The Nonlinear Library EA - Types of subjective welfare by MichaelStJules
Feb 2, 2024
44:38
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Types of subjective welfare, published by MichaelStJules on February 2, 2024 on The Effective Altruism Forum.
Summary
I describe and review four broad potential types of subjective welfare: 1) hedonic states, i.e. pleasure and unpleasantness, 2) felt desires, both appetitive and aversive, 3) belief-like preferences, i.e. preferences as judgements or beliefs about value, and 4) choice-based preferences, i.e. what we choose or would choose. My key takeaways are the following:
Belief-like preferences and choice-based preferences seem unlikely to be generally comparable, and even comparisons between humans can be problematic (
more).
Hedonic states, felt desires and belief-like preferences all plausibly matter intrinsically, possibly together in a morally pluralistic theory, or unified as subjective appearances of value or even under belief-like preferences (
more).
Choice-based preferences seem not to matter much or at all intrinsically (
more).
The types of welfare are dissociable, so measuring one in terms of another is likely to misweigh it relative to more intuitive direct standards and risks discounting plausible moral patients altogether (
more).
There are multiple potentially important variations on the types of welfare (
more).
Acknowledgements
Thanks to Brian Tomasik, Derek Shiller and Bob Fischer for feedback. All errors are my own.
The four types
It appears to me that subjective welfare - welfare whose value depends only or primarily[1] on the perspectives or mental states of those who hold them - can be roughly categorized into one of the following four types based on how they are realized: hedonic states, felt desires, belief-like preferences and choice-based preferences.
To summarize, there's welfare as feelings (hedonic states and felt desires), welfare as beliefs about value (belief-like preferences) and welfare as choices (choice-based preferences). I will define, illustrate and elaborate on these types below.
For some discussion of my choices of terminology, see the following footnote.[2]
Hedonic states
Hedonic states: feeling good and feeling bad, or (conscious) pleasure and unpleasantness/unpleasure/displeasure,[3] or (conscious) positive and negative affect. Their causes can be physical, like sensory pleasures and physical pain, or psychological, like achievement, failure, loss, shame, humour and threats, to name a few.
It's unclear if interpersonal comparisons of hedonic state can be grounded in general, whether or not they can be between beings who realize them in sufficiently similar ways. In my view, the most promising approaches would be on the basis of the magnitudes of immediate and necessary cognitive or mental effects, causes or components of hedonic states. Other measures seem logically and intuitively dissociable (e.g. see
the section on dissociation below) or incompatible with functionalism at the right level of abstraction (e.g. against using the absolute number of active neurons, see
Mathers, 2022 and
Shriver, 2022).
Felt desires
Felt desires: desires we feel. They can be one of two types, either a) appetitive - or incentive and typically conducive to approach or consummatory behaviour and towards things - like in attraction, hunger and anger, or b) aversive - and typically conducive to avoidance and away from things - like in pain, fear, disgust and again anger (
Hayes et al., 2014,
Berridge, 2018, and on anger as aversive and appetitive,
Carver & Harmon-Jones, 2009,
Watson, 2009 and
Lee & Lang, 2009). However, the actual approach/consummatory or avoidance behaviour is not necessary to experience a felt desire, and we can overcome our felt desires or be constrained from satisfying them.
Potentially defining functions of felt desires could be their effects on attention and its control, as motivational salience, or incentive salience an...
Summary
I describe and review four broad potential types of subjective welfare: 1) hedonic states, i.e. pleasure and unpleasantness, 2) felt desires, both appetitive and aversive, 3) belief-like preferences, i.e. preferences as judgements or beliefs about value, and 4) choice-based preferences, i.e. what we choose or would choose. My key takeaways are the following:
Belief-like preferences and choice-based preferences seem unlikely to be generally comparable, and even comparisons between humans can be problematic (
more).
Hedonic states, felt desires and belief-like preferences all plausibly matter intrinsically, possibly together in a morally pluralistic theory, or unified as subjective appearances of value or even under belief-like preferences (
more).
Choice-based preferences seem not to matter much or at all intrinsically (
more).
The types of welfare are dissociable, so measuring one in terms of another is likely to misweigh it relative to more intuitive direct standards and risks discounting plausible moral patients altogether (
more).
There are multiple potentially important variations on the types of welfare (
more).
Acknowledgements
Thanks to Brian Tomasik, Derek Shiller and Bob Fischer for feedback. All errors are my own.
The four types
It appears to me that subjective welfare - welfare whose value depends only or primarily[1] on the perspectives or mental states of those who hold them - can be roughly categorized into one of the following four types based on how they are realized: hedonic states, felt desires, belief-like preferences and choice-based preferences.
To summarize, there's welfare as feelings (hedonic states and felt desires), welfare as beliefs about value (belief-like preferences) and welfare as choices (choice-based preferences). I will define, illustrate and elaborate on these types below.
For some discussion of my choices of terminology, see the following footnote.[2]
Hedonic states
Hedonic states: feeling good and feeling bad, or (conscious) pleasure and unpleasantness/unpleasure/displeasure,[3] or (conscious) positive and negative affect. Their causes can be physical, like sensory pleasures and physical pain, or psychological, like achievement, failure, loss, shame, humour and threats, to name a few.
It's unclear if interpersonal comparisons of hedonic state can be grounded in general, whether or not they can be between beings who realize them in sufficiently similar ways. In my view, the most promising approaches would be on the basis of the magnitudes of immediate and necessary cognitive or mental effects, causes or components of hedonic states. Other measures seem logically and intuitively dissociable (e.g. see
the section on dissociation below) or incompatible with functionalism at the right level of abstraction (e.g. against using the absolute number of active neurons, see
Mathers, 2022 and
Shriver, 2022).
Felt desires
Felt desires: desires we feel. They can be one of two types, either a) appetitive - or incentive and typically conducive to approach or consummatory behaviour and towards things - like in attraction, hunger and anger, or b) aversive - and typically conducive to avoidance and away from things - like in pain, fear, disgust and again anger (
Hayes et al., 2014,
Berridge, 2018, and on anger as aversive and appetitive,
Carver & Harmon-Jones, 2009,
Watson, 2009 and
Lee & Lang, 2009). However, the actual approach/consummatory or avoidance behaviour is not necessary to experience a felt desire, and we can overcome our felt desires or be constrained from satisfying them.
Potentially defining functions of felt desires could be their effects on attention and its control, as motivational salience, or incentive salience an...