The idea that the unpleasantness of pain increases superlinearly with its intensity (i.e. an 8⁄10 on the pain scale is more than twice as bad as a 4⁄10).
Yeah… I wish we would just say that the 4 is actually lower than 4 and directly track what you mean by “unpleasantness” with these scores, since this is what we care about. But that’s not how people use the /10 scale, unfortunately. And that’s understandable. If they were, they would seldom say that they’re suffering above a 1⁄10.[1]
And yes. When researchers/people assign welfare ranges, they think they’re tracking “unpleasantness”, but I also suspect they are actually tracking what you mean by “intensity” to a large extent, which may lead to very misguided cross-species welfare tradeoffs. I am extremely skeptical of the following counter-view you describe:
If a researcher judges an animal to be at 10% of its capacity, they simply mean 1⁄10 as bad as its worst state — there’s no question about whether 100% is “really” 10x worse, because that’s just what the numbers mean by construction.
Maybe that’s what they mean, but I doubt that their estimate is not deeply biased by the “unpleasantness”/”intensity” confusion.
To be clear, though, I don’t want people to take away that we should care less about insects and shrimp. There are so many other considerations. If anything, this should make us less confident in precise-ish moral weight estimates (and maybe look for projects robust to this uncertainty).
That’s a very important problem you raise! Thank you for this. :)
Yeah… I wish we would just say that the 4 is actually lower than 4 and directly track what you mean by “unpleasantness” with these scores, since this is what we care about. But that’s not how people use the /10 scale, unfortunately. And that’s understandable. If they were, they would seldom say that they’re suffering above a 1⁄10.[1]
And yes. When researchers/people assign welfare ranges, they think they’re tracking “unpleasantness”, but I also suspect they are actually tracking what you mean by “intensity” to a large extent, which may lead to very misguided cross-species welfare tradeoffs. I am extremely skeptical of the following counter-view you describe:
Maybe that’s what they mean, but I doubt that their estimate is not deeply biased by the “unpleasantness”/”intensity” confusion.
To be clear, though, I don’t want people to take away that we should care less about insects and shrimp. There are so many other considerations. If anything, this should make us less confident in precise-ish moral weight estimates (and maybe look for projects robust to this uncertainty).
That’s a very important problem you raise! Thank you for this. :)
I guess that’s why the /10 scale measures what you mean by “intensity,” even though I agree with Toby it’s not clear what it’s even supposed to be.