What thought process do you think goes into your guess that very few non-human animals can leave a meaningful and fulfilling life? My guess is that many mammals and birds can live a meaningful and fulfilling life, though the phrase “meaningful and fulfilling” strikes me as hard to specify. I’m mostly thinking that having emotionally significant social bonds with other individuals is sufficient for a life to be meaningful and fulfilling, and that many mammals and birds can form emotionally significant social bonds.
And if emotionally significant social bonds don’t count, it seems like we could be throwing away what humans typically find most important in their lives.
Of course, I think there are potentially important differences. I suspect humans tend to be willing to sacrifice or suffer much more for those they love than (almost?) all other animals. Grief also seems to affect humans more (longer, deeper), and it’s totally absent in many animals.
On the other hand, I guess some other animals will fight to the death to protect their offspring. And some die apparently grieving. This seems primarily emotionally driven, but I don’t think we should discount it for that fact. Emotions are one way of making evaluations, like other kinds of judgements of value.
EDIT: Another possibility is that other animals form such bonds and could even care deeply about them, but don’t find them “meaningful” or “fulfilling” at all or in a way as important as humans do. Maybe those require higher cognition, e.g. concepts of meaning and fulfillment. But it seems to me that the deep caring, in just emotional and motivational terms, should be enough?
I think that unless we can find a specific causal relationship implying that the capacity to form social bonds increases overall well-being capacity, we should assume that attaching special importance to this capacity is merely a product of human bias.
Humans typically assign an animal’s capacity for wellbeing and meaningful experience based on a perceived overlap, or shared experience. As though humans are this circle in a Ven diagram, and the extent to which our circle overlaps with an iguana’s circle is the extent to which that iguana has meaningful experience.
I think this is clearly fallacious. An iguana has their own circle, maybe the circle is smaller, but there’s a huge area of non-overlap that we can’t just entirely discount because we’re unable to relate to it. We can’t define meaningful experience by how closely it resembles human experience.
I would be surprised if iguanas find things meaningful that humans don’t find meaningful, but maybe they desire some things pretty alien to us. I’m also not sure they find anything meaningful at all, but that depends on how we define meaningfulness.
Still, I think focusing on meaningfulness is also too limited. Iguanas find things important to them, meaningful or not. Desires, motivation, pleasure and suffering all assign some kind of importance to things.
In my view, either
capacity for welfare is something we can measure and compare based on cognitive effects, like effects on attention, in which case it would be surprising if other verteberates, say, had tiny capacities for welfare relative to humans, or
interpersonal utility comparisons can’t be grounded, so there aren’t any grounds to say iguanas have lower (or higher) capacities for welfare than humans, assuming they have any at all.
What thought process do you think goes into your guess that very few non-human animals can leave a meaningful and fulfilling life? My guess is that many mammals and birds can live a meaningful and fulfilling life, though the phrase “meaningful and fulfilling” strikes me as hard to specify. I’m mostly thinking that having emotionally significant social bonds with other individuals is sufficient for a life to be meaningful and fulfilling, and that many mammals and birds can form emotionally significant social bonds.
And if emotionally significant social bonds don’t count, it seems like we could be throwing away what humans typically find most important in their lives.
Of course, I think there are potentially important differences. I suspect humans tend to be willing to sacrifice or suffer much more for those they love than (almost?) all other animals. Grief also seems to affect humans more (longer, deeper), and it’s totally absent in many animals.
On the other hand, I guess some other animals will fight to the death to protect their offspring. And some die apparently grieving. This seems primarily emotionally driven, but I don’t think we should discount it for that fact. Emotions are one way of making evaluations, like other kinds of judgements of value.
EDIT: Another possibility is that other animals form such bonds and could even care deeply about them, but don’t find them “meaningful” or “fulfilling” at all or in a way as important as humans do. Maybe those require higher cognition, e.g. concepts of meaning and fulfillment. But it seems to me that the deep caring, in just emotional and motivational terms, should be enough?
Interesting topic
I think that unless we can find a specific causal relationship implying that the capacity to form social bonds increases overall well-being capacity, we should assume that attaching special importance to this capacity is merely a product of human bias.
Humans typically assign an animal’s capacity for wellbeing and meaningful experience based on a perceived overlap, or shared experience. As though humans are this circle in a Ven diagram, and the extent to which our circle overlaps with an iguana’s circle is the extent to which that iguana has meaningful experience.
I think this is clearly fallacious. An iguana has their own circle, maybe the circle is smaller, but there’s a huge area of non-overlap that we can’t just entirely discount because we’re unable to relate to it. We can’t define meaningful experience by how closely it resembles human experience.
I would be surprised if iguanas find things meaningful that humans don’t find meaningful, but maybe they desire some things pretty alien to us. I’m also not sure they find anything meaningful at all, but that depends on how we define meaningfulness.
Still, I think focusing on meaningfulness is also too limited. Iguanas find things important to them, meaningful or not. Desires, motivation, pleasure and suffering all assign some kind of importance to things.
In my view, either
capacity for welfare is something we can measure and compare based on cognitive effects, like effects on attention, in which case it would be surprising if other verteberates, say, had tiny capacities for welfare relative to humans, or
interpersonal utility comparisons can’t be grounded, so there aren’t any grounds to say iguanas have lower (or higher) capacities for welfare than humans, assuming they have any at all.