I’m a Senior Research Manager at Rethink Priorities, an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Texas State University, and the Director of the Society for the Study of Ethics & Animals.
Bob Fischer
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An Introduction to the Moral Weight Project
Good question, Jobst. Given the project assumptions, I was using them as synonyms. Of course, many people have perfectly good reasons for using “utility” in a broader way.
Thanks for your comment, Vasco! We don’t discuss the symmetry assumption in other posts. Our only discussion is in the supplementary report that’s linked above, which is focused on axiological asymmetries (where the theory of welfare itself posits a fundamental asymmetry), not contingent asymmetries (where contingent physiological facts about organisms explain the asymmetry). But to be clear: we aren’t attached to the symmetry assumption and agree that it’s controversial. We make it purely to simplify the project, as it makes it much easier to define a lower welfare bound (negating the number that represents full health) and, for that reason, makes cross-species comparisons more straightforward. That being said, we’ve built a BOTEC for doing cost-effectiveness analyses with welfare ranges (not yet released), and that tool allows you to factor in different welfare range “skews” (i.e., the appropriate asymmetry for a species). We’re also interested in doing more work on asymmetry in the future. So I agree with you about the importance of the issue!
The Welfare Range Table
Thanks for the kind words, Emre!
Here’s hoping the details live up to the summary!
This is great feedback, Sebastien! Thanks so much for all the recommendations. We do want to keep updating the table with new references and, eventually, expand it to include other species. Cattle, sheep, and goats are probably the most important terrestrial vertebrates, but many aquatic animals and invertebrates are farmed in much greater numbers. Hopefully, we’ll be able to include them all over time.
As for the decision to include just one paper, that was mostly to keep the table relatively neat. Moreover, if one paper makes a decent case for the presence or absence of a trait, it isn’t clear whether our credences would change enough, given the large “credence buckets” we’re using, to justify including more of the literature. But I agree that, all else equal, it would be better to have as many references as possible.
Sorry about that! I’ve fixed the link, which now goes directly to the Google Sheet. Originally, you would have had to scroll down to switch tabs to see the references. Now, clicking through will work. Thanks for bringing this to my attention!
Thanks! And yes, I was surprised by this too.
Theories of Welfare and Welfare Range Estimates
Thanks for the question, Vasco! So it’s true that all those things could provide hedonic benefits. However, the idea is that all those things might not provide hedonic benefits—knowledge could be depressing, love could be taxing, etc.--and yet the objective list theorist would still say they add value to a life.
Thanks for your comment, Leonard. I guess I’d want to push your case a bit further. Imagine that Sarah enters the experience machine and is maxed out with respect to hedonic goods. Would the objective list theorist want to say that her life is bad on balance? Is it actually net negative? Presumably not. Her life might be much less good than it could be, but would still be positive on balance. If that’s right, then that’s exactly what we’d expect based on the Tortured Tim case: we get symmetry with respect to the impacts of non-hedonic goods. On Tim’s side, they can’t make him net positive; on Sarah’s side, they can’t make her net negative. Either way, they play a role in total welfare that’s no greater than the role played by hedonic goods and bads.
Hi Vasco. I think you’re using “hedonism” and “objective list theory” in different ways than I’m using them. I understand hedonism as the view that all and only positive experiences are good for you and all and only negative experiences are bad for you, independently of their sources. I understand objective list theory as the view that pleasures and pains are on the list of things that are good and bad for you, respectively, but there are lots of other things that are on those lists too—where those other things are good or bad for you independently of whether we enjoy them or dislike them.
Hi Monica! We hear you about wanting a table with those results. We’ve tried to provide one here for 11 farmed species: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/tnSg6o7crcHFLc395/the-welfare-range-table
We tend to think that if the goal is to find a single proxy, something like encephalization quotient might be the best bet. It’s imperfect in various ways, but at least it corrects for differences in body size, which means that it doesn’t discount many animals nearly as aggressively as neuron counts do. (While we don’t have EQs for every species of interest, they’re calculable in principle.)
Finally, we’ve also developed some models to generate values that can be plugged into cost-benefit analyses. We’ll post those in January. Hope they’re useful!
Do Brains Contain Many Conscious Subsystems? If So, Should We Act Differently?
Octopuses (Probably) Don’t Have Nine Minds
Thanks for this observation, Ben. I agree that this isn’t the cleanest example. Maybe the best examples are in animals—e.g., headless frogs whose legs still try to remove acid from their skin. But I’m sure Joe has his own thoughts about this.
Usually, people end up with such specific numbers by starting with several round numbers and multiplying. We didn’t do that in this case, though we could. Instead, I asked Joe to use a heuristic that I sometimes find helpful. Imagine being presented with the same information ten times. How many times do you think you’d come to a different conclusion if you were reasoning about it in good faith? In other words, try to run many simulations of your own sincere deliberations to assess how much variation there might be in the results. If none, then imagine going to 100 simulations. If still none, imagine going to 1000. Etc. And when Joe did that, those are the numbers that struck him as plausible.
Thanks so much for your comments, Geoffrey! Just to clarify, Joe really deserves all the credit for this great report; I only provided feedback on drafts. That aside, I’m very sympathetic to the functional perspective you outline, which I’ve borrowed in other (unpublished) work from Peter Godfrey-Smith. Seems exactly right to me.
Thanks, Ben! Hope it’s helpful.