the most important thing, here, if we’re weighing every life equally? The obvious reductio-ad-absurdam argument would be bacteria, who we routinely kill in their billions and trillions. Maybe we can throw those, and maybe even plants, out because they lack a nervous system. But many microorganisms do have rudimental nervous systems. If a fish is horrifically eaten alive by parasites, does the happiness of the swarming parasites outweigh the agony of the fish?
Personally, I think a sliding scale makes more sense and accords more with my intuition, with varying weight assigned based on intelligence or complexity or whatever.
While I do think the surveying of farmed fish is abhorrent… I don’t think I would feel OK with subjecting a single human to the same fate to save a hundred fish, and I do think I would be willing to condemn a hundred fish to a factory farm to save one human from that date. So I think my discount rate is even lower than the 1% “conservative” estimate you gave. Unfortunately, scope sensitivity makes it kind of difficult to make these kind of extreme judgements. I am confident that slowly and painfully torturing an animal to death over the course of months for a tasty sandwich does not feel OK to me.