Thanks for spelling this out, Vasco — yes, that’s a fair clarification.
When we say that pain intensities are defined as “absolute” in WFF, this is meant in a conceptual and operational sense within a shared intensity vocabulary, not as a claim that no interspecific adjustments are needed in practice. The statement you quote is explicitly conditional (“if shrimps were capable of experiencing Excruciating pain”) and is held as a temporary, simplifying assumption to allow measurement of time spent in different intensity categories, while recognizing that the true placement of experiences on an absolute scale across taxa remains an open scientific problem.
At a personal scientific level, I find it very implausible that the affective capacity of a shrimp and that of a human are comparable. However, because this remains an unresolved empirical question, the framework itself is intentionally agnostic and requires that any interspecific adjustments be made explicitly and post-quantification, rather than being implicitly embedded in the core estimates.
Thanks for spelling this out, Vasco — yes, that’s a fair clarification.
When we say that pain intensities are defined as “absolute” in WFF, this is meant in a conceptual and operational sense within a shared intensity vocabulary, not as a claim that no interspecific adjustments are needed in practice. The statement you quote is explicitly conditional (“if shrimps were capable of experiencing Excruciating pain”) and is held as a temporary, simplifying assumption to allow measurement of time spent in different intensity categories, while recognizing that the true placement of experiences on an absolute scale across taxa remains an open scientific problem.
At a personal scientific level, I find it very implausible that the affective capacity of a shrimp and that of a human are comparable. However, because this remains an unresolved empirical question, the framework itself is intentionally agnostic and requires that any interspecific adjustments be made explicitly and post-quantification, rather than being implicitly embedded in the core estimates.