Hey Ben â your understanding is correct. Option 2 is meant to allow for the possibility that the inference from P1-P3 to Conclusion, as stated in my summary post, is logically invalid. (Of course I think thatâs unlikely, but philosophy can be subtle.) Does that clear things up?
Would you say bracketing isnât fully impartial? It doesnât seem less impartial than Scanlonâs Greater Burden Principle (or Tom Reganâs harm principle), which roughly says to choose between two actions, you should prioritize the individual(s) with the strongest claim or who has the most to lose counterfactually between options (not necessarily the worst off, to contrast with Rawlsâ Difference Principle/âmaximin/âleximin).
I guess methods of bracketing where admissible bracketings must group certain individuals, e.g. spatiotemporally or by causal paths affecting them, are more partial. But if you go with the unconstrained version, it seems basically impartial?
It is sensitive to differences between worlds beyond the number of individuals at each welfare level, because it has to identify each individual across worlds to take individual differences.
Hmm yeah maybe I shouldnât have fully endorsed Benâs summary. I think many forms of bracketing are impartial in the sense that they donât arbitrarily favor some moral patients over others. But the forms of bracketing Iâm aware of are either (1) not âimpartialâ in the sense that some moral patients/âconsequences are bracketed out for not very well-motivated reasons, or (2) not action-guiding.
That latter definition of impartial might be confusing though, so in general Iâd just list my specific dissatisfactions with different forms of bracketing, âimpartialityâ aside.
(1) not âimpartialâ in the sense that some moral patients/âconsequences are bracketed out for not very well-motivated reasons, or (2) not action-guiding.
If you think itâs fair to map the âsameâ moral patient across worlds to themselves, assuming at least some transworld identity, then Iâd guess we could work out counterpart relations extending transworld identity to cover contingent moral patient, maybe along the lines of Thomas, 2019, pp.30-31 where, roughly, we map each contingent moral patient under one choice to the statistical average of the contingent moral patients â across all of spacetime and the whole multiverse if weâre in one â under the other choice.[1]
At first pass, if weâre clueless about the total welfare effects for any action or comparing any two actions, Iâd guess weâd be clueless about each contingent moral patient, and, at least on bottom-up bracketing, just bracket them out and ignore them. This would mean the theory acts like the strict person-affecting view, where only currently existing (or at least ânecessaryâ) moral patients count, and we ignore (at least) the rest. That might sound bad, but we ignore them because weâre consistently clueless about whether their counterparts are better or worse off in expectation, which seems like a good principled reason to do that.
This could be practically action-guiding. Youâd probably focus on near-term human welfare, because currently existing non-human animals that you could âaffectâ cost-effectively donât typically live long enough for your actions today to help them, and youâre clueless about the welfare of the counterparts of the future/âcontingent animals you could âaffectâ cost-effectively.
But maybe speculative scenarios, including how TAI might play out, also make you clueless about how to benefit currently existing humans if, before bracketing, youâre aggregating and taking expectations over their entire futures or their current preferences pointing at things at least a few years away, and canât bracket out the speculative scenarios. I imagine you could get around this by using transworld identity at each point of time[2] and do bracketing before aggregating over their futures, so you can bracket out the periods of time youâre clueless about.
Thanks! âDonât arbitrarily favor some moral patients over othersâ was the most intuitive definition of âimpartialâ in my mind, so I was confused about how it was being used here.
Hey Ben â your understanding is correct. Option 2 is meant to allow for the possibility that the inference from P1-P3 to Conclusion, as stated in my summary post, is logically invalid. (Of course I think thatâs unlikely, but philosophy can be subtle.) Does that clear things up?
Would you say bracketing isnât fully impartial? It doesnât seem less impartial than Scanlonâs Greater Burden Principle (or Tom Reganâs harm principle), which roughly says to choose between two actions, you should prioritize the individual(s) with the strongest claim or who has the most to lose counterfactually between options (not necessarily the worst off, to contrast with Rawlsâ Difference Principle/âmaximin/âleximin).
I guess methods of bracketing where admissible bracketings must group certain individuals, e.g. spatiotemporally or by causal paths affecting them, are more partial. But if you go with the unconstrained version, it seems basically impartial?
It is sensitive to differences between worlds beyond the number of individuals at each welfare level, because it has to identify each individual across worlds to take individual differences.
Hmm yeah maybe I shouldnât have fully endorsed Benâs summary. I think many forms of bracketing are impartial in the sense that they donât arbitrarily favor some moral patients over others. But the forms of bracketing Iâm aware of are either (1) not âimpartialâ in the sense that some moral patients/âconsequences are bracketed out for not very well-motivated reasons, or (2) not action-guiding.
That latter definition of impartial might be confusing though, so in general Iâd just list my specific dissatisfactions with different forms of bracketing, âimpartialityâ aside.
If you think itâs fair to map the âsameâ moral patient across worlds to themselves, assuming at least some transworld identity, then Iâd guess we could work out counterpart relations extending transworld identity to cover contingent moral patient, maybe along the lines of Thomas, 2019, pp.30-31 where, roughly, we map each contingent moral patient under one choice to the statistical average of the contingent moral patients â across all of spacetime and the whole multiverse if weâre in one â under the other choice.[1]
At first pass, if weâre clueless about the total welfare effects for any action or comparing any two actions, Iâd guess weâd be clueless about each contingent moral patient, and, at least on bottom-up bracketing, just bracket them out and ignore them. This would mean the theory acts like the strict person-affecting view, where only currently existing (or at least ânecessaryâ) moral patients count, and we ignore (at least) the rest. That might sound bad, but we ignore them because weâre consistently clueless about whether their counterparts are better or worse off in expectation, which seems like a good principled reason to do that.
This could be practically action-guiding. Youâd probably focus on near-term human welfare, because currently existing non-human animals that you could âaffectâ cost-effectively donât typically live long enough for your actions today to help them, and youâre clueless about the welfare of the counterparts of the future/âcontingent animals you could âaffectâ cost-effectively.
But maybe speculative scenarios, including how TAI might play out, also make you clueless about how to benefit currently existing humans if, before bracketing, youâre aggregating and taking expectations over their entire futures or their current preferences pointing at things at least a few years away, and canât bracket out the speculative scenarios. I imagine you could get around this by using transworld identity at each point of time[2] and do bracketing before aggregating over their futures, so you can bracket out the periods of time youâre clueless about.
Maybe with some extra accounting for the number of moral patients to do. And this could get trickier with infinities.
Could need to account for relativity theory in some way.
Thanks! âDonât arbitrarily favor some moral patients over othersâ was the most intuitive definition of âimpartialâ in my mind, so I was confused about how it was being used here.