"No Welfare without Sentience"

Adrià Moret

When: Tuesday Feb. 3, at 11am in Houston/6pm in Barcelona 

Where: https://riceuniversity.zoom.us/j/93096236283?pwd=s6SO6NqrM5mnGpqjFtKNfTNoxaHGUg.1

Who: Adrià Moret

What: "No Welfare without Sentience"

Abstract. Can entities without sentience have welfare? Some philosophers argue they can, given that they may acquire objective goods and have desires. Against this view, I argue that all welfare goods and bads must be hedonically experienced. If states not pleasantly or unpleasantly experienced were beneficial and harmful, sufficient amounts could outweigh any set of hedonically experienced states. However, this yields unacceptable conclusions about what is prudentially best for us. I consider whether this can be avoided by positing limits on aggregation, and argue that this strategy requires costly ad hoc adjustments while producing its own counterintuitive results. We therefore have very strong reasons to think that sentience is required for welfare subjecthood and to accept phenomenological hedonism or some hybrid extra-experientialist version of it.