There are other appeals of neutrality (about adding âpositiveâ lives or âgoodsâ) 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 whatâs 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 youâve discussed elsewhere), neutrality seems to give a stronger principled reason, since the welfare of a new child wouldnât make up for a parentâs 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/âcreate and satisfy sufficiently strong new preferences in them. Preference-affecting views â basically person-affecting views, but treating individual preferences like persons* â can avoid this problem, and some can avoid âsymmetricâ 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), weâd need a theory that assigns suitably more weight to quality than quantity. And if youâve got such a theory, you donât need neutrality for interpersonal cases either.
Fair enough if you just donât 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, âRethinking the Asymmetryâ.) 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 âstronger principled reasonâ. Protecting bodily autonomy by denying the in-principle value of people in need of organ transplants would be horrifying, not satisfying. So I donât 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/âpreferences, might as well just die, even if heâd 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 donât think this solves the problem, at least if one has the intuition (as I do) that itâs not the current existence of the people who are extremely harmed to produce happy lives that makes this tradeoff âvery repugnant.â It doesnât 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 arenât just muzak and potatoes, but very blissful. (One might think that is âhorribly evilâ or âutterly disastrous,â and isnât 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 Iâd prefer these discussions not involve labels like âevilâ at all. Though I sympathize with wanting to treat this with moral seriousness!
Interesting! Yeah, a committed anti-natalist who regrets all of existenceâeven in an âapproximate utopiaââon 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 donât 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 Robertsâ âdeeper intuition that the existing Ann must in some way come before need-not-ever-exist-at-all Benâ).
certainly donât 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 donât hold up to scrutiny. Setiyaâs 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 poetâneither is strictly better or worseâbut it doesnât follow that being a philosopher is equally good, regardless of the pay.
...Having said that, I do think the âdeeper intuition that the existing Ann must in some way come before need-not-ever-exist-at-all Benâ plausibly boils down to some kind of antifrustrationist or tranquilist intuition. Ann comes first because she has actual preferences (/âexperiences of desire) that get violated when sheâs deprived of happiness. Not creating Ben doesnât violate any preferences of Benâs.
I donât think so. Iâm 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 theyâunlike traditional value relationsâare not meant to be transitive. If youâre 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).
âExtinguishâ evokes the wrong connotations since neutrality is just about not creating new lives. You make it seem like thereâs 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 itâs 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 âextinguishâ is borderline disingenuous. [edit: I didnât mean to imply dishonesty â I was being hyperbolic in a way that isnât conducive to good discussion norms.]
Likewise, the Cleopatra example in the OP is misleading â at the very least it begs the question. It isnât 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.
âDisingenuousâ? I really donât think itâs 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 âmisleadingâ.
But fwiw, I strongly disagree that itâs misleading. Human extinction is obviously a âtrajectory changeâ. Quite apart from what anyone wantsâmaybe the party is sufficient incentive to change their preferences, for exampleâI think itâs perfectly reasonable to expect the continuation of the species by default. But Iâm 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. Iâm not appealing to âexisting people not wanting to dieâ, but rather existing people being glad that they got to come into existence, which is rather more obviously relevant. (But I wonât accuse you of dishonesty over this. I just think youâre confused.)
Sorry, I didnât mean to accuse you of dishonesty (Iâm adding an edit to the OP to make that completely clear). I still think the framing isnât defensible (but philosophy is contested and people can disagree over whatâs defensible).
Even if you come to expect extinction, it remains accurate to view extinction as extinguishing the potential for future life.
Yes, but thatâs different from extinguishing future people. If the last remaining members of a family name tradition voluntarily decide against having children, are they âextinguishing their lineageâ? To me, âextinguishing a lineageâ evokes central examples like killing the last person in the lineage or carrying out an evil plot to make the remaining members infertile. It doesnât evoke examples like âa couple decides not to have children.â
To be clear, I didnât mean to say that Iexpect extinction. I agree that what we expect in reality doesnât 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 ânon-moral reasons,â Iâm 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 âthere should be no future peopleâ in that sort of world.
Your response to the Cleopatra example is similarly misguided. Iâm not appealing to âexisting people not wanting to dieâ, 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 thereâs clearly an element of deprivation when we as existing people imagine Cleopatra doing something that prevents us from coming to exist. Itâs kind of hard â arguably even impossible â 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 arenât looking back to us from the vantage point of existence).
To be clear, itâs 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 âgotchaâ quality that made it seem like people donât have coherent beliefs if they (1) really enjoy their lives but (2) wouldnât 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 âgratefulâ in a sense thatâs more limited than the axiologically relevant sense â âgratefulâ in a personal sense but not in the sense of âthis means itâs important to create other people like me.â (Iâm 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 doesnât necessarily mean Iâm 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 havenât put a lot of thought into this specific account. Another reply could be that itâs simply unclear how to go about comparing oneâs 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/âpreferences, might as well just die, even if heâd have a happy, flourishing future).
I think if weâre already counting implicit preferences, so that, for example, people still have desires/âpreferences while in deep dreamless sleep and those still count, itâs very hard to imagine someone losing all of their desires/âpreferences without dying or otherwise having their brains severely damaged, in which case their moral status seems pretty questionable. Thereâs also a question of whether this has broken (psychological) continuity enough that we shouldnât 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 theyâd have the same desires/âpreferences 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 thatâs best according to the preference-affecting view), even if theyâd have a happy, flourishing future. The above responses wouldnât work for this case. But keeping them alive involuntarily also seems problematic. Furthermore, if we think itâs better for them to stay alive even if theyâre indifferent overall, