Philosophy, global priorities and animal welfare research. My current specific interests include: philosophy of mind, moral weights, person-affecting views, preference-based views and subjectivism, moral uncertainty, decision theory, deep uncertainty/cluelessness and backfire risks, s-risks, and indirect effects on wild animals.
I’ve also done economic modelling for some animal welfare issues.
Thanks, fixed!
Assume your utility function is unbounded from above. Pick outcomes such that . Let your lottery be with probability . Note that , so the probabilities sum to 1.
Then this lottery has infinite expected utility:
Now, consider any two other lotteries and with finite expected utility, such that . There’s no way to mix and probabilistically to be equivalent to , because
whenever . For , .
So Continuity is violated.
In practice, I think the effects of one’s actions decay to practically 0 after 100 years or so. In principle, I am open one’s actions having effects which are arbitrarily large, but not infinite, and continuity does not rule out arbitrarily large effects.
If you allow arbitrarily large values and prospects with infinitely many different possible outcomes, then you can construct St Petersburg-like prospects, which have infinite expected value but only take finite value in every outcome. These violate Continuity (if it’s meant to apply to all prospects, including ones with infinitely many possible outcomes). So from arbitrary large values, we violate Continuity.
We’ve also discussed this a bit before, and I don’t expect to change your mind now, but I think actually infinite effects are quite plausible (mostly through acausal influence in a possibly spatially infinite universe), and I think it’s unwarranted to assign them probability 0.
Reality forces us to compare outcomes, at least implicitly.
There are decision rules that are consistent with violations of Completeness. I’m guessing you want to treat incomparable prospects/lotteries as equivalent or that whenever you pick one prospect over another, the one you pick is at least as good as the latter, but this would force other constraints on how you compare prospects/lotteries that these decision rules for incomplete preferences don’t.
I just do not see how adding the same possibility to each of 2 lotteries can change my assessment of these.
You could read more about the relevant accounts of risk aversion and difference-making risk aversion, e.g. discussed here and here. Their motivations would explain why and how Independence is violated. To be clear, I’m not personally sold on them.
If your utility function can take arbitrarily large but finite values, then you can design a prospect/lottery with infinitely many possible outcomes and infinite expected value, like the St Petersburg paradox. Then you can treat such a prospect/lottery as if it has infinite actual value, and demonstrate violations of Continuity the same way you would with an outcome with infinite value. This is assuming Continuity applies to arbitrary prospects/lotteries, including with infinitely many possible outcomes, not just finitely many possible outcomes per prospect/lottery.
(Infinitary versions of Independence and the Sure-Thing Principle also rule out “unbounded” utility functions. See Russell & Isaacs, 2020.)
When you perceive a color, is it not self-evident that the color “looks” a certain way? There is no one doing the looking; it just looks. Color and disvalue are properties of conscious experience, and they are real parts of the world. I would say our subjective experience is in fact the “realest” part of the world because there can be no doubt about its existence, whereas we cannot ever be sure what is really “out there” that we are interpreting.
I’m sympathetic to illusionism about phenomenal properties (illusionism about phenomenal consciousness), i.e. I don’t believe consciousness is phenomenal, ineffable, intrinsic, qualitative, etc.. People often mean phenomenal properties or qualia when they talk about things just looking a certain way. This might cut against your claims here.
However, I suspect there are ways to interpret your statements that are compatible with illusionism. Maybe something like your brain is undergoing specific patterns of reactions and discriminations to inputs, and these are distinctive for distinctive colours. What it means to “look” or “feel” a certain way is to just undergo particular patterns of reactions. And it’s wired in or cognitively impenetrable: you don’t have direct introspective access to the processes responsible for these patterns of reactions, only their effects on you.
Furthermore, everything we respond to and are aware of is filtered through these processes, so “we cannot ever be sure what is really “out there” that we are interpreting”.
there can be no doubt about its existence
I’m not sure about this. I’d probably want to see a deductive argument for this.
If no property of (dis)value existed and couldn’t ever exist, then I think it would make no difference at all which outcome is brought about.
I’m not saying values don’t exist, I just think they are projected, rather than intrinsic. It can still matter to whatever’s doing the projection.
