There are other appeals of neutrality (about adding “positive” lives or “goods”) besides just avoiding the RC:
It can avoid the Very Repugnant Conclusion, although some of your proposed solutions like critical levels would work, too.
Adding people at the cost to existing or otherwise necessary people. See here and here. I pretty much have the opposite intuition on the extinction vs party example from you, but I think the use of a party may confound people with intuitions against frivolousness or hedonism and is relatively low stakes for existing people. We can imagine cases where what’s at stake for existing people seems much more serious: dreams or important life goals, suffering, freedom, spending time with loved ones, their lives (including replacement arguments, and the logic of the larder), and so on. The views you defend here allow all of these to be outweighed by the addition of new people. Furthermore, while there may still be strong instrumental reasons for respecting reproductive freedom regardless (which you’ve discussed elsewhere), neutrality seems to give a stronger principled reason, since the welfare of a new child wouldn’t make up for a parent’s overall loss in welfare on its own under any circumstance. Getting the right answer for more principled reasons is more satisfying and on firmer ground.
In intrapersonal tradeoffs on theories where preferences matter terminally, it fits liberal, pluralistic and anti-paternalistic intuitions better. Under preference views that allow the addition of new contingent preferences to outweigh the lesser satisfaction of necessary preferences (and so violate neutrality with respect to adding satisfied preferences, but in a specific way), and ignoring indirect and instrumental reasons (which of course matter substantially in practice), it would in principle be good for the individual for you to violate any or all of their own existing preferences in order to induce/create and satisfy sufficiently strong new preferences in them. Preference-affecting views — basically person-affecting views, but treating individual preferences like persons* — can avoid this problem, and some can avoid “symmetric” problems at the same time, e.g. violating preferences to eliminate or prevent frustrated preferences (at least in the cases where it seems worst to do so).
* although there are more fundamental distinctions we could make if we wanted, e.g. between intrapersonal and interpersonal tradeoffs.
I think my dialectical strategy works similarly against appealing to the Very Repugnant Conclusion to support neutrality. To avoid the intra-personal VRC (compatibly with other commonsense commitments about the harm of death), we’d need a theory that assigns suitably more weight to quality than quantity. And if you’ve got such a theory, you don’t need neutrality for interpersonal cases either.
Fair enough if you just don’t share my intuitions. I think it would be horribly evil for the present generation to extinguish all future life, merely to moderately benefit ourselves (even in not purely frivolous ways). When considering different cases, where there are much graver costs to existing people (e.g. full-blown replacement), I share the intuition that extreme sacrifice is not required; but appeal to some form of partiality or personal prerogative seems much more appropriate to me than denying the value of the beneficiaries. (I develop a view along these lines in my paper, ‘Rethinking the Asymmetry’.) Just like the permissibility of keeping your organs inside your own body is no reason to deny the value of potential beneficiaries of organ donation.
That last point also speaks to the putative desirability of offering a “stronger principled reason”. Protecting bodily autonomy by denying the in-principle value of people in need of organ transplants would be horrifying, not satisfying. So I don’t think that question can be adjudicated independently of the first-order question of which view is simply right on the merits.
How to deal with induced or changing preferences is a real problem for preferentist theories of well-being, and IMO is a good reason to reject all such views in favour of more objective alternatives. Neutrality about future desires helps in some cases, as you note, but is utterly disastrous in others (e.g. potentially implying that a temporarily depressed child or teenager, who momentarily loses all his desires/preferences, might as well just die, even if he’d have a happy, flourishing future).
appeal to some form of partiality or personal prerogative seems much more appropriate to me than denying the value of the beneficiaries
I don’t think this solves the problem, at least if one has the intuition (as I do) that it’s not the current existence of the people who are extremely harmed to produce happy lives that makes this tradeoff “very repugnant.” It doesn’t seem any more palatable to allow arbitrarily many people in the long-term future (rather than the present) to suffer for the sake of sufficiently many more added happy lives. Even if those lives aren’t just muzak and potatoes, but very blissful. (One might think that is “horribly evil” or “utterly disastrous,” and isn’t just a theoretical concern either, because in practice increasing the extent of space settlement would in expectation both enable many miserable lives and many more blissful lives.)
