Complexity is a cop-out

I lean illusionist and preference welfarist. Should I be nice to my thermostat? It has a goal (temperature set point) and sends signals to try to achieve that goal. Is it morally wrong to leave my windows open in the winter, because it runs contrary to my thermostat’s preference?

Obviously, my thermostat is an incredibly simple system, much, much more simple than you and I, and its “preference” doesn’t have nearly the sophistication that our preferences do. In fact, it might be so simple that it doesn’t deserve the term “preference” at all.

I suspect functionalists—like me, in the past—stop right there, and think they have a satisfactory explanation for why they don’t need to worry about thermostat welfare: it’s not complex enough to be a moral patient.

This is a dangerous way to think. There are two reads of that sentence, the first probably true, the second completely unjustified:

1. De re: there exists some specific property or family of properties P which are necessary for moral patienthood. It is true that anything which has P is also complex. Therefore, if the thermostat is not complex, it cannot possess P, and therefore is not a moral patient.
2. De dicto: complexity itself is the ground of moral patienthood.

I would be surprised if anyone seriously believes #2. Is a Rube Goldberg machine more of a moral patient, just because it’s more complex? Why? What reason do would have to believe complexity in se is the thing in virtue of which our preferences acquire value? This would, at the very least, be a quite surprising view.

But then on the de re reading, it’s not the fact that the thermostat is simple which means it doesn’t get moral consideration. It’s the fact that it lacks some specific property or properties. Well, what are those properties, and what reason do we have to believe that those properties are the ones that matter?

We all know it’s not enough just to show that those properties and our paradigm cases of moral value are coextensive. Imagine Helmut grew up only around people with blue eyes. Upon meeting a brown-eyed person, Helmut doesn’t take their welfare seriously. Why? Well, every person he believes to be morally valuable has this blue-eyed property, and this new creature doesn’t! So Helmut doesn’t waste a moment on it; it’s not “blue-eyed” enough.

This is obviously terrible reasoning; Helmut hasn’t given any reason why the blue-eyed property grounds moral value. But I think “complexity” sounds fancy enough that there’s less of an instinctive suspicion of it. It sounds like something cool and quasi-mystical and very smart, so you can accidentally hang your hat on a non-explanation if you’re not careful.

Lest I be accused of strawmanning: I don’t believe any philosopher I’ve encountered actually holds this view, and it would be very uncharitable to read them that way. I am merely trying to stress the need to explain, in detail, why it would be that some naturalistic property is necessary for moral patienthood. Personally, I am worried that the most natural way to do this—introspective ostension—is incompatible with illusionism. But once I take that away, it’s really unclear to me why I ought to care about whether the thermostat has a survival instinct, or a language capacity, or an evolutionary history. Maybe I have a personal stance on these things, but do I have stance-independent reasons to care about survival instinct? That seems prima facie implausible to me.