I’m curious about your takes on the value-inverted versions of the repugnant and very-repugnant conclusions.
I’m not sure what exactly they are. If either of them means to “replace a few extremely miserable lives with many, almost perfectly untroubled ones”, then it does not sound repugnant to me. But maybe you meant something else.
(Perhaps see also thesecomments about adding slightly less miserable people to hell to reduce the most extreme suffering therein, which seems, to me at least, to result in an overall more preferable population when repeated multiple times.)
It’s easy to “make sense” of a preference (e.g. for positive experiences) by deciding not to care about it after all, but doing that doesn’t actually resolve the weirdness in our feelings about aggregation.
Did you mean
the subjective preference, of the “lives worth living” themselves, to have positive experiences, or
the preference of an outside observer, who is looking at the population comparison diagrams, to count those lives as having isolated positive value?
If 1, then I would note that e.g. the antifrustrationist and tranquilist accounts would care about that subjective preference, as they would see it as a kind of dissatisfaction with the preferrer’s current situation. Yet when we are looking at only causally isolated lives, these views, like all minimalist views, would say that there is no need to create dissatisfied (or even perfectly fulfilled) beings for their own sake in the first place. (In other words, creating and fulfilling a need is only a roundabout way to not having the need in the first place, unless we also consider the positive roles of this process for other needs, which we arguably should do in the practical world.)
If 2, then I’d be eager to understand what seems to be missing with the previous “need-based” account.
(I agree that the above points are unrelated to how to aggregate e.g. small needs vs. extreme needs. But in a world with extreme pains, I might e.g. deprioritize any amount of isolated small pains, i.e. small pains that do not increase the risk of extreme pains nor constitute a distraction or opportunity cost for alleviating extreme pains. Perhaps one could intuitively think of this as making “the expected amount of extreme pains” the common currency. Of course, that kind of aggregation may seem repugnant between a few extreme pains vs. a vast amount of slightly less extreme pains, but in practice we would also account for their wide ”error bars” and non-isolated nature.)
Once you let go of trying to reduce people to a 1-dimensional value first and then aggregate them second, as you seem to be advocating here in ss. 3⁄4, I don’t see why we should try to hold onto simple rules like “minimize this one simple thing.” If the possibilities we’re allowed to have preferences about are not 1-dimensional aggregations, but are instead the entire self-interacting florescence of life’s future, then our preferences can get correspondingly more interesting. It’s like replacing preferences over the center of mass of a sculpture with preferences about its pose or theme or ornamentation.
The claim of axiological monism is only that our different values ultimately reduce to one value. Without a common measure, it would seem that multiple independent values are incommensurable and cannot be measured against each other even in principle.
So no one claims that people would descriptively follow only a single guiding principle, nor that it would be simple to e.g. decide how to prioritize between our intertwined and often contradictory preferences. Our needs and preferences can be “about” anything, but if e.g. someone prefers the existence of additional beings, we should plausibly weigh the magnitude of this (unfulfilled) preference against the potential unfulfilled needs that those beings might suffer from. And it seems questionable that e.g. someone’s aesthetic preferences could in themselves override another’s need to avoid extreme suffering (cf. gladiator games).
Thanks!
I’m not sure what exactly they are. If either of them means to “replace a few extremely miserable lives with many, almost perfectly untroubled ones”, then it does not sound repugnant to me. But maybe you meant something else.
(Perhaps see also these comments about adding slightly less miserable people to hell to reduce the most extreme suffering therein, which seems, to me at least, to result in an overall more preferable population when repeated multiple times.)
Did you mean
the subjective preference, of the “lives worth living” themselves, to have positive experiences, or
the preference of an outside observer, who is looking at the population comparison diagrams, to count those lives as having isolated positive value?
If 1, then I would note that e.g. the antifrustrationist and tranquilist accounts would care about that subjective preference, as they would see it as a kind of dissatisfaction with the preferrer’s current situation. Yet when we are looking at only causally isolated lives, these views, like all minimalist views, would say that there is no need to create dissatisfied (or even perfectly fulfilled) beings for their own sake in the first place. (In other words, creating and fulfilling a need is only a roundabout way to not having the need in the first place, unless we also consider the positive roles of this process for other needs, which we arguably should do in the practical world.)
If 2, then I’d be eager to understand what seems to be missing with the previous “need-based” account.
(I agree that the above points are unrelated to how to aggregate e.g. small needs vs. extreme needs. But in a world with extreme pains, I might e.g. deprioritize any amount of isolated small pains, i.e. small pains that do not increase the risk of extreme pains nor constitute a distraction or opportunity cost for alleviating extreme pains. Perhaps one could intuitively think of this as making “the expected amount of extreme pains” the common currency. Of course, that kind of aggregation may seem repugnant between a few extreme pains vs. a vast amount of slightly less extreme pains, but in practice we would also account for their wide ”error bars” and non-isolated nature.)
The claim of axiological monism is only that our different values ultimately reduce to one value. Without a common measure, it would seem that multiple independent values are incommensurable and cannot be measured against each other even in principle.
So no one claims that people would descriptively follow only a single guiding principle, nor that it would be simple to e.g. decide how to prioritize between our intertwined and often contradictory preferences. Our needs and preferences can be “about” anything, but if e.g. someone prefers the existence of additional beings, we should plausibly weigh the magnitude of this (unfulfilled) preference against the potential unfulfilled needs that those beings might suffer from. And it seems questionable that e.g. someone’s aesthetic preferences could in themselves override another’s need to avoid extreme suffering (cf. gladiator games).