Bees, Humans, and Utility Monsters: Partial Aggregation in Inter-Species Comparisons

Jakob Lohmar (University of Oxford)

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Bees, Humans, and Utility Monsters: Partial Aggregation in Inter-Species Comparisons

Abstract: The welfare ranges of many species – such as of bees, salmon, and mice – seem to be much smaller than the human welfare range: due to their physical and psychological constitution, individuals of these low welfare species cannot be nearly as well or badly off as we can be. Which moral importance should we assign to benefitting them? A straight-forward application of partially aggregative views suggests that benefits for members of low welfare species are morally irrelevant whenever significant human goods are at stake: just as small human benefits, such as the alleviation of mild headaches, are irrelevant to significant human benefits, benefits for low welfare species, which are necessarily small, should be considered irrelevant to significant human benefits as well. One problem with this reasoning is that, analogously, any human benefits would be irrelevant to significant benefits for members of a hypothetical high welfare species whose welfare range is much larger than the human welfare range. This would result in an exacerbated version of Nozick’s Utility Monster problem. After arguing that we have good reasons to consider some benefits for low welfare species to be relevant even when significant human goods are at stake, I propose an alternative partially aggregative principle on which for each individual, whatever its welfare range, there are some benefits that are never irrelevant.