I’m parsing this as follows: I don’t have a good intuition on whose suffering matters, and unbounded utilitarianism is vulnerable to the Repugnant Conclusion, so I will pick an obvious threshold: humans and decide to not care about other animals until and unless the reason to care arises.
EDIT: the Schelling point for the caring threshold seems to be shifting toward progressively less intelligent (but still cute and harmless) species as time passes
EDIT: the Schelling point for the caring threshold seems to be shifting toward progressively less intelligent (but still cute and harmless) species as time passes
I tried. But it’s written in extreme Gwernian: well researched, but long, rambling and without a decent summary upfront. I skipped to the (also poorly written) conclusion, missing most of the arguments, and decided that it’s not worth my time. The essay would be right at home as a chapter in some dissertation, though.
Leaving aside the dynamics of the Schelling point, did the rest of my reply miss the mark?
What I mostly got out of it is that there are two big ways in which the circle of things with moral worth has shrunk rather than grown throughout history: it shrunk to exclude gods, and it shrunk to exclude dead people.
Leaving aside the dynamics of the Schelling point, did the rest of my reply miss the mark?
I’m not sure what your comment was intended to be, but if it was intended to be a summary of the point I was implicitly trying to make, then it’s close enough.
the Schelling point for the caring threshold seems to be shifting toward progressively less intelligent (but still cute and harmless) species as time passes
“Cute” I’ll give you. ”Harmless” I’m not sure about.
That is, it’s not in the least bit clear to me that I can reliably predict, from species S being harmful and cute, that the Schelling point you describe won’t/hasn’t shifted so as to include S on the cared-about side.
For clarity: I make no moral claims here about any of this, and am uninterested in the associated moral claims, I’m just disagreeing with the bare empirical claim.
I’m parsing this as follows: I don’t have a good intuition on whose suffering matters, and unbounded utilitarianism is vulnerable to the Repugnant Conclusion, so I will pick an obvious threshold: humans and decide to not care about other animals until and unless the reason to care arises.
EDIT: the Schelling point for the caring threshold seems to be shifting toward progressively less intelligent (but still cute and harmless) species as time passes
Have you read The Narrowing Circle?
I tried. But it’s written in extreme Gwernian: well researched, but long, rambling and without a decent summary upfront. I skipped to the (also poorly written) conclusion, missing most of the arguments, and decided that it’s not worth my time. The essay would be right at home as a chapter in some dissertation, though.
Leaving aside the dynamics of the Schelling point, did the rest of my reply miss the mark?
What I mostly got out of it is that there are two big ways in which the circle of things with moral worth has shrunk rather than grown throughout history: it shrunk to exclude gods, and it shrunk to exclude dead people.
I’m not sure what your comment was intended to be, but if it was intended to be a summary of the point I was implicitly trying to make, then it’s close enough.
… are you including chimpanzees there, by any chance?
“Cute” I’ll give you.
”Harmless” I’m not sure about.
That is, it’s not in the least bit clear to me that I can reliably predict, from species S being harmful and cute, that the Schelling point you describe won’t/hasn’t shifted so as to include S on the cared-about side.
For clarity: I make no moral claims here about any of this, and am uninterested in the associated moral claims, I’m just disagreeing with the bare empirical claim.
I think it’s simply a case of more animals moving into the harmless category as our technology improves.