Reading the comments here, there seem to be two issues entangled. One is which organisms are capable of suffering (which is probably roughly the same set that is capable of experiencing qualia; we might call this the set of sentient beings). The other is which entities we would care about and perhaps try to help.

I don't think the second question is really relevant here. It is not the issue Tiiba is trying to raise. If you're a selfish bastard, or a saintly altruist, fine. That doesn't matter. What matters is what constitutes a sentient being which can expe... (read more)

For me, a morally significant agent is one that has positive and negative qualia. Since I can't tell this by looking at an agent, I guess. I'm pretty sure that my brother does, and I'm pretty sure that a rock doesn't.

Cyan mentioned pain asymbolia on the last thread: the ability to feel pain, but not really find anything painful or problematic about it. If someone had asymbolia generalized across all mental functions, I would stop counting that person as a moral agent.

If a "morally significant agent" is one whose goals I would want to further, then I am the only inherently morally significant agent. The moral significance of other agents shifts with my mood.

serasvictoriawouldyoumarryme?

The capacity to abide by morality carves out the right cluster in thingspace for me, though I'd hesitate to call it the determining factor. If a thing has this capacity, we care about its preferences proportionately.

People, save probably infants, are fully capable, in theory, of understanding and abiding by morality. Most animals are not. Those more capable of doing so, domestic pets, beasts of burden for example, receive some protection. Those who do not have this capacity are generally less protected and that which is done to them less morally relevant.

I don't fully endorse this view, but it feels like it explians a lot.

The following was originally going to be a top-level post, but I never posted it because I couldn't complete the proof of my assertion.

In his recent book I Am a Strange Loop, Douglas Hofstadter writes:

A spectacular evolutionary gulf opened up at some point as human beings were gradually separating from other primates: their category systems became arbitrarily extensible. Into our mental lives there entered a dramatic quality of open-endedness, an essentially unlimited extensibility, as compared with a very palpable limitedness in other species. Concept

I will help a suffering thing if it benefits me to help it, or if the social contract requires me to. Otherwise I will walk away.

I adopted this cruel position after going through one long relationship where I constantly demanded emotional "help" from the girl, then another relationship soon afterwards where the girl constantly demanded similar "help" from me. Both those situations felt so sick that I finally understood: participating in any guilt-trip scenario makes you a worse person, no matter whether you're tripping or being tripped.... (read more)

Interesting question....

Could there be suffering in anything not considered an MSA? While I can imagine a hypothetical MSA that could not suffer, it's hard to think of a being that suffers yet could not be considered an MSA.

But do we have a good operational definition of 'suffering'? The study with the fish is a start, but is planning really a good criterion?

The discussion reminds of that story On being a bat (iirc) in Hofstadter/Dennets highly recommended The Mind's I, on the impossibility of understanding at all what it is like to be something so different from us.

Most people do this intuitionally, and most people keep to make rationalisations of their intuitive judgements or construct neat logical moral theories in order to support them (and these theories usually fail to describe what they are intended to describe, because of their simplicity relative to the complexity of an average man's value system).

That said, for me an agent is the more morally significant the more is it similar to human, and I determine suffering by comparison with my own experiences and some necessary extrapolation. Not much useful answer perhaps, but I don't know of any better.

BTW, I think the most important defining feature of an MSA is ability to kick people's asses. Very humanizing.

I don't know if you meant that as a joke, but that's pretty much my take from a contractarian perspective (though I wouldn't use the phrase "morally significant agent"). Fish can't do much about us cooking and eating them, so they are not a party to any social contract. That's also the logic behind my tolerance of infanticide.

The potential to enhance the information complexity of another agent. Where the degree of this potential and the degree of the complexity provided indicates the degree of moral significance.

Which reduces the problem to the somewhat less difficult one of estimating complexity and so estimating potential complexity influences among agents. By this, I means something more nuanced than algorithmic or Kolmogorov complexity. We need something that takes into account fun theory and how both simple systems and random noise are innately less complex than systems w... (read more)