I don’t quite see the connection here between having a small welfare range and having an indeterminate welfare sign. Suppose a being is only capable of having very slightly positive experiences. Then it has a very small welfare range but it seems to me that its welfare range is determinately positive. It has positive and no negative experiences.
There is some plausibility to the idea that there may not be uniquely correct ways of weighing different experiences against each other. E.g., perhaps there is no uniquely correct answer to how many seconds of a pleasant breeze outweigh 60 minutes of a boring lecture, or how many minutes of the intellectual enjoyment of playing chess outweigh the sharp pain of a bad papercut, even if there are incorrect answers (maybe one second of the breeze is definitely not enough to outweigh the lecture). This may be plausible in light of the Ruth Chang-type intransitivity arguments: if I am indifferent between X seconds of the breeze and 60 minutes of the lecture, I might also be indifferent between X + 1 seconds of the breeze and 60 minutes of the lecture even though I obviously prefer X+1 seconds of the breeze to just X seconds, and it’s not clear that this is merely an epistemic issue. If, as came up in your discussion with Vasco, someone wants to understand one’s experience outweighing another’s as being a matter of what you would prefer (rather than a realist understanding on which the outweighing comes first and rational preferences will follow), this perhaps seems especially plausible, as I doubt our preferences about these things are, as a matter of descriptive psychology, always perfectly fine-grained.
in that case, I could see it being the case that it’s sometimes indeterminate whether a being has positive or negative welfare because it has lots of very different types of experiences which sort of come out closely matched with no uniquely correct weighting. But that is orthogonal to the size of the welfare range: that could turn out to be true even if the individual experiences are really (dis)valuable.
I implicitly assumed the welfare range includes zero.
About the intransitivity argument: The comparison of the X seconds of breeze and the lecture is a coarse-grained comparison, i.e. in a coarse-grained frame. Also comparing X+1 seconds of breeze with the lecture is in a coarse-grained frame. But comparing X with X+1 seconds of breeze is fine-grained. So the comparisons assume different frames, as with reference frames in special relativity and welfare frames in utilitarian ethics.
I guess I’m not getting how this responds to my point. Suppose my welfare range (understood as representing the range of positive and negative experiences I can have) goes from -.01 to .01. I say I might have determinately positive welfare because, as a matter of fact, all, or the predominant majority of, my experiences are slightly positive. Otoh, suppose my range goes from −1000 to 1000. I say (I am open to the possibility that) it might be indeterminate whether I have positive welfare because I have a bunch of importantly different types of positive and negative experiences that are kind of closely matched without a uniquely correct weighting. So the indeterminacy is not related to the size of the welfare range but rather to having importantly different types of positive and negative experiences that are kind of closely matched without a uniquely correct weighting, or something like that. It could still be that it’s indeterminate whether nematodes have positive or negative welfare, but that won’t be just because their welfare range is small.
I guess you’re suggesting that the neutral range is not well-defined? When experiences are composed of positive and negative parts without correct weighting, the neutral range could be larger than when experiences are more dominated by either positive or negative parts? I’m open to such a possibility.
As far as I can see, there just isn’t such a thing as a neutral range. An individual could have an arbitrarily small welfare range and still have determinately positive or negative net welfare, or (I am open to the possibility of) an arbitrarily large welfare range while being such that it’s indeterminate whether their net welfare is positive or negative. And so noting that nematodes have small welfare ranges doesn’t tell us anything about this in and of itself.
Perhaps we should run a survey, ask people if they have a neutral range. Can they give values of X, Y and Z such that if they would experience X, Y and Z units of some welfare determining components, they would be indifferent between that experience and non-existence, whereas if they had X+dX, Y and Z units, they would state a positive welfare and X-dX, Y and Z units would correspond with a negative welfare. I’m personally very skeptical that most people’s neutral ranges are zero. You claim to have a zero neutral range?
So my view is that if I have (X,Y,Z) at (0,0,0), which is equal to nonexistence, then (.01,0,0) is positive and (-.01,0,0) is negative. Why wouldn’t it be? Why wouldn’t a life with a slight positive and no negatives be positive? And presumably, say, (.01,0,-.00000001) will also be positive.
I think people frequently conflate there being no reason for something and there being very little reason. E.g., they’ll say “there is no evidence for a flat earth” when there is obviously some evidence for it (that some people believe in it is some evidence). If people say (.01,0,0) is not better than non-existence, I’d suspect that’s what they’re doing.