ETA: Ideally I’d prefer these discussions not involve labels like “evil” at all. Though I sympathize with wanting to treat this with moral seriousness!
Interesting! Yeah, a committed anti-natalist who regrets all of existence—even in an “approximate utopia”—on the grounds that even a small proportion of very unhappy lives automatically trumps the positive value of a world mostly containing overwhelmingly wonderful, flourishing lives is, IMO, in the grips of… um (trying to word this delicately)… values I strongly disagree with. We will just have very persistent disagreements, in that case!
FWIW, I think those extreme anti-natalist values are unusual, and certainly don’t reflect the kinds of concerns expressed by Setiya that I was responding to in the OP (or other common views in the vicinity, e.g. Melinda Roberts’ “deeper intuition that the existing Ann must in some way come before need-not-ever-exist-at-all Ben”).
certainly don’t reflect the kinds of concerns expressed by Setiya that I was responding to in the OP
I agree. I happen to agree with you that the attempts to accommodate the procreation asymmetry without lexically disvaluing suffering don’t hold up to scrutiny. Setiya’s critique missed the mark pretty hard, e.g. this part just completely ignores that this view violates transitivity:
But the argument is flawed. Neutrality says that having a child with a good enough life is on a par with staying childless, not that the outcome in which you have a child is equally good regardless of their well-being. Consider a frivolous analogy: being a philosopher is on a par with being a poet—neither is strictly better or worse—but it doesn’t follow that being a philosopher is equally good, regardless of the pay.
...Having said that, I do think the “deeper intuition that the existing Ann must in some way come before need-not-ever-exist-at-all Ben” plausibly boils down to some kind of antifrustrationist or tranquilist intuition. Ann comes first because she has actual preferences (/experiences of desire) that get violated when she’s deprived of happiness. Not creating Ben doesn’t violate any preferences of Ben’s.
I don’t think so. I’m sure that Roberts would, for example, think we had more reason to give Ann a lollipop than to bring Ben into existence and give him one, even if Ann would not in any way be frustrated by the lack of a lollipop.
The far more natural explanation is just that we have person-directed reasons to want what is good for Ann, in addition to the impersonal reasons we have to want a better world (realizable by either benefiting Ann or creating & benefiting Ben).
In fairness to Setiya, the whole point of parity relations (as developed, with some sophistication, by Ruth Chang) is that they—unlike traditional value relations—are not meant to be transitive. If you’re not familiar with the idea, I sketch a rough intro here.
I think it would be horribly evil for the present generation to extinguish all future life, merely to moderately benefit ourselves (even in not purely frivolous ways).
“Extinguish” evokes the wrong connotations since neutrality is just about not creating new lives. You make it seem like there’s going to be all this life in the future and the proponents of neutrality want to change the trajectory. This introduces misleading connotations because some views with neutrality say that it’s good to create new people if this is what existing people want, but not good to create new people for its own sake.
I think using the word “extinguish” is borderline disingenuous. [edit: I didn’t mean to imply dishonesty – I was being hyperbolic in a way that isn’t conducive to good discussion norms.]
Likewise, the Cleopatra example in the OP is misleading – at the very least it begs the question. It isn’t obvious that existing people not wanting to die is a reason to bring them into existence. Existing people not wanting to die is more obviously a reason to not kill them once they exist.
“Disingenuous”? I really don’t think it’s OK for you to accuse me of dishonesty just because you disagree with my framing of the issue. Perhaps you meant to write something like “misleading”.
But fwiw, I strongly disagree that it’s misleading. Human extinction is obviously a “trajectory change”. Quite apart from what anyone wants—maybe the party is sufficient incentive to change their preferences, for example—I think it’s perfectly reasonable to expect the continuation of the species by default. But I’m also not sure that default expectations are what matters here. Even if you come to expect extinction, it remains accurate to view extinction as extinguishing the potential for future life.
Your response to the Cleopatra example is similarly misguided. I’m not appealing to “existing people not wanting to die”, but rather existing people being glad that they got to come into existence, which is rather more obviously relevant. (But I won’t accuse you of dishonesty over this. I just think you’re confused.)
