It depends on the case. Do you think my answer to the above should influence which interventions I prioritise? My current top recommendations are research on i) the welfare of soil animals and microorganisms, and ii) comparisons of (expectedhedonistic) welfare across species and digital systems. Could you see these changing if I thought EVs were imprecise instead of precise at a fundamental level?
I think there’s a lot that could change if you very seriously weighed others’ actual or possible direct impressions/​intuitions without heavily privileging your own, before we even get into the question of precise vs imprecise credences. Epistemic modesty is going to do a lot of work first.
Holding your current normative views ~constant, with precise credences, then epistemic modesty would make infinite expected values (and possibly cardinally larger infinities) your focus, as long as there are well-defined consistent ways to handle them without always getting infinity minus infinity errors in practice. With imprecise credences, you could plausibly justify ignoring them on some versions of bracketing (also see here), say because they’re so speculative and you’re clueless about the direction of your impacts on infinities, including possibly even the effects of research into infinite effects (because the research could be used in ways you’d judge to be very bad).
(Independently of precise vs imprecise) If you’re a moral realist, then you wouldn’t privilege your own direct normative intuitions just for being yours either, and this would plausibly mean not privileging consequentialism, utilitarianism, hedonism, risk neutrality, etc.. This could have important implications. Your current priorities might still be among your top priorities, but your list of priorities could expand a lot.
It might be impossible to compare these priorities; there’s no universal common standard/​unit across all normative stances. You might go for a portfolio of interventions.
If you’re not a moral realist, or for the part of you that isn’t, you can just not care about views that conflict too much with your most important intuitions.
If you’re doing some version of bracketing with imprecise credences, some vertebrate welfare work could be worth prioritizing. I’m clueless about whether crops or nature is better for wild animals, even though I’m suffering-focused, so I ignore conversions between nature and crops. Far future effects and acausal influence could guide some priorities unless you’re clueless about them and bracket them away.
With imprecise credences, I think you would also be more pessimistic about the marginal value of research to compare welfare ranges and sentience across types of possible moral patients. You should also be more pessimistic about the value of further research into the sign of the welfare of moral patients. That doesn’t mean no such research is worth doing, but I think it would focus on scoping out possibilities and their implications and gathering evidence that could basically rule out the more extreme hypotheses (e.g. for (near-)constant welfare ranges and for welfare ranges with the most extreme ratios between potential moral patients). Arguments like the two envelopes problem, conscious subsystems, how moral weights could scale with neuron counts, gradations/​vagueness, looking for more ways to assign welfare ranges with very different implications from the ones we have now. If you’re gathering empirical evidence, you would aim it at shifting or ruling out extremes.
Personally, I’ve decided to draw some lines in practice, and basically leave out nematodes and simpler systems as priorities. This depends largely on my normative views (and I’m not a moral realist, so I’m more willing to make some judgement calls about this). I think what counts as consciousness is largely normative and subjective, I have some objections to aggregation (e.g. torture vs dust specks) and I’m not entirely risk neutral or ambiguity neutral. The capacities I’ve observed in them don’t seem so compelling. Maybe some of it is motivated reasoning, though. And maybe some sentience research on nematodes would be worth doing. If they met some of the standards here or here or we found evidence for some of the most sophisticated cognitive capacities we observe in fruit flies, I might take them pretty seriously.
I’d also be keen to get your response to this (and also this, if you have the time.)
I have replied to both comments.
I think there’s a lot that could change if you very seriously weighed others’ actual or possible direct impressions/​intuitions without heavily privileging your own, before we even get into the question of precise vs imprecise credences. Epistemic modesty is going to do a lot of work first.
Thanks for elaborating on this. I imagine I could arrive to different (practical) priorities if I changed my mind about the topics you listed. At the same time, my more foundational philosophical views have historically changed very little. Investigations about empirical matters have updated my priorities a lot more. So I would be curious to know if you think there are areas which are more amenable to empirical investigation, and where I am not giving enough consideration to the views of others.
I’m clueless about whether crops or nature is better for wild animals, even though I’m suffering-focused
I agree it is very unclear whether increasing cropland is good or bad, even for suffering-focussed people.
I think there’s a lot that could change if you very seriously weighed others’ actual or possible direct impressions/​intuitions without heavily privileging your own, before we even get into the question of precise vs imprecise credences. Epistemic modesty is going to do a lot of work first.
Holding your current normative views ~constant, with precise credences, then epistemic modesty would make infinite expected values (and possibly cardinally larger infinities) your focus, as long as there are well-defined consistent ways to handle them without always getting infinity minus infinity errors in practice. With imprecise credences, you could plausibly justify ignoring them on some versions of bracketing (also see here), say because they’re so speculative and you’re clueless about the direction of your impacts on infinities, including possibly even the effects of research into infinite effects (because the research could be used in ways you’d judge to be very bad).
(Independently of precise vs imprecise) If you’re a moral realist, then you wouldn’t privilege your own direct normative intuitions just for being yours either, and this would plausibly mean not privileging consequentialism, utilitarianism, hedonism, risk neutrality, etc.. This could have important implications. Your current priorities might still be among your top priorities, but your list of priorities could expand a lot.
It might be impossible to compare these priorities; there’s no universal common standard/​unit across all normative stances. You might go for a portfolio of interventions.
If you’re not a moral realist, or for the part of you that isn’t, you can just not care about views that conflict too much with your most important intuitions.
If you’re doing some version of bracketing with imprecise credences, some vertebrate welfare work could be worth prioritizing. I’m clueless about whether crops or nature is better for wild animals, even though I’m suffering-focused, so I ignore conversions between nature and crops. Far future effects and acausal influence could guide some priorities unless you’re clueless about them and bracket them away.
Again, potentially impossible comparisons + portfolio.
With imprecise credences, I think you would also be more pessimistic about the marginal value of research to compare welfare ranges and sentience across types of possible moral patients. You should also be more pessimistic about the value of further research into the sign of the welfare of moral patients. That doesn’t mean no such research is worth doing, but I think it would focus on scoping out possibilities and their implications and gathering evidence that could basically rule out the more extreme hypotheses (e.g. for (near-)constant welfare ranges and for welfare ranges with the most extreme ratios between potential moral patients). Arguments like the two envelopes problem, conscious subsystems, how moral weights could scale with neuron counts, gradations/​vagueness, looking for more ways to assign welfare ranges with very different implications from the ones we have now. If you’re gathering empirical evidence, you would aim it at shifting or ruling out extremes.
Personally, I’ve decided to draw some lines in practice, and basically leave out nematodes and simpler systems as priorities. This depends largely on my normative views (and I’m not a moral realist, so I’m more willing to make some judgement calls about this). I think what counts as consciousness is largely normative and subjective, I have some objections to aggregation (e.g. torture vs dust specks) and I’m not entirely risk neutral or ambiguity neutral. The capacities I’ve observed in them don’t seem so compelling. Maybe some of it is motivated reasoning, though. And maybe some sentience research on nematodes would be worth doing. If they met some of the standards here or here or we found evidence for some of the most sophisticated cognitive capacities we observe in fruit flies, I might take them pretty seriously.
I have replied to both comments.
Thanks for elaborating on this. I imagine I could arrive to different (practical) priorities if I changed my mind about the topics you listed. At the same time, my more foundational philosophical views have historically changed very little. Investigations about empirical matters have updated my priorities a lot more. So I would be curious to know if you think there are areas which are more amenable to empirical investigation, and where I am not giving enough consideration to the views of others.
I agree it is very unclear whether increasing cropland is good or bad, even for suffering-focussed people.