INTRODUCTION

In Utilitarian ethics, one important factor in making moral decisions is the relative moral weight of all moral patients affected by the decision. For instance, when EAs try to determine whether or not shrimp or bee welfare (or even that of chickens or hogs) is a cause worth putting money and effort into advancing, the importance of an individual bee or shrimp’s hedonic state (relative that of a human, or a fish, or a far-future mind affected by the long-term fate of civilization) is a crucial consideration. If shrimp suffer, say, 10% as much as humans would in analogous mental states, then shrimp welfare charities are likely the most effective animal welfare organizations to donate to (in terms of suffering averted per dollar) by orders of magnitude, but if the real ratio is closer to 10^-5 (like the ratio between shrimp and human brain neuron counts), then the cause seems much less important.

One property of a moral patient that many consider an important contributor to its moral worth is its size or complexity. As it happens, there are a number of different ways that moral worth could plausibly scale with a moral patient’s mental complexity, ranging from constant moral worth all the way up to exponential scaling laws. Furthermore, these are affected by one’s philosophy of consciousness and of qualia in perhaps unintuitive ways. I will break down some different plausible scaling laws and some beliefs about phenomenology that could lead to them one-by-one in the remainder of this essay.

ASSUMPTIONS AND DISCLAIMERS

In this post, I am assuming:

Physicalism
Computationalism
Hedonic Utilitarianism, and
That qualia exist and are the source of moral utility.

This blog post will likely be of little value to you if you think that these premises are incorrect, especially the second two, partially because I'm working from assumptions you think are wrong and partially because I frequently equivocate between things that are situationally equivalent under this worldview (e.g. components of a person’s mind and components of their brain or the computation it implements) for convenience.

I am not trying to argue that any of the scaling laws below are true per se, nor do I mean to suggest that any of the arguments below are bulletproof, or even all that strong (they support contradictory conclusions, after all). I aim instead to show that each of the sca...

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