Sorry, I didn’t mean to accuse you of dishonesty (I’m adding an edit to the OP to make that completely clear). I still think the framing isn’t defensible (but philosophy is contested and people can disagree over what’s defensible).
Even if you come to expect extinction, it remains accurate to view extinction as extinguishing the potential for future life.
Yes, but that’s different from extinguishing future people. If the last remaining members of a family name tradition voluntarily decide against having children, are they “extinguishing their lineage”? To me, “extinguishing a lineage” evokes central examples like killing the last person in the lineage or carrying out an evil plot to make the remaining members infertile. It doesn’t evoke examples like “a couple decides not to have children.”
To be clear, I didn’t mean to say that Iexpect extinction. I agree that what we expect in reality doesn’t matter for figuring out philosophical views (caveat). I mentioned the point about trajectories to highlight that we can conceive of worlds where no one wants humanity to stick around for non-moral reasons (see this example by Singer). (By “non-moral reasons,” I’m not just thinking of some people wanting to have children. When people plant trees in their neighbourhoods or contribute to science, art, business or institutions, political philosophy, perhaps even youtube and tik tok, they often do so because it provides personal meaning in a context where we expect civilization to stay around. A lot of these activities would lose their meaning if civilization was coming to an end in the foreseeable future.) To evaluate whether neutrality about new lives is repugnant, we should note that it only straightforwardly implies “there should be no future people” in that sort of world.
Your response to the Cleopatra example is similarly misguided. I’m not appealing to “existing people not wanting to die”, but rather existing people being glad that they got to come into existence, which is rather more obviously relevant.
I think I was aware that this is what you meant. I should have explained my objection more clearly. My point is that there’s clearly an element of deprivation when we as existing people imagine Cleopatra doing something that prevents us from coming to exist. It’s kind of hard – arguably even impossible – for existing people to imagine non-existence as something different from no-longer-existence. By contrast, the deprivation element is absent when we imagine not creating future people (assuming they never come to exist and therefore aren’t looking back to us from the vantage point of existence).
To be clear, it’s perfectly legitimate to paint a picture of a rich future where many people exist and flourish to get present people to care about creating such a future. However, I felt that your point about Cleopatra had a kind of “gotcha” quality that made it seem like people don’t have coherent beliefs if they (1) really enjoy their lives but (2) wouldn’t mind if people at some point in history decide to be the last generation. I wanted to point out that (1) and (2) can go together.
For instance, I could be “grateful” in a sense that’s more limited than the axiologically relevant sense – “grateful” in a personal sense but not in the sense of “this means it’s important to create other people like me.” (I’m thinking out loud here, but perhaps this personal sense could be similar to how one can be grateful for person-specific attributes like introversion or a strong sense of justice. If I was grateful about these attributes in myself, that doesn’t necessarily mean I’m committed to it being morally important to create people with those same attributes. In this way, people with the neutrality intuition may see existence as a person-specific attribute that only people who have that attribute can meaningfully feel grateful about. [I haven’t put a lot of thought into this specific account. Another reply could be that it’s simply unclear how to go about comparing one’s existence to never having been born.])
Neutrality about future desires helps in some cases, as you note, but is utterly disastrous in others (e.g. potentially implying that a temporarily depressed child or teenager, who momentarily loses all his desires/preferences, might as well just die, even if he’d have a happy, flourishing future).
I think if we’re already counting implicit preferences, so that, for example, people still have desires/preferences while in deep dreamless sleep and those still count, it’s very hard to imagine someone losing all of their desires/preferences without dying or otherwise having their brains severely damaged, in which case their moral status seems pretty questionable. There’s also a question of whether this has broken (psychological) continuity enough that we shouldn’t consider this the same person at all: this case could be more like someone dying and either being replaced by a new person with a happy, flourishing future or just dying and not being replaced at all. Either way, the child has already died.
If they’d have the same desires/preferences in the future as they had before temporarily losing them, then we can ask if this is due to a causal connection from the child before the temporary loss. If not, then this again undermines the persistence of their identity and the child may have already died either way, since causal connection seems necessary. If there is such a causal connection, then our answer here should probably match how we think about destructive mind uploading and destructive teleportation.
