The general tone of your comments + the line “I’m still happy I wrote that section because I wanted to defend longtermism from your attack” in one comment gives me the impression that you are, but I’m fully willing to accept that it’s just the lack of emotive expressiveness in text.
Yes, MacAskill does have these explicit lines at certain points (I’d argue that this is the bare minimum, but it’s a problem I have with a large swathe of academic and particularly pop-philosophy texts and as I said it’s in some measure a matter of personal preference), but the overall tone of the text and the way he engages with counterarguments and positions still came off as polemical to me. I admittedly hold seminal texts—which WWTF is obviously intended to be—up to particularly high standards in this regard, which I think is fair but completely understand if others disagree. To be clear, I think that this also weakens the argumentation overall rather than just being a lopsided defense or a matter of tone. I think the points raised here about the intuition of neutrality are an good example of this; a more robust engagement with the intuition of neutrality and its implications for longtermism could help specify longtermism and it’s different strains to make it less of an amorphous moral imperative to “think/care about future generations” and a more easily operationalized and intellectually/analytically robust moral philosophy since it would create room for a deeper discussion of how longtermist approaches that prioritize the existence of future people differ from longtermist approaches that view the benefits for future people as secondary.
Ah ok I actually used the word “attack”. I probably shouldn’t have, I feel no animosity at all towards Michael. I love debating these topics and engaging with arguments. I wish he’d had more room to expand on his person-affecting leanings. In a sense he is “attacking” longtermism but in a way that I welcome and enjoy responding to.
I happen to think the level of attention Will gave to population ethics and the concepts of the non-identity problem, repugnant conclusion, and person-affecting intuition is fairly admirable for a book intended for a general non-philosophical audience. As I say, if you read the book you do understand why these three things can be seen as undermining longtermism. Saying up front that he has more material to engage with on his website seems great to me.
The general tone of your comments + the line “I’m still happy I wrote that section because I wanted to defend longtermism from your attack” in one comment gives me the impression that you are, but I’m fully willing to accept that it’s just the lack of emotive expressiveness in text.
Yes, MacAskill does have these explicit lines at certain points (I’d argue that this is the bare minimum, but it’s a problem I have with a large swathe of academic and particularly pop-philosophy texts and as I said it’s in some measure a matter of personal preference), but the overall tone of the text and the way he engages with counterarguments and positions still came off as polemical to me. I admittedly hold seminal texts—which WWTF is obviously intended to be—up to particularly high standards in this regard, which I think is fair but completely understand if others disagree. To be clear, I think that this also weakens the argumentation overall rather than just being a lopsided defense or a matter of tone. I think the points raised here about the intuition of neutrality are an good example of this; a more robust engagement with the intuition of neutrality and its implications for longtermism could help specify longtermism and it’s different strains to make it less of an amorphous moral imperative to “think/care about future generations” and a more easily operationalized and intellectually/analytically robust moral philosophy since it would create room for a deeper discussion of how longtermist approaches that prioritize the existence of future people differ from longtermist approaches that view the benefits for future people as secondary.
Ah ok I actually used the word “attack”. I probably shouldn’t have, I feel no animosity at all towards Michael. I love debating these topics and engaging with arguments. I wish he’d had more room to expand on his person-affecting leanings. In a sense he is “attacking” longtermism but in a way that I welcome and enjoy responding to.
I happen to think the level of attention Will gave to population ethics and the concepts of the non-identity problem, repugnant conclusion, and person-affecting intuition is fairly admirable for a book intended for a general non-philosophical audience. As I say, if you read the book you do understand why these three things can be seen as undermining longtermism. Saying up front that he has more material to engage with on his website seems great to me.