I like your summary. I feel (slightly) less hopeless because I think…
Comparisons that involve multiple dimensions of pain are, in principle, possible. I think I would only regard them as impossible if I came upon evidence that pain severity is, in reality, an ordinal construct.
In one sense, I might be more pessimistic about this topic than many because I think it is plausible that many psychological constructs are ordinal.
Behavioral evidence could in theory license cardinal comparisons among different pains. Practical issues of feasibility (and permission from institutions) stand in the way, and I would grant that these will probably never be overcome.
Possibly, cardinal differences in severity are explicitly represented in the brain. If so, then in principle we could measure these representations, though I do not think that we ever will.
We may be able to prioritize between relieving severe pain and long-lasting pain without making direct cardinal comparisons, so long as we have a sense of just how many orders of magnitude pain severity can span. Many aspects of pain experience appear conserved across a large number of species. If we find that pain in humans or laboratory animals have a wide range of pain severity, then there is an above-chance possibility that farmed animals do too. There is also an above-chance possibility that the most severe pains on factory farms are close to the end of the negative side of the range, given that it is difficult to see the adaptive value of being able to represent threats more extreme than, say, being boiled alive.
I would agree that the point above is partly grounded in intuition that has only a vague relationship to a well-established theory of the evolution of pain. Hopefully, advances in this area will reduce our reliance on intuitions that are not grounded by a plausible scientific theory.
I like your summary. I feel (slightly) less hopeless because I think…
Comparisons that involve multiple dimensions of pain are, in principle, possible. I think I would only regard them as impossible if I came upon evidence that pain severity is, in reality, an ordinal construct.
In one sense, I might be more pessimistic about this topic than many because I think it is plausible that many psychological constructs are ordinal.
Behavioral evidence could in theory license cardinal comparisons among different pains. Practical issues of feasibility (and permission from institutions) stand in the way, and I would grant that these will probably never be overcome.
Possibly, cardinal differences in severity are explicitly represented in the brain. If so, then in principle we could measure these representations, though I do not think that we ever will.
We may be able to prioritize between relieving severe pain and long-lasting pain without making direct cardinal comparisons, so long as we have a sense of just how many orders of magnitude pain severity can span. Many aspects of pain experience appear conserved across a large number of species. If we find that pain in humans or laboratory animals have a wide range of pain severity, then there is an above-chance possibility that farmed animals do too. There is also an above-chance possibility that the most severe pains on factory farms are close to the end of the negative side of the range, given that it is difficult to see the adaptive value of being able to represent threats more extreme than, say, being boiled alive.
I would agree that the point above is partly grounded in intuition that has only a vague relationship to a well-established theory of the evolution of pain. Hopefully, advances in this area will reduce our reliance on intuitions that are not grounded by a plausible scientific theory.