With respect to your last paragraph, someone who holds a person-affecting view might respond that you have things backwards (indeed, this is what Frick claims): welfare matters because moral patients matter, rather than the other way around, so you need to put the person first, and something something therefore person-affecting view! Then we could discuss what welfare means, and that could be more pleasure and less suffering, or something else.
That being said, this seems kind of confusing to me, too. Welfare matters because moral patients matter, but moral patients are, in my view, just those beings capable of welfare. So, welfare had to come first anyway, and we just added extra steps.
I suspect this can be fixed by dealing directly with interests themselves as the atoms that matter, rather than entire moral patients. E.g. preference satisfaction matters because preferences matter, and something something therefore preference-affecting view! I think such an account would deny that giving even existing people more pleasure is good in itself: they’d need to have an interest in more pleasure for it to make them better off. Maybe we always do have such an interest by our nature, though, and that’s something someone could claim, although I find that unintuitive.
Another response may just be that value is complex, and we shouldn’t give too much extra weight to simpler views just because they’re simpler. That can definitely go even further, e.g. welfare is not cardinally measurable or nothing matters. Also, I think only suffering (or only pleasure) mattering is actually in some sense a simpler view than both suffering and pleasure mattering, since with both, you need to explain why each matters and tradeoffs between them. Some claim that symmetric hedonism is not value monistic at all.
With respect to your last paragraph, someone who holds a person-affecting view might respond that you have things backwards (indeed, this is what Frick claims): welfare matters because moral patients matter, rather than the other way around, so you need to put the person first, and something something therefore person-affecting view! Then we could discuss what welfare means, and that could be more pleasure and less suffering, or something else.
That being said, this seems kind of confusing to me, too. Welfare matters because moral patients matter, but moral patients are, in my view, just those beings capable of welfare. So, welfare had to come first anyway, and we just added extra steps.
I suspect this can be fixed by dealing directly with interests themselves as the atoms that matter, rather than entire moral patients. E.g. preference satisfaction matters because preferences matter, and something something therefore preference-affecting view! I think such an account would deny that giving even existing people more pleasure is good in itself: they’d need to have an interest in more pleasure for it to make them better off. Maybe we always do have such an interest by our nature, though, and that’s something someone could claim, although I find that unintuitive.
Another response may just be that value is complex, and we shouldn’t give too much extra weight to simpler views just because they’re simpler. That can definitely go even further, e.g. welfare is not cardinally measurable or nothing matters. Also, I think only suffering (or only pleasure) mattering is actually in some sense a simpler view than both suffering and pleasure mattering, since with both, you need to explain why each matters and tradeoffs between them. Some claim that symmetric hedonism is not value monistic at all.