You raised a good point. Yes, I guess I agree that when there is only a positive experience and no negative, the welfare is definitely positive, even if the positive experience is very small. But thinks get tricky when there are both positive and negative experiences, as is the case for almost all sentient beings, and probably also for nematodes if they are sentient. The more welfare is composed of positive and negative parts, the more difficult it becomes to compare it with a zero welfare level. Might have to do with information processing capacity. Adding up many positives and negatives is more difficult that considering a single positive or negative value. Evaluating mixed experiences (with both positive and negative parts) might require a more coarse-grained approach. The level of coarse-graining might relate to the neutral range: the more coarse-graining is used, the wider the neutral range. 

Ok, let me exaggerate a bit. Assume when state S=(X,Y,Z)=(87455.668741, -258.142567, -11024.441253), you are indifferent with nonexistence. Now consider state S'=(87455.668741, -258.142567, -11024.441153). You can confidently say that S' gives you a positive welfare? If yes: close your eyes and write down, for the given X and Y of state S, a value of Z that gives you a positive welfare lower than S'. I bet your brains are too small to do this exercise. Now consider a nematode with much smaller brains....

Perhaps we should run a survey, ask people if they have a neutral range. Can they give values of X, Y and Z such that if they would experience X, Y and Z units of some welfare determining components, they would be indifferent between that experience and non-existence, whereas if they had X+dX, Y and Z units, they would state a positive welfare and X-dX, Y and Z units would correspond with a negative welfare. I'm personally very skeptical that most people's neutral ranges are zero. You claim to have a zero neutral range? 

I guess you're suggesting that the neutral range is not well-defined? When experiences are composed of positive and negative parts without correct weighting, the neutral range could be larger than when experiences are more dominated by either positive or negative parts? I'm open to such a possibility. 

Well, I'll probably move to teaching at high school. It got me thinking...

I also feel the increased competition with AI. I underestimated how important it became to learn to use state of the art AI https://80000hours.org/2025/04/to-understand-ai-you-should-use-it-heres-how-to-get-started/

I implicitly assumed the welfare range includes zero. 

About the intransitivity argument: The comparison of the X seconds of breeze and the lecture is a coarse-grained comparison, i.e. in a coarse-grained frame. Also comparing X+1 seconds of breeze with the lecture is in a coarse-grained frame. But comparing X with X+1 seconds of breeze is fine-grained. So the comparisons assume different frames, as with reference frames in special relativity and welfare frames in utilitarian ethics. 

Thanks for the reference. I quickly read that paper, and at the very end the authors seem to defend what I interpret as an account of incommensurability (the part about context-sensitivity). Perhaps I misunderstand that paper, but anyway, I'm not yet convinced that incommensurability of welfare is impossible, in particular because of the analogy with special relativity, where time is really (mathematically) incommensurable: the notion of 'now' depends on the reference frame. 

I can relate to that. In the past 2 years, I applied for almost 50 positions at 30 EA-aligned organizations, with no success. (Yet, I have 3 PhD's, am president and co-founder of EA Belgium) Especially the remote jobs are extremely competitive.  

yes, this was a fruitful discussion; thanks! I summarized my arguments here: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/udcCBBwGnCneLRjkH/should-we-consider-the-welfare-of-small-soil-animals-on-the

Yes, I think newborns can compare their welfare with non-existence, to a small degree, but I'm uncertain about it. That is why I think it is so difficult to estimate whether my newborn sons have a positive or negative welfare. I tend to believe that my first son had a negative welfare the first few weeks and positive now, and my second son (who is a month old and lying next to me now) has an average positive welfare these days. But it could easily be indeterminate. For a nematode I'm much more confident that it is indeterminate. A question I would ask is: would the most empathic veterinarians prefer to euthanize a nematode, like they prefers to euthanize a dog when that dog has a negative welfare? I doubt it. Would the most empathic total utilitarians prefer to breed more nematodes, like they prefer the existence of more individuals with positive welfare? I doubt it. Would those people believe that a nematode happens to have exactly 0 welfare? I doubt it. So a nematode's welfare is not clearly negative, not clearly positive, and not clearly zero. Then what is it? It's incommensurable with 0.  

I wrote some ideas about that neutral range here:

https://stijnbruers.wordpress.com/2021/10/16/person-affecting-neutral-range-utilitarianism/

https://stijnbruers.wordpress.com/2020/08/26/relativistic-welfare-farm-animal-abolitionism-and-wild-animal-welfarism/

Yes, if a nematode's neutral range was smaller or zero, I would say that there is an objective fact of the matter whether the nematode has positive or negative welfare. just like when speed of light is infinite, there is an absolute reference frame, and every space-time event is either in the future, the present or the past of this space time-event I call "now!" That's Newtonian physics. 

Your case would be like assigning a probability of 0 to the possibility that the speed of light is finite. Note that the fact that welfare is continuous, is irrelevant: also time in special relativity is continuous.