Experience size

Abstract

This article proposes that hedonic theories of welfare should account for the size of an experience in addition to its hedonic intensity. The author argues that even if two experiences consist of equally intense pleasure or pain, one can be bigger than the other, in which case the welfare of the bigger one is more positive or more negative. This is analogous to the sense in which, if welfare is aggregable at all, one population can have more welfare than another due to its size, even if the two consist of people all of whom are feeling the same thing. The author illustrates the idea of experience size through a number of analogies, including visual fields, bodily sensations, and split-brain cases. He then argues that the tendency to neglect size and think of an experience’s welfare as proportional only to its hedonic intensity is a common tendency in both EA and academic philosophy circles, and has probably led a lot of people astray on the question of interspecies welfare comparisons, as well as some other less significant questions. The author then examines some of the ethical and epistemic implications of the idea of experience size, arguing that it could have important implications for our understanding of the moral status of different species, as well as for our understanding of the distribution of consciousness in the universe. – AI-generated abstract.