The question is, how do you generate these weights otherwise ?
The issue is, the way I seen most people do it is basically go “the conclusion that animals have a similar capacity for pain than humans feels wrong, so, hm, let’s say that they morally weight 1000 or 10000 times less”.
It’s often conveniently in the range where people don’t have to change their behavior about the topic. I’m skeptical of that.
For most people, the beehive example invokes a response close to ‘oh this feels wrong so the conclusion must be wrong’. They don’t consider the option ‘wow, despite being small, maybe bees have a capacity to feel love, and pleasure when they find flowers and make honey and danse, and feel pain when their organs are destroyed by pesticides’, which may be also likely.
RP’s work is the most complete work I’ve seen on this topic, comparatively.
The question is, how do you generate these weights otherwise ?
The issue is, the way I seen most people do it is basically go “the conclusion that animals have a similar capacity for pain than humans feels wrong, so, hm, let’s say that they morally weight 1000 or 10000 times less”.
It’s often conveniently in the range where people don’t have to change their behavior about the topic. I’m skeptical of that.
For most people, the beehive example invokes a response close to ‘oh this feels wrong so the conclusion must be wrong’. They don’t consider the option ‘wow, despite being small, maybe bees have a capacity to feel love, and pleasure when they find flowers and make honey and danse, and feel pain when their organs are destroyed by pesticides’, which may be also likely.
RP’s work is the most complete work I’ve seen on this topic, comparatively.