Summary

Vagueness and gradations complicate the assignment of moral weights to potential moral patients and their interests.

I motivate and outline a general model of moral weights across possible moral patients to account for vagueness and gradations about what it means — the defining standards — to be a moral patient or realize a given kind of welfare on the given standard, like realizing certain functions, say self-awareness, to specific degrees of sophistication with a given precise method for calculating welfare (more).
I refine the model assuming maximizing expected choiceworthiness with intertheoretic comparisons of value and illustrate how subjective and poorly constrained expected moral weights can be on this model (more).
I both argue for and against the possibility that there are morally important standards humans don’t meet, and neither possibility seems extremely unlikely (more).

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Brian Tomasik and Bob Fischer for feedback. All errors are my own.

Gradations of consciousness

The Windows Task Manager may be a model of a computer’s own “attention”, and so an attention schema, and so be conscious to some degree, meeting a requirement of Attention Schema Theory (Tomasik, 2014-2017),^[1] but you need to squint, and it seems at best only sort of true. Nonhuman animals fall somewhere between the Windows Task Manager and humans, having far more sophisticated versions of the capacities of Windows Task Manager and entire capacities it lacks entirely, but still, for most species, apparently lacking higher-order thoughts and self-narratives, which are typical of humans. We may also have different standards for what counts as a belief for the purpose of belief-like preferences or assign some special significance to the individual deciding how they judge their own life for global preferences (Plant, 2020).

There may be more than two degrees to which it can be the case that an animal or other system is conscious, has a (certain type of) welfare, or is otherwise a moral patient at all. There are multiple potentially defining features or functions — like higher-order thoughts, self-awareness of various kinds,^[2] top-down attention control, beliefs, or effects on any of these — that may be independently present or absent or themselves realized to more than two degrees of sophistication or in different nu...

Interpersonal comparisons of wellbeing

Further reading

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