The motivational salience you speak of in one of your posts may be a necessary condition for suffering (in humans), but the disvalue is exclusively in the distinct way the experience feels.
This seems to me to be separating the apparent disvalue from one of the crucial mechanisms responsible for (a large share of) the apparent disvalue. Motivational salience is what gives suffering its apparent urgency, and (I think) a big part of what makes suffering feel the way it does. If you got rid of its motivational salience, it would feel very different.
I don’t think any of the axioms are self-evident. FWIW, I don’t really think anything is self-evident, maybe other than direct logical deductions and applications of definitions.
I have some sympathy for rejecting each of them, except maybe transitivity, which I’m pretty strongly inclined not to give up. (EDIT: On the other hand, I’m quite willing to give up the Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives, which is similar to transitivity.) I give weight to views that violate the axioms, under normative uncertainty.
Some ways you might reject them:
Continuity: Continuity rules out infinities and prospects with finite value but infinite expected value, like St Petersburg lotteries. If Continuity is meant to apply to all logically coherent prospects (including prospects with infinitely many possible outcomes), then this implies your utility function must be bounded. This rules out expectational total utilitarianism as a general view.
Continuity: You might think some harms are infinitely worse than others, e.g. when suffering reaches the threshold of unbearability. It could also be that this threshold is imprecise/vague/fuzzy, and we would also reject Completeness to accommodate that.
Completeness: Some types of values/goods/bads may be incomparable. Or, you might think interpersonal welfare comparisons, e.g. across very different kinds of minds, are not always possible. Tradeoffs between incomparable values would often be indeterminate. Or, you might think they are comparable in principle, but only vaguely so, leaving gaps of incomparability when the tradeoffs seem too close.
Independence: Different accounts of risk aversion or difference-making risk aversion (not just decreasing marginal utility, which is consistent with Independence).
I reject axiological hedonism. I don’t think anything has intrinsic value or intrinsic disvalue. On my preferred view, all value is projected subjectively onto the world, and pleasure is just one way, among multiple, to find something “good”. Conscious approval is another way to find something good, for example. Things are only (dis)valuable if they are (dis)valued. I describe this view in this piece, and some more implications here.
The disvalue of suffering is self-evident from introspection, i.e. from observing how suffering feels.
Could you elaborate? FWIW, I don’t really think anything is self-evident, maybe other than direct logical deductions and applications of definitions.
The disvalue is inherent in the experience; it is not a matter of an evaluation done by me, or a desire for the suffering to stop felt by me (even though there is a strong correlation), or me having a certain attitude towards suffering.
I would say suffering actually is an evaluation done by you (disliking) and a desire (wanting). The evaluations and desires inherent to suffering are kind of hardwired in, not reason-based. They are not the kind where you decide by reasoning that something is bad and to be avoided. They are forced onto you. These are empirical claims for which I think there is some evidence from cognitive neuroscience. I discuss this more in this piece and this piece.
Thanks Erich!
Yes, it is pretty close to Korsgaard! I think I actually had Korsgaard in mind and might have checked some of her shorter pieces while working on this, although “object views” ended up being what I actually wanted here. Also, there’s this piece by Jeff Sebo explaining Korsgaard’s constructivism.
Fyi, the latter two of these links are broken.
Fixed! Thanks.
They aren’t asserting that the whole universe, including the unreachable portion, is finite in extent with certainty. They’re just saying that it’s possible, and they also note infinite is possible too in the sentence after which that footnote follows.
Even if you think a universe with infinite spatial extent is very unlikely, you should still be entertaining the possibility. If there’s a chance it’s infinite and you can have infinite impact (before renormalizing), a risk neutral expected value reasoner should wager on that.
FWIW, I’m sympathetic to their arguments in that section against expected value maximization, or that at least undermine the arguments for it. I’m not totally convinced of expected value maximization myself.
However, that doesn’t give a positive case for ignoring these infinities. I find infinite acausal impacts not too unlikely, personally, because both that acausal influence is possible seems more likely than not and that the universe is infinite in spatial extent (and in the right way to be influenced infinitely acausally) seems not too unlikely.