Of course, it may be the case that a temporarily depressed child just prefers overall to die (or otherwise that that’s best according to the preference-affecting view), even if they’d have a happy, flourishing future. The above responses wouldn’t work for this case. But keeping them alive involuntarily also seems problematic. Furthermore, if we think it’s better for them to stay alive even if they’re indifferent overall, then this still seems paternalistic in a sense, but less objectionably so, and if we’re making continuous tradeoffs, too, then there would be cases where we would keep them alive involuntary for their sake and against their wishes.
There’s also the possibility that a preference still continues to count terminally even after it’s no longer held, so even after a person dies or their preferences change, but I lean towards rejecting that view.
The connection to personal identity is interesting, thanks for flagging that! I’d emphasize two main points in reply:
(i) While preference continuity is a component of person identity, it isn’t clear that it’s essential. Memory continuity is classically a major component, and I think it makes sense to include other personality characteristics too. We might even be able to include values in the sense of moral beliefs that could persist even while the agent goes through a period of being unable to care in the usual way about their values; they might still acknowledge, at least in an intellectual sense, that this is what they think they ought to care about. If someone maintained all of those other connections, and just temporary stopped caring about anything, I think they would still qualify as the same person. Their past self has not thereby “already died”.
(ii) re: “paternalism”, it’s worth distinguishing between acting against another’s considered preferences vs merely believing that their considered preferences don’t in fact coincide with their best interests. I don’t think the latter is “paternalistic” in any objectionable sense. I think it’s just obviously true that someone who is depressed or otherwise mentally ill may have considered preferences that fail to correspond to their best interests. (People aren’t infallible in normative matters, even concerning themselves. To claim otherwise would be an extremely strong and implausible view!)
fwiw, I also think that paternalistic actions are sometimes justifiable, most obviously in the case of literal children, or others (like the temporarily depressed!) for whom we have a strong basis to judge that the standard Millian reasons for deference do not apply.
But that isn’t really the issue here. We’re just assessing the axiological question of whether it would, as a matter of principle, be bad for the temporary depressive to die—whether we should, as mere bystanders, hope that they endure through this rough period, or that they instead find and take the means to end it all, despite the bright future that would otherwise be ahead of them.
That’s a good point. I’d say the organ transplant case is disanalogous for basically person-affecting reasons (in the case where these contingent people don’t come to exist, they have no need or interest to further satisfy), but to evaluate this claim of disanalogy, we need to consider “the first-order question of which view is simply right on the merits”, as you say. (I’m not sympathetic to denying impartiality, though, and I don’t think it solves the problem for tradeoffs between other people.)
I find the alternatives to desire theories worse overall, based on the objections to them you raise in your article and similar ones.
There are other appeals of neutrality (about adding “positive” lives or “goods”) besides just avoiding the RC:
It can avoid the Very Repugnant Conclusion, although some of your proposed solutions like critical levels would work, too.
Adding people at the cost to existing or otherwise necessary people. See here and here. I pretty much have the opposite intuition on the extinction vs party example from you, but I think the use of a party may confound people with intuitions against frivolousness or hedonism and is relatively low stakes for existing people. We can imagine cases where what’s at stake for existing people seems much more serious: dreams or important life goals, suffering, freedom, spending time with loved ones, their lives (including replacement arguments, and the logic of the larder), and so on. The views you defend here allow all of these to be outweighed by the addition of new people. Furthermore, while there may still be strong instrumental reasons for respecting reproductive freedom regardless (which you’ve discussed elsewhere), neutrality seems to give a stronger principled reason, since the welfare of a new child wouldn’t make up for a parent’s overall loss in welfare on its own under any circumstance. Getting the right answer for more principled reasons is more satisfying and on firmer ground.
In intrapersonal tradeoffs on theories where preferences matter terminally, it fits liberal, pluralistic and anti-paternalistic intuitions better. Under preference views that allow the addition of new contingent preferences to outweigh the lesser satisfaction of necessary preferences (and so violate neutrality with respect to adding satisfied preferences, but in a specific way), and ignoring indirect and instrumental reasons (which of course matter substantially in practice), it would in principle be good for the individual for you to violate any or all of their own existing preferences in order to induce/create and satisfy sufficiently strong new preferences in them. Preference-affecting views — basically person-affecting views, but treating individual preferences like persons* — can avoid this problem, and some can avoid “symmetric” problems at the same time, e.g. violating preferences to eliminate or prevent frustrated preferences (at least in the cases where it seems worst to do so).
