I think that unless we can find a specific causal relationship implying that the capacity to form social bonds increases overall well-being capacity, we should assume that attaching special importance to this capacity is merely a product of human bias.
Humans typically assign an animal’s capacity for wellbeing and meaningful experience based on a perceived overlap, or shared experience. As though humans are this circle in a Ven diagram, and the extent to which our circle overlaps with an iguana’s circle is the extent to which that iguana has meaningful experience.
I think this is clearly fallacious. An iguana has their own circle, maybe the circle is smaller, but there’s a huge area of non-overlap that we can’t just entirely discount because we’re unable to relate to it. We can’t define meaningful experience by how closely it resembles human experience.
I would be surprised if iguanas find things meaningful that humans don’t find meaningful, but maybe they desire some things pretty alien to us. I’m also not sure they find anything meaningful at all, but that depends on how we define meaningfulness.
Still, I think focusing on meaningfulness is also too limited. Iguanas find things important to them, meaningful or not. Desires, motivation, pleasure and suffering all assign some kind of importance to things.
In my view, either
capacity for welfare is something we can measure and compare based on cognitive effects, like effects on attention, in which case it would be surprising if other verteberates, say, had tiny capacities for welfare relative to humans, or
interpersonal utility comparisons can’t be grounded, so there aren’t any grounds to say iguanas have lower (or higher) capacities for welfare than humans, assuming they have any at all.
Interesting topic
I think that unless we can find a specific causal relationship implying that the capacity to form social bonds increases overall well-being capacity, we should assume that attaching special importance to this capacity is merely a product of human bias.
Humans typically assign an animal’s capacity for wellbeing and meaningful experience based on a perceived overlap, or shared experience. As though humans are this circle in a Ven diagram, and the extent to which our circle overlaps with an iguana’s circle is the extent to which that iguana has meaningful experience.
I think this is clearly fallacious. An iguana has their own circle, maybe the circle is smaller, but there’s a huge area of non-overlap that we can’t just entirely discount because we’re unable to relate to it. We can’t define meaningful experience by how closely it resembles human experience.
I would be surprised if iguanas find things meaningful that humans don’t find meaningful, but maybe they desire some things pretty alien to us. I’m also not sure they find anything meaningful at all, but that depends on how we define meaningfulness.
Still, I think focusing on meaningfulness is also too limited. Iguanas find things important to them, meaningful or not. Desires, motivation, pleasure and suffering all assign some kind of importance to things.
In my view, either
capacity for welfare is something we can measure and compare based on cognitive effects, like effects on attention, in which case it would be surprising if other verteberates, say, had tiny capacities for welfare relative to humans, or
interpersonal utility comparisons can’t be grounded, so there aren’t any grounds to say iguanas have lower (or higher) capacities for welfare than humans, assuming they have any at all.