One reason to be suspicious of taking into account lost potential lives here is that if you always do so, it looks like you might get a general argument for âdevelopment is badâ. Rich countries have low fertility compared to poor countries. So anything that helps poor countries develop is likely to prevent some people from being born. But it seems pretty strange to think we should wait until we find out how much development reduces fertility before we can decide if it is good or bad.
I agree that all else equal it is an argument against development, though I still think development is good overall on net, and I think the extent to which development specifically is the cause of reduced fertility has been overstated.
More generally, I am very skeptical of arguments of the form âWe must ignore X, because otherwise Y would be badâ. Maybe Y is bad! What gives you the confidence that Y is good? If you have some strong argument that Y is good, why canât that argument outweigh X, rather than forcing us to simply close our eyes and pretend X doesnât exist?
Yes, I have an intuition that development is good, just like I have an intuition that ice cream is good. That doesnât mean that the price of the ice-cream should be ignored and assumed to be zero when deciding when to buy it, and nor should the costs of development be ignored and assumed to be zero.
Yes, but if at some point you find out, for example, that your model of morality leads to a conclusion that one should kill all humans, youâd probably conclude that your model is wrong rather than actually go through with it.
Itâs an extreme example, but at its basis every model is somehow an approximation stemming from our internal moral intuition. Be it that life is better than death, or happiness better than pain, or satisfying desires better than frustration, or that following godâs commands is better than ignoring them, etc.
âMore generally, I am very skeptical of arguments of the form âWe must ignore X, because otherwise Y would be badâ. Maybe Y is bad! What gives you the confidence that Y is good? If you have some strong argument that Y is good, why canât that argument outweigh X, rather than forcing us to simply close our eyes and pretend X doesnât exist?â
This is very difficult philosophical territory, but I guess my instinct is to draw a distinction between:
a) ignoring new evidence about what properties something has, because that would overturn your prior moral evaluation of that thing.
b) Deciding that well-known properties of a thing donât contribute towards it being bad enough to overturn the standard evaluation of it, because you are committed to the standard moral evaluation. (This doesnât involve inferring that something has particular non-moral properties from the claim that it is morally good/âbad, unlike a).)
A) feels always dodgy to me, but b) seems like the kind of thing that could be right, depending on how much you should trust judgments about individual cases versus judgements about abstract moral principles. And I think I was only doing b) here, not a).
Having said that, I remember a conversation I had in grad school with a faculty member who was probably much better at philosophy than me claimed that even a) is only automatically bad if you assume moral anti-realism.
One reason to be suspicious of taking into account lost potential lives here is that if you always do so, it looks like you might get a general argument for âdevelopment is badâ. Rich countries have low fertility compared to poor countries. So anything that helps poor countries develop is likely to prevent some people from being born. But it seems pretty strange to think we should wait until we find out how much development reduces fertility before we can decide if it is good or bad.
I agree that all else equal it is an argument against development, though I still think development is good overall on net, and I think the extent to which development specifically is the cause of reduced fertility has been overstated.
More generally, I am very skeptical of arguments of the form âWe must ignore X, because otherwise Y would be badâ. Maybe Y is bad! What gives you the confidence that Y is good? If you have some strong argument that Y is good, why canât that argument outweigh X, rather than forcing us to simply close our eyes and pretend X doesnât exist?
Is not every moral theory based on assumptions that X must be better than Y, around which some model is built?
Yes, I have an intuition that development is good, just like I have an intuition that ice cream is good. That doesnât mean that the price of the ice-cream should be ignored and assumed to be zero when deciding when to buy it, and nor should the costs of development be ignored and assumed to be zero.
Yes, but if at some point you find out, for example, that your model of morality leads to a conclusion that one should kill all humans, youâd probably conclude that your model is wrong rather than actually go through with it.
Itâs an extreme example, but at its basis every model is somehow an approximation stemming from our internal moral intuition. Be it that life is better than death, or happiness better than pain, or satisfying desires better than frustration, or that following godâs commands is better than ignoring them, etc.
âMore generally, I am very skeptical of arguments of the form âWe must ignore X, because otherwise Y would be badâ. Maybe Y is bad! What gives you the confidence that Y is good? If you have some strong argument that Y is good, why canât that argument outweigh X, rather than forcing us to simply close our eyes and pretend X doesnât exist?â
This is very difficult philosophical territory, but I guess my instinct is to draw a distinction between:
a) ignoring new evidence about what properties something has, because that would overturn your prior moral evaluation of that thing.
b) Deciding that well-known properties of a thing donât contribute towards it being bad enough to overturn the standard evaluation of it, because you are committed to the standard moral evaluation. (This doesnât involve inferring that something has particular non-moral properties from the claim that it is morally good/âbad, unlike a).)
A) feels always dodgy to me, but b) seems like the kind of thing that could be right, depending on how much you should trust judgments about individual cases versus judgements about abstract moral principles. And I think I was only doing b) here, not a).
Having said that, I remember a conversation I had in grad school with a faculty member who was probably much better at philosophy than me claimed that even a) is only automatically bad if you assume moral anti-realism.