Hi Bill. Thanks for engaging with our work. I agree with you that the project had lots of limitations. And as I’ve said many times, no one should put much stock in the specific estimates we offered. A few additional thoughts:
We don’t say that 14 bees = 1 human. We say that if the one and only thing you care about is the intensity of valenced experience (which is not the only thing that most people care about), then, probably, you should think of the value of a life year of bee suffering as being within an order of magnitude of the value of a life year of human suffering. Of course, there are lots of reasons why we might be wrong about that more modest claim. Still, just wanted to clarify.
Totally fair about there being a double-counting problem, which we discuss in section 3.1 here). It’s a tough problem to tackle given the functional approach we chose. It’s also one reason why, in the work I’m doing now on this topic, I’m interested in aggregating over very different kinds of estimation strategies rather than developing a functional approach in more detail. That being said, I do think it’s pretty interesting if it turns out that there’s a lot of clustering of intensity-relevant traits. That would be some evidence that welfare ranges don’t differ that much, at least in my view.
Fair point re: the impacts of your priors. Of course, it’s an open question whether you ought to have such a low prior in insect sentience. FWIW, I think 0.01% is probably overconfident, given how poorly we understand consciousness generally and sentience specifically. (For some additional thoughts on this, see the “Studying sentience” section of this article.) I’ll also mention that there’s a methodological disagreement here about how to approach this kind of problem. I say just a bit about it in this comment.
Third, I’ve realized that my gut endorses some vague argument like this: Insects just don’t matter. But if they were sentient, they would. So, they must not be sentient.
That, of course, is a bad line of reasoning. We don’t learn facts by consulting our ethical intuitions. And it’s helpful — for me, anyway — to call that out explicitly. When I detach the idea of insect sentience from its moral significance — that is, when I consider the possibility completely isolated from any level of concern for nonhuman pain — it seems much more plausible to me that insects can hurt. And if so, I shouldn’t shy away from that conclusion just because of its possible moral consequences.
I disagree with this, and strongly disagree with your claim that it is obvious.
You are assuming that sentience/ability to suffer is a factual question, when it’s actually a moral question and it’s perfectly fine to apply moral evidence to moral questions.
The exact argument depends on definition. If you define suffering as only applicable to moral patients, then the question if something is suffering requires a determination of whether it is a moral patient , which is there a moral question. If you define suffering more broadly, then whether it is bad depends on whether it’s happening to a moral patient, which again is a moral question.
Hi Bill. Thanks for engaging with our work. I agree with you that the project had lots of limitations. And as I’ve said many times, no one should put much stock in the specific estimates we offered. A few additional thoughts:
We don’t say that 14 bees = 1 human. We say that if the one and only thing you care about is the intensity of valenced experience (which is not the only thing that most people care about), then, probably, you should think of the value of a life year of bee suffering as being within an order of magnitude of the value of a life year of human suffering. Of course, there are lots of reasons why we might be wrong about that more modest claim. Still, just wanted to clarify.
Totally fair about there being a double-counting problem, which we discuss in section 3.1 here). It’s a tough problem to tackle given the functional approach we chose. It’s also one reason why, in the work I’m doing now on this topic, I’m interested in aggregating over very different kinds of estimation strategies rather than developing a functional approach in more detail. That being said, I do think it’s pretty interesting if it turns out that there’s a lot of clustering of intensity-relevant traits. That would be some evidence that welfare ranges don’t differ that much, at least in my view.
Fair point re: the impacts of your priors. Of course, it’s an open question whether you ought to have such a low prior in insect sentience. FWIW, I think 0.01% is probably overconfident, given how poorly we understand consciousness generally and sentience specifically. (For some additional thoughts on this, see the “Studying sentience” section of this article.) I’ll also mention that there’s a methodological disagreement here about how to approach this kind of problem. I say just a bit about it in this comment.
I disagree with this, and strongly disagree with your claim that it is obvious.
You are assuming that sentience/ability to suffer is a factual question, when it’s actually a moral question and it’s perfectly fine to apply moral evidence to moral questions.
The exact argument depends on definition. If you define suffering as only applicable to moral patients, then the question if something is suffering requires a determination of whether it is a moral patient , which is there a moral question. If you define suffering more broadly, then whether it is bad depends on whether it’s happening to a moral patient, which again is a moral question.