Thanks for this great post! Really appreciate your thinking about this important question. 

Here's one question that I'm turning over. On the face of it, you might think of the pain categories as being assessed behaviorally and relative to an individual’s capacity for welfare. So, disabling pain would be whatever pain "takes priority over most bids for behavioral execution and prevents all forms of enjoyment or positive welfare.” But then, disabling pain wouldn't be a single pain level across species, which some might be able to feel and others not. It would be a capacity-for-welfare-neutral behavioral characterization of an internal state. 

However, your post seems not to endorse this view. Instead, it seems to imply that the pain categories are indexed to humans, without any assumption that all animals can experience the same thing.

I don't necessarily have an objection to the indexed-to-humans view. However, it does seem to undermine the idea that we can look at behavior to assess the presence of a particular pain level unless we have independent reasons to think that the relevant animal is capable of that pain level. Am I understanding that correctly?

Thanks a bunch!

That’s correct. 

Correct and important. Thanks for sharing. 

No deadline yet. The cutoff will be determined by when the caterers need the final headcount. I would expect that to be a week or two prior to the event.

We discuss this in the book here. The summary:

...we’ll have to settle for some rough, intuitive sense of the space of possibilities relative to which we’re evaluating welfare ranges. We might think of them as the “realistic biological possibilities,” or something to that effect, which seems like the set of possibilities to which general physiological, cognitive, and behavioral traits might be relevant (as, again, we’ll discuss Chapters 5–7). Very roughly, these possibilities are the ones that we take to be realistic ways things could turn out for an individual based on our best biological theories and our understanding of their biological characteristics.

Of course, even if we have a tolerably good understanding of the “realistic biological possibilities,” it remains the case that a “tolerably good understanding” leaves plenty of room for disagreement about specific cases, including many that may be practically relevant. So, we aren’t going to get the fine-grained, context-sensitive picture we might have wanted—or, at least, not without further discussion about how to extend the framework that we’re developing. However, whatever the limits of this approach, it does reasonably well overall. It does a better job of limiting our attention to relevant possibilities (in one sense of “relevant”) than we’d get by considering the logical, metaphysical, or physical possibilities. Insofar as we can secure welfare-relevant biological knowledge, it does reasonably well on the epistemic criterion, and while more coarse-grained than we might like, it may still prove useful in many practical contexts. After all, the goal here is to improve interspecies welfare comparisons relative to armchair speculation. If that method is bad enough, then the bar for claiming improvement is low.

Thanks for engaging with my work, Adam!

Thanks for asking! I don't believe that OUP offers it in those formats, though I would imagine it wouldn't be hard to convert what they've made available. If you end up doing that, please let me know! Would be happy to circulate it.

Thanks for the productive exchange!

Fair, but there are degrees here, right? Some hypotheses are fairly tightly tied to empirical evidence while others involve many more speculative premises.

But as I said, totally makes sense to want an all-in estimate. I've been thinking about how to do that and hope to have something concrete to say eventually.

The thought is that we think of the Conscious Subsystems hypothesis as a bit like panpsychism: not something you can rule out, but a sufficiently speculative thesis that we aren't interested in including it, as we don't think anyone really believes it for empirical reasons. Insofar as they assign some credence to it, it's probably for philosophical reasons.

Anyway, totally understand wanting every hypothesis over which you're uncertain to be reflected in your welfare range estimates. That's a good project, but it wasn't ours. But fwiw, it's really unclear what that's going to imply in this particular case, as it's so hard to pin down which Conscious Subsystems hypothesis you have in mind and the credences you should assign to all the variants.