But I am optimistic about renormalization.
You could want to do acausal trades and cooperate with agents causally disconnected from you. You’ll expect that those who reason (sufficiently) similarly would do the same in return, and that you would cooperate would be evidence for them cooperating and make it more likely.
If you were difference-making risk averse locally, e.g. you don’t care about making a huge difference with very very tiny probability, by taking acausal influence into account, you should be (possibly much) less difference-making risk averse, according to Wilkinson.
There’s a thread here about hardware between companies, with johnswentworth arguing AMD had better hardware than Nvidia.
If you maximize expcted value, you should be taking expected values through small probabilities, including that we have the physics wrong or that things could go on forever (or without hard upper bound) temporally. Unless you can be 100% in no infinities, then your expected values will be infinite or undefined. And there are, I think, hypotheses that can’t be ruled out and that could involve infinite affectable value.
In response to Carl Shulman on acausal influence, David Manheim said to renormalize. I’m sympathetic and would probably agree with doing something similar, but the devil is in the details. There may be no very uniquely principled way to do this, and some things can still break down, e.g. you get actions that are morally incomparable.
EDIT: Rereading, I’m not really disagreeing with you. I definitely agree with the sentiment here:
And so when I see comments saying things like “I would axiomatically reject any moral weight on animals that implied saving kids from dying was net negative”, I’m like… really? There’s no empirical facts that could possibly cause the trade-off to go the other way?
(Edited) So, rather than just the possibility that all tradeoffs between humans and chickens should favour humans, I take issue with >99% confidence in that position or otherwise treating it like it’s true.
Whatever someone thinks makes humans infinitely more important than chickens[1] could actually be present in chickens in some similarly important form with non-tiny or even modest probability (examples here), or not actually be what makes humans important at all (more general related discussion, although that piece defends a disputed position). In my view, this should in principle warrant some tradeoffs favouring chickens.
Or, if they don’t think there’s anything at all, say except the mere fact of species membership, then this is just pure speciesism and seems arbitrary.
Or makes humans matter at all, but chickens lack, so chickens don’t matter at all.
I only skimmed, but on the view that we should focus on the very worst experience (or very worst life, say), consider a thought experiment, where x is an extremely horrible experience and y is another extremely horrible experience, but slightly better:
Alice suffers x, and 100 people live great lives without suffering.
Alice suffers y, and the 100 people also each suffer y.
I would choose 1, even though the worst experience in it is worse than the worst experience in 2. I think modest tradeoffs between intensity and number should be made at least for similar intensities. Or, perhaps, we should care about the differences, not improving the worst experience, e.g. y-x, what’s at stake for Alice, is actually much smaller in magnitude than y, (at least) what’s at stake for each of the other 100 people.
Even if I find full aggregation and especially summation counterintuitive, at least some modest tradeoffs seem right to me. You might be interested in “partial aggregation”.
More recent data for US beef cattle (APHIS USDA, 2017, p.iii):
Only 7.8 percent of calves born or expected to be born in 2017 had horns, indicating the widespread use of polled breeds. For horned calves that were dehorned, the average age at dehorning was 107.0 days.
FWIW, Molly’s comment you linked to quoted and cited Welfare Footprint Project and basically addressed something like “grows to a bigger size more quickly”:
The Welfare Footprint Project used the Cumulative Pain Framework to investigate how the adoption of the Better Chicken Commitment (BCC) and similar welfare certification programs affect the welfare of broilers. Specifically, they examined concerns that the use of slower-growing breeds may increase suffering by extending the life of chickens for the production of the same amount of meat. From their main findings they stated:
‘Our results strongly support the notion that adoption of BCC standards and slower-growing broiler strains have a net positive effect on the welfare of broiler chickens. Because most welfare offenses endured by broilers are strongly associated with fast growth, adoption of slower-growing breeds not only reduces the incidence of these offenses but also delays their onset. As a consequence, slower-growing birds are expected to experience a shorter, not longer, time in pain before being slaughtered.’
I would probably think of donating to FWI as supporting them to develop a more cost-effective program. Most of their budget is spent on R&D, IIRC.