I would be interested in an explanation of how the quote captures why you don’t like suffering focused ethics.
My (possibly nieve) perspective is that people who downplay the relative moral significance of suffering just have a lack of relevant experience when it comes to qualia states.
If someone hasn’t experienced certain levels of suffering over certain durations, how can they reasonably judge that hundreds of billions of years worth of those experiences are relatively insignificant?
If you primarily care about suffering, then animal welfare is a huge priority, but if you instead care about meaning, fulfillment, love, etc., then it’s much less clearly important.
It’s hard for me not to interpret the word ‘care’ here as relating to attention, rather than intrinsic values. To me it seems like if someones attention were calibrated such that they had a deep understanding of the implication of billions of animals having surgery done on them without anesthesia, while also understanding the implications of people potentially having marginally more meaningful lives, they would generally consider the animal issue to be more pressing.
I’m quite interested in what you might think I’m missing. I often find myself very confused about people’s perspectives here.
I would be interested in an explanation of how the quote captures why you don’t like suffering focused ethics.
My (possibly nieve) perspective is that people who downplay the relative moral significance of suffering just have a lack of relevant experience when it comes to qualia states.
If someone hasn’t experienced certain levels of suffering over certain durations, how can they reasonably judge that hundreds of billions of years worth of those experiences are relatively insignificant?
It’s hard for me not to interpret the word ‘care’ here as relating to attention, rather than intrinsic values. To me it seems like if someones attention were calibrated such that they had a deep understanding of the implication of billions of animals having surgery done on them without anesthesia, while also understanding the implications of people potentially having marginally more meaningful lives, they would generally consider the animal issue to be more pressing.
I’m quite interested in what you might think I’m missing. I often find myself very confused about people’s perspectives here.