On the practical side, figuring out the -u0 penalty for non-humans is extremely important for those adopting this sort of ethical system. Animals that produce lots of offspring that rarely survive to adulthood would rack up -u0 penalties extremely quickly while barely living long enough to offset those penalties with hedonic utility. This happens at a large enough of scale that, if -u0 is non-negligible, wild animal reproduction might be the most dominant source of disutility by many orders of magnitude.
When I try to think about how to define -u0 for non-humans, I get really confused—more-so than I do when I reason about how animals suffer. The panpsychist approach would probably be something like “define death/life or non-existence/existence as a spectrum and make species-specific u0s proportional to where species fall on that spectrum.” Metrics of sapience/self-awareness/cognition/other-things-in-that-cluster might be serviceable for this though.
I basically take a similar approach to you. I give animals a smaller -u0 penalty if they are less self-aware and less capable of forming the sort of complex eudaimonic preferences that human beings can. I also treat complex eudaimonic preferences as generating greater moral value when satisfied in order to avoid incentivizing creating animals over creating humans.
On the practical side, figuring out the -u0 penalty for non-humans is extremely important for those adopting this sort of ethical system. Animals that produce lots of offspring that rarely survive to adulthood would rack up -u0 penalties extremely quickly while barely living long enough to offset those penalties with hedonic utility. This happens at a large enough of scale that, if -u0 is non-negligible, wild animal reproduction might be the most dominant source of disutility by many orders of magnitude.
When I try to think about how to define -u0 for non-humans, I get really confused—more-so than I do when I reason about how animals suffer. The panpsychist approach would probably be something like “define death/life or non-existence/existence as a spectrum and make species-specific u0s proportional to where species fall on that spectrum.” Metrics of sapience/self-awareness/cognition/other-things-in-that-cluster might be serviceable for this though.
I took a crack at figuring it out here.
I basically take a similar approach to you. I give animals a smaller -u0 penalty if they are less self-aware and less capable of forming the sort of complex eudaimonic preferences that human beings can. I also treat complex eudaimonic preferences as generating greater moral value when satisfied in order to avoid incentivizing creating animals over creating humans.