I like the principle of indifference. However, I think infinities are unfalsifiable in principle. In this case, does it make sense for me to attribute probabilities to them? If I did, they would be just metaphysical priors that can never be updated by any evidence.

I also believe 2 actions can have infinite expected cost-effectiveness considering all future effects, and still be comparable. Imagine actions A and B have expected cost-effectiveness of CE_A(t) and CE_B(t) considering effects in the next t years (after a given date), and that CE_A and CE_B tend to positive infinity as t tends to infinity. If the ratio R(t) = CE_A(t)/CE_B(t) tends to:

• 0, B is infinitely more cost-effective than A.
• N, A is N times as cost-effective as B.
• Positive infinity, A is infinitely more cost-effective than B.

I am sceptical of the 1st and last cases in practice. However, in any of the above cases, there would be a clear answer about which action has the highest expected cost-effectiveness considering all future effects.

There would be a dilemma if the expected cost-effectiveness growing faster kept oscillating forever between positive and negative forever. For example, if CE_A(t) = t, and CE_B(t) = t^2*sin(t), R(t) = 1/(t*sin(t)), which tends to 0 as t goes to infinity, but keeps oscillating between an infinitesimally positive and negative value. However, in the real world, one could reasonably assume actions grow similarly fast sufficiently far into the future when there would be exactly the same evidence about the effects of A and B? In this case, R always tends to a finite single number as t goes to infinity.

Thanks for the clarifications.

An analogy would be an exoplanet candidate. Astronomers may have evidence of varying strength that a planet exists around a distant star. Their confidence may be 20%, 70% or 99%, but the planet itself either exists or does not. Graded evidence does not require the underlying fact to be graded.

Looking into this example is helpful to explain my point. Humans have to come up with a defition for what is a planet, and then test whether a given celestial body satisfies it. Margot (2015) illustrates this. I present below their Figure 1 whose lines represents 3 potential definitons. They are analogous to the sharp evidential surface I mentioned in my last comment. Increasing the mass of a celestial body which is slightly too light to be a planet (just below the definitional line) by just 1 kg without practically changing its semi-major axis could make it a planet (cross the definitional line). I think this is fine. At the same time, I would not see any deep difference between 2 celestial bodies which are practically the same except one is 1 kg heavier, and therefore is a planet unlike the other.

My own personal view is that the biological capacities associated with sentience can vary continuously, while the minimal presence of affective experience [sentience] is categorical.

If sentience was categorical, there could in principle be 2 organisms which only differed infinitesimally in biological capacities, but one was sentient, and the other was not. This would be fine if sentience was similar to being a planet. However, sentience is often assumed to be necessary for moral consideration. In this case, one organism would get some moral value, and the other would get exactly 0 moral value. I would find this problematic if the organisms only differed infinitesimally.

This is also why the tool uses a sentience-plausibility gate followed by a separate affective-capacity analysis. The first asks whether there is sufficient reason to infer that anything can feel good or bad for the organism. The second asks, conditional on that, how differentiated and intense those states could be. The first is treated categorically in the underlying hypothesis but uncertain in our knowledge; the second is explicitly graded.

My take is that it would be better to have everything graded, and assume all organisms have more than exactly 0 moral value.

Hi Saulius. I think this is such a great post. I just reread it because it was shared in the last EA Forum newsletter.

I object to relying on infinities (not arbitrarily large finities) to guide decisions because they do not explain more empirical evidence than arbitrarily large finities.

I do not have an upper bound for counterfactual impact, but this does not mean it can be infinite. A normal distribution does not have a maximum value. It can take an arbitrarily large value. However, it cannot take an infinite value. Its range is the set of real numbers.

Thanks, Wladimir.

Here is a thought experiment that may be helpful. Imagine you had all the empirical/physical evidence about an animal, including all the "behavioural, physiological, neural, pharmacological, cognitive, evolutionary, and ecological evidence". There may be practical limits to how much one could know, but I am imagining a scenario where empirical/physical uncertainty was fully eliminated. Would you be able to say whether the animal is sentient or not under the Welfare Footprint Framework (WFF)? If the probability of sentience is just supposed to capture empirical uncertainty under WFF, it would be either 0 or 1? For it to be higher than 0, and below 1, I think it would have to capture metaphysical or definitional uncertainty. If so, would it be better for WFF to cover just empirical uncertainty?

Under WFF, affective welfare either exists or does not exist at all. However, how can one justify such a binary distinction? Each type of empirical evidence, including "behavioural, physiological, neural, pharmacological, cognitive, evolutionary, and ecological evidence", exists on a spectrum. So I find it very counterintuitive that we could map empirical evidence to affective welfare either existing (sentience) or not existing at all (lack of sentience). I believe this would require assuming the existence of a sharp surface in the evidential space separating affective welfare existing from it not existing at all (even if there is uncertainty about the surface location), which is what feels arbitrary to me.

I would like to have the option of sorting the posts of a given user. As of now, I can only sort posts with a given tag.

Thanks. It is fixed.

I would prefer draft comments I deleted not to show up in my private homepage.

Hi Cynthia and Wladimir. Nice post.

The user inputs a target taxon. The tool then determines, where necessary, two related but distinct scopes: one for the sentience gate and one for the affective-capacity analysis.

You may be interested in the article "Ethics Without Sentience: Facing Up to the Probable Insignificance of Phenomenal Consciousness" by François Kammerer. Here is a summary. Relatedly, you may like this and this very short posts by Keith Frankish. I agree with Keith that phenomenal consciousness does not exist. In any case, even if it exists, I agree with François it is not significant. Phenomenal consciousness as traditionally defined is not falsifiable (or, to be precise, it is traditionally defined such that one can only know about their own consciousness at the moment). In practice, one always has to come up with empirical proxies for it, but I feel these are largely arbitrary if it is not falsifiable. So I believe it would be better to focus just on what animals can do (as in your affective-capacity analysis), and not on assessing phenomenal sentience.

When I click on a given section of a post on the left pane, the URL shown at the top is still that of the post. It used to be the URL of the section. However, I can still link to a section by opening it in a new tab.