Ok, let me exaggerate a bit. Assume when state S=(X,Y,Z)=(87455.668741, −258.142567, −11024.441253), you are indifferent with nonexistence. Now consider state S’=(87455.668741, −258.142567, −11024.441153). You can confidently say that S’ gives you a positive welfare? If yes: close your eyes and write down, for the given X and Y of state S, a value of Z that gives you a positive welfare lower than S’. I bet your brains are too small to do this exercise. Now consider a nematode with much smaller brains....
So I understand: are you denying that the life with a tiny bit of positive welfare and no negative welfare, or the life with a tiny bit of positive welfare and a tiny tiny tiny tiny tiny bit of negative welfare, is determinately net positive? If so, I think that is an important crux. I don’t see why that would be.
I guess it had better not be a question of whether, as a matter of actual fact, I have the brainpower to do the exercise (with my eyes closed!). Babies, I assume, have no concept of their own non-existence, and so can’t compare any state they’re in to non-existence, yet they can have positive or negative welfare. Or someone who lives long enough will not be able to remember, much less bring to mind, everything that’s happened in their life, yet they can have a positive or negative welfare. So what matters is, if anything, some kind of idealized comparison I may or may not be able to do in actual fact. (And in any event, I guess the argument here would not be that nematodes have indeterminate welfare because their range is small, but rather that they do because they are stupid.)
What I’m suggesting could be the case is a situation where, say, the correct weighting of X vs Z is not a precise ratio but a range—anything between 7.9:1 and 8:1, let’s say for the sake of argument—such that the actual ratio falls into this indeterminate range, and a small change in either direction will not cause a departure from the range. I see how that could perhaps be the case. But that kind of indeterminacy is orthogonal to the size of the welfare range. It would still hold if the values were .087455668741 and .011024441253 or 87455668741 and 11024441253, and wouldn’t hold if the values were .087455668741 and .010024441253.
You raised a good point. Yes, I guess I agree that when there is only a positive experience and no negative, the welfare is definitely positive, even if the positive experience is very small. But thinks get tricky when there are both positive and negative experiences, as is the case for almost all sentient beings, and probably also for nematodes if they are sentient. The more welfare is composed of positive and negative parts, the more difficult it becomes to compare it with a zero welfare level. Might have to do with information processing capacity. Adding up many positives and negatives is more difficult that considering a single positive or negative value. Evaluating mixed experiences (with both positive and negative parts) might require a more coarse-grained approach. The level of coarse-graining might relate to the neutral range: the more coarse-graining is used, the wider the neutral range.
I don’t quite see the connection here between having a small welfare range and having an indeterminate welfare sign. Suppose a being is only capable of having very slightly positive experiences. Then it has a very small welfare range but it seems to me that its welfare range is determinately positive. It has positive and no negative experiences.
There is some plausibility to the idea that there may not be uniquely correct ways of weighing different experiences against each other. E.g., perhaps there is no uniquely correct answer to how many seconds of a pleasant breeze outweigh 60 minutes of a boring lecture, or how many minutes of the intellectual enjoyment of playing chess outweigh the sharp pain of a bad papercut, even if there are incorrect answers (maybe one second of the breeze is definitely not enough to outweigh the lecture). This may be plausible in light of the Ruth Chang-type intransitivity arguments: if I am indifferent between X seconds of the breeze and 60 minutes of the lecture, I might also be indifferent between X + 1 seconds of the breeze and 60 minutes of the lecture even though I obviously prefer X+1 seconds of the breeze to just X seconds, and it’s not clear that this is merely an epistemic issue. If, as came up in your discussion with Vasco, someone wants to understand one’s experience outweighing another’s as being a matter of what you would prefer (rather than a realist understanding on which the outweighing comes first and rational preferences will follow), this perhaps seems especially plausible, as I doubt our preferences about these things are, as a matter of descriptive psychology, always perfectly fine-grained.
in that case, I could see it being the case that it’s sometimes indeterminate whether a being has positive or negative welfare because it has lots of very different types of experiences which sort of come out closely matched with no uniquely correct weighting. But that is orthogonal to the size of the welfare range: that could turn out to be true even if the individual experiences are really (dis)valuable.
I implicitly assumed the welfare range includes zero.
About the intransitivity argument: The comparison of the X seconds of breeze and the lecture is a coarse-grained comparison, i.e. in a coarse-grained frame. Also comparing X+1 seconds of breeze with the lecture is in a coarse-grained frame. But comparing X with X+1 seconds of breeze is fine-grained. So the comparisons assume different frames, as with reference frames in special relativity and welfare frames in utilitarian ethics.