* although there are more fundamental distinctions we could make if we wanted, e.g. between intrapersonal and interpersonal tradeoffs.
Hi Michael! Thanks for your comments.
I think my dialectical strategy works similarly against appealing to the Very Repugnant Conclusion to support neutrality. To avoid the intra-personal VRC (compatibly with other commonsense commitments about the harm of death), we’d need a theory that assigns suitably more weight to quality than quantity. And if you’ve got such a theory, you don’t need neutrality for interpersonal cases either.
Fair enough if you just don’t share my intuitions. I think it would be horribly evil for the present generation to extinguish all future life, merely to moderately benefit ourselves (even in not purely frivolous ways). When considering different cases, where there are much graver costs to existing people (e.g. full-blown replacement), I share the intuition that extreme sacrifice is not required; but appeal to some form of partiality or personal prerogative seems much more appropriate to me than denying the value of the beneficiaries. (I develop a view along these lines in my paper, ‘Rethinking the Asymmetry’.) Just like the permissibility of keeping your organs inside your own body is no reason to deny the value of potential beneficiaries of organ donation.
That last point also speaks to the putative desirability of offering a “stronger principled reason”. Protecting bodily autonomy by denying the in-principle value of people in need of organ transplants would be horrifying, not satisfying. So I don’t think that question can be adjudicated independently of the first-order question of which view is simply right on the merits.
How to deal with induced or changing preferences is a real problem for preferentist theories of well-being, and IMO is a good reason to reject all such views in favour of more objective alternatives. Neutrality about future desires helps in some cases, as you note, but is utterly disastrous in others (e.g. potentially implying that a temporarily depressed child or teenager, who momentarily loses all his desires/preferences, might as well just die, even if he’d have a happy, flourishing future).
I don’t think this solves the problem, at least if one has the intuition (as I do) that it’s not the current existence of the people who are extremely harmed to produce happy lives that makes this tradeoff “very repugnant.” It doesn’t seem any more palatable to allow arbitrarily many people in the long-term future (rather than the present) to suffer for the sake of sufficiently many more added happy lives. Even if those lives aren’t just muzak and potatoes, but very blissful. (One might think that is “horribly evil” or “utterly disastrous,” and isn’t just a theoretical concern either, because in practice increasing the extent of space settlement would in expectation both enable many miserable lives and many more blissful lives.)
ETA: Ideally I’d prefer these discussions not involve labels like “evil” at all. Though I sympathize with wanting to treat this with moral seriousness!
Interesting! Yeah, a committed anti-natalist who regrets all of existence—even in an “approximate utopia”—on the grounds that even a small proportion of very unhappy lives automatically trumps the positive value of a world mostly containing overwhelmingly wonderful, flourishing lives is, IMO, in the grips of… um (trying to word this delicately)… values I strongly disagree with. We will just have very persistent disagreements, in that case!
FWIW, I think those extreme anti-natalist values are unusual, and certainly don’t reflect the kinds of concerns expressed by Setiya that I was responding to in the OP (or other common views in the vicinity, e.g. Melinda Roberts’ “deeper intuition that the existing Ann must in some way come before need-not-ever-exist-at-all Ben”).
I agree. I happen to agree with you that the attempts to accommodate the procreation asymmetry without lexically disvaluing suffering don’t hold up to scrutiny. Setiya’s critique missed the mark pretty hard, e.g. this part just completely ignores that this view violates transitivity:
...Having said that, I do think the “deeper intuition that the existing Ann must in some way come before need-not-ever-exist-at-all Ben” plausibly boils down to some kind of antifrustrationist or tranquilist intuition. Ann comes first because she has actual preferences (/experiences of desire) that get violated when she’s deprived of happiness. Not creating Ben doesn’t violate any preferences of Ben’s.
I don’t think so. I’m sure that Roberts would, for example, think we had more reason to give Ann a lollipop than to bring Ben into existence and give him one, even if Ann would not in any way be frustrated by the lack of a lollipop.
