> I’d certainly rather save a hundred duck-sized horses. It’s hard to know how to compare the moral importance of different creatures’ experiences. How many happy chicken-days is as good as a happy chimp-day? The best guess I currently have is to use the logarithm of neural mass. And I think that the total log(neural mass) of a hundred duck-sized horses is much greater than that of one horse-sized duck. There’s just a lot more experiencing entities, and even if the horse-sized duck’s experiences are a bit more valuable in light of greater computational resources powering them, it’s not that much greater.Moreover, horses live a little longer than ducks (25-30 years compared to about 20 years, according to a quick google). Insofar as I think we should care not about number of lives saved, but number of quality-adjusted life-years saved, then saving the duck-sized horses is clearly going to have the bigger impact.
Not sure logarithm of neural mass is the best way to approach this… but the selection seems right to me!
For those interested, stay tuned, as RP has some really exciting work upcoming on moral weights that I think may help give a truly cutting edge response to this age old question :)
If you had to choose between saving
a. 1 horse-sized duck, and
b. 100 duck-sized horses,
which would you save?
Ha! Excellent question and should be raised in every AMA :)
100 hundred duck-sized horses!
Hard to improve on Will’s answer here:
> I’d certainly rather save a hundred duck-sized horses. It’s hard to know how to compare the moral importance of different creatures’ experiences. How many happy chicken-days is as good as a happy chimp-day? The best guess I currently have is to use the logarithm of neural mass. And I think that the total log(neural mass) of a hundred duck-sized horses is much greater than that of one horse-sized duck. There’s just a lot more experiencing entities, and even if the horse-sized duck’s experiences are a bit more valuable in light of greater computational resources powering them, it’s not that much greater.Moreover, horses live a little longer than ducks (25-30 years compared to about 20 years, according to a quick google). Insofar as I think we should care not about number of lives saved, but number of quality-adjusted life-years saved, then saving the duck-sized horses is clearly going to have the bigger impact.
Not sure logarithm of neural mass is the best way to approach this… but the selection seems right to me!
For those interested, stay tuned, as RP has some really exciting work upcoming on moral weights that I think may help give a truly cutting edge response to this age old question :)