I guess I’m not getting how this responds to my point. Suppose my welfare range (understood as representing the range of positive and negative experiences I can have) goes from -.01 to .01. I say I might have determinately positive welfare because, as a matter of fact, all, or the predominant majority of, my experiences are slightly positive. Otoh, suppose my range goes from −1000 to 1000. I say (I am open to the possibility that) it might be indeterminate whether I have positive welfare because I have a bunch of importantly different types of positive and negative experiences that are kind of closely matched without a uniquely correct weighting. So the indeterminacy is not related to the size of the welfare range but rather to having importantly different types of positive and negative experiences that are kind of closely matched without a uniquely correct weighting, or something like that. It could still be that it’s indeterminate whether nematodes have positive or negative welfare, but that won’t be just because their welfare range is small.
What’s your answer to that?
I guess you’re suggesting that the neutral range is not well-defined? When experiences are composed of positive and negative parts without correct weighting, the neutral range could be larger than when experiences are more dominated by either positive or negative parts? I’m open to such a possibility.
As far as I can see, there just isn’t such a thing as a neutral range. An individual could have an arbitrarily small welfare range and still have determinately positive or negative net welfare, or (I am open to the possibility of) an arbitrarily large welfare range while being such that it’s indeterminate whether their net welfare is positive or negative. And so noting that nematodes have small welfare ranges doesn’t tell us anything about this in and of itself.
Perhaps we should run a survey, ask people if they have a neutral range. Can they give values of X, Y and Z such that if they would experience X, Y and Z units of some welfare determining components, they would be indifferent between that experience and non-existence, whereas if they had X+dX, Y and Z units, they would state a positive welfare and X-dX, Y and Z units would correspond with a negative welfare. I’m personally very skeptical that most people’s neutral ranges are zero. You claim to have a zero neutral range?
So my view is that if I have (X,Y,Z) at (0,0,0), which is equal to nonexistence, then (.01,0,0) is positive and (-.01,0,0) is negative. Why wouldn’t it be? Why wouldn’t a life with a slight positive and no negatives be positive? And presumably, say, (.01,0,-.00000001) will also be positive.
I think people frequently conflate there being no reason for something and there being very little reason. E.g., they’ll say “there is no evidence for a flat earth” when there is obviously some evidence for it (that some people believe in it is some evidence). If people say (.01,0,0) is not better than non-existence, I’d suspect that’s what they’re doing.
Ok, let me exaggerate a bit. Assume when state S=(X,Y,Z)=(87455.668741, −258.142567, −11024.441253), you are indifferent with nonexistence. Now consider state S’=(87455.668741, −258.142567, −11024.441153). You can confidently say that S’ gives you a positive welfare? If yes: close your eyes and write down, for the given X and Y of state S, a value of Z that gives you a positive welfare lower than S’. I bet your brains are too small to do this exercise. Now consider a nematode with much smaller brains....
So I understand: are you denying that the life with a tiny bit of positive welfare and no negative welfare, or the life with a tiny bit of positive welfare and a tiny tiny tiny tiny tiny bit of negative welfare, is determinately net positive? If so, I think that is an important crux. I don’t see why that would be.
I guess it had better not be a question of whether, as a matter of actual fact, I have the brainpower to do the exercise (with my eyes closed!). Babies, I assume, have no concept of their own non-existence, and so can’t compare any state they’re in to non-existence, yet they can have positive or negative welfare. Or someone who lives long enough will not be able to remember, much less bring to mind, everything that’s happened in their life, yet they can have a positive or negative welfare. So what matters is, if anything, some kind of idealized comparison I may or may not be able to do in actual fact. (And in any event, I guess the argument here would not be that nematodes have indeterminate welfare because their range is small, but rather that they do because they are stupid.)
What I’m suggesting could be the case is a situation where, say, the correct weighting of X vs Z is not a precise ratio but a range—anything between 7.9:1 and 8:1, let’s say for the sake of argument—such that the actual ratio falls into this indeterminate range, and a small change in either direction will not cause a departure from the range. I see how that could perhaps be the case. But that kind of indeterminacy is orthogonal to the size of the welfare range. It would still hold if the values were .087455668741 and .011024441253 or 87455668741 and 11024441253, and wouldn’t hold if the values were .087455668741 and .010024441253.
You raised a good point. Yes, I guess I agree that when there is only a positive experience and no negative, the welfare is definitely positive, even if the positive experience is very small. But thinks get tricky when there are both positive and negative experiences, as is the case for almost all sentient beings, and probably also for nematodes if they are sentient. The more welfare is composed of positive and negative parts, the more difficult it becomes to compare it with a zero welfare level. Might have to do with information processing capacity. Adding up many positives and negatives is more difficult that considering a single positive or negative value. Evaluating mixed experiences (with both positive and negative parts) might require a more coarse-grained approach. The level of coarse-graining might relate to the neutral range: the more coarse-graining is used, the wider the neutral range.