Welfare and moral weights

EAs and EA organizations may be making important conceptual or methodological errors in prioritization between moral patients. I illustrate and address several:

1. Types of subjective welfare: I review types of subjective welfare, interpersonal comparisons with them and common grounds between them.
2. Solution to the two envelopes problem for moral weights: The welfare concepts we value directly are human-based, so we should normalize nonhuman welfare by human welfare. This would increase the priority for nonhumans.
3. Which animals realize which types of subjective welfare?: I argue that many nonhuman animals may have access to (simple versions of) types of subjective welfare people may expect to require language or higher self-awareness. This would support further prioritizing them.
4. Increasingly vague interpersonal welfare comparisons: I illustrate that interpersonal welfare comparisons can be vague, and more vague the more different two beings are.
5. Gradations of moral weight: I build a model for moral weight assignments given vagueness and gradations in capacities. I explore whether other moral patients could have greater moral weights than humans through (more sophisticated) capacities we don’t have.
6. Pleasure and suffering are not conceptual opposites: Suffering is probably (at least) unpleasantness + desire (motivational salience), not just unpleasantness. So suffering is not the opposite of pleasure.
7. Animals matter a lot on non-hedonic views