The far more natural explanation is just that we have person-directed reasons to want what is good for Ann, in addition to the impersonal reasons we have to want a better world (realizable by either benefiting Ann or creating & benefiting Ben).
In fairness to Setiya, the whole point of parity relations (as developed, with some sophistication, by Ruth Chang) is that they—unlike traditional value relations—are not meant to be transitive. If you’re not familiar with the idea, I sketch a rough intro here.
“Extinguish” evokes the wrong connotations since neutrality is just about not creating new lives. You make it seem like there’s going to be all this life in the future and the proponents of neutrality want to change the trajectory. This introduces misleading connotations because some views with neutrality say that it’s good to create new people if this is what existing people want, but not good to create new people for its own sake.
I think using the word “extinguish” is borderline disingenuous. [edit: I didn’t mean to imply dishonesty – I was being hyperbolic in a way that isn’t conducive to good discussion norms.]
Likewise, the Cleopatra example in the OP is misleading – at the very least it begs the question. It isn’t obvious that existing people not wanting to die is a reason to bring them into existence. Existing people not wanting to die is more obviously a reason to not kill them once they exist.
“Disingenuous”? I really don’t think it’s OK for you to accuse me of dishonesty just because you disagree with my framing of the issue. Perhaps you meant to write something like “misleading”.
But fwiw, I strongly disagree that it’s misleading. Human extinction is obviously a “trajectory change”. Quite apart from what anyone wants—maybe the party is sufficient incentive to change their preferences, for example—I think it’s perfectly reasonable to expect the continuation of the species by default. But I’m also not sure that default expectations are what matters here. Even if you come to expect extinction, it remains accurate to view extinction as extinguishing the potential for future life.
Your response to the Cleopatra example is similarly misguided. I’m not appealing to “existing people not wanting to die”, but rather existing people being glad that they got to come into existence, which is rather more obviously relevant. (But I won’t accuse you of dishonesty over this. I just think you’re confused.)
Sorry, I didn’t mean to accuse you of dishonesty (I’m adding an edit to the OP to make that completely clear). I still think the framing isn’t defensible (but philosophy is contested and people can disagree over what’s defensible).
Yes, but that’s different from extinguishing future people. If the last remaining members of a family name tradition voluntarily decide against having children, are they “extinguishing their lineage”? To me, “extinguishing a lineage” evokes central examples like killing the last person in the lineage or carrying out an evil plot to make the remaining members infertile. It doesn’t evoke examples like “a couple decides not to have children.”
To be clear, I didn’t mean to say that I expect extinction. I agree that what we expect in reality doesn’t matter for figuring out philosophical views (caveat). I mentioned the point about trajectories to highlight that we can conceive of worlds where no one wants humanity to stick around for non-moral reasons (see this example by Singer). (By “non-moral reasons,” I’m not just thinking of some people wanting to have children. When people plant trees in their neighbourhoods or contribute to science, art, business or institutions, political philosophy, perhaps even youtube and tik tok, they often do so because it provides personal meaning in a context where we expect civilization to stay around. A lot of these activities would lose their meaning if civilization was coming to an end in the foreseeable future.) To evaluate whether neutrality about new lives is repugnant, we should note that it only straightforwardly implies “there should be no future people” in that sort of world.
I think I was aware that this is what you meant. I should have explained my objection more clearly. My point is that there’s clearly an element of deprivation when we as existing people imagine Cleopatra doing something that prevents us from coming to exist. It’s kind of hard – arguably even impossible – for existing people to imagine non-existence as something different from no-longer-existence. By contrast, the deprivation element is absent when we imagine not creating future people (assuming they never come to exist and therefore aren’t looking back to us from the vantage point of existence).
To be clear, it’s perfectly legitimate to paint a picture of a rich future where many people exist and flourish to get present people to care about creating such a future. However, I felt that your point about Cleopatra had a kind of “gotcha” quality that made it seem like people don’t have coherent beliefs if they (1) really enjoy their lives but (2) wouldn’t mind if people at some point in history decide to be the last generation. I wanted to point out that (1) and (2) can go together.
For instance, I could be “grateful” in a sense that’s more limited than the axiologically relevant sense – “grateful” in a personal sense but not in the sense of “this means it’s important to create other people like me.” (I’m thinking out loud here, but perhaps this personal sense could be similar to how one can be grateful for person-specific attributes like introversion or a strong sense of justice. If I was grateful about these attributes in myself, that doesn’t necessarily mean I’m committed to it being morally important to create people with those same attributes. In this way, people with the neutrality intuition may see existence as a person-specific attribute that only people who have that attribute can meaningfully feel grateful about. [I haven’t put a lot of thought into this specific account. Another reply could be that it’s simply unclear how to go about comparing one’s existence to never having been born.])
I think if we’re already counting implicit preferences, so that, for example, people still have desires/preferences while in deep dreamless sleep and those still count, it’s very hard to imagine someone losing all of their desires/preferences without dying or otherwise having their brains severely damaged, in which case their moral status seems pretty questionable. There’s also a question of whether this has broken (psychological) continuity enough that we shouldn’t consider this the same person at all: this case could be more like someone dying and either being replaced by a new person with a happy, flourishing future or just dying and not being replaced at all. Either way, the child has already died.
If they’d have the same desires/preferences in the future as they had before temporarily losing them, then we can ask if this is due to a causal connection from the child before the temporary loss. If not, then this again undermines the persistence of their identity and the child may have already died either way, since causal connection seems necessary. If there is such a causal connection, then our answer here should probably match how we think about destructive mind uploading and destructive teleportation.
Of course, it may be the case that a temporarily depressed child just prefers overall to die (or otherwise that that’s best according to the preference-affecting view), even if they’d have a happy, flourishing future. The above responses wouldn’t work for this case. But keeping them alive involuntarily also seems problematic. Furthermore, if we think it’s better for them to stay alive even if they’re indifferent overall, then this still seems paternalistic in a sense, but less objectionably so, and if we’re making continuous tradeoffs, too, then there would be cases where we would keep them alive involuntary for their sake and against their wishes.
There’s also the possibility that a preference still continues to count terminally even after it’s no longer held, so even after a person dies or their preferences change, but I lean towards rejecting that view.
The connection to personal identity is interesting, thanks for flagging that! I’d emphasize two main points in reply:
(i) While preference continuity is a component of person identity, it isn’t clear that it’s essential. Memory continuity is classically a major component, and I think it makes sense to include other personality characteristics too. We might even be able to include values in the sense of moral beliefs that could persist even while the agent goes through a period of being unable to care in the usual way about their values; they might still acknowledge, at least in an intellectual sense, that this is what they think they ought to care about. If someone maintained all of those other connections, and just temporary stopped caring about anything, I think they would still qualify as the same person. Their past self has not thereby “already died”.
(ii) re: “paternalism”, it’s worth distinguishing between acting against another’s considered preferences vs merely believing that their considered preferences don’t in fact coincide with their best interests. I don’t think the latter is “paternalistic” in any objectionable sense. I think it’s just obviously true that someone who is depressed or otherwise mentally ill may have considered preferences that fail to correspond to their best interests. (People aren’t infallible in normative matters, even concerning themselves. To claim otherwise would be an extremely strong and implausible view!)
fwiw, I also think that paternalistic actions are sometimes justifiable, most obviously in the case of literal children, or others (like the temporarily depressed!) for whom we have a strong basis to judge that the standard Millian reasons for deference do not apply.
But that isn’t really the issue here. We’re just assessing the axiological question of whether it would, as a matter of principle, be bad for the temporary depressive to die—whether we should, as mere bystanders, hope that they endure through this rough period, or that they instead find and take the means to end it all, despite the bright future that would otherwise be ahead of them.
Agreed.
That’s a good point. I’d say the organ transplant case is disanalogous for basically person-affecting reasons (in the case where these contingent people don’t come to exist, they have no need or interest to further satisfy), but to evaluate this claim of disanalogy, we need to consider “the first-order question of which view is simply right on the merits”, as you say. (I’m not sympathetic to denying impartiality, though, and I don’t think it solves the problem for tradeoffs between other people.)
I find the alternatives to desire theories worse overall, based on the objections to them you raise in your article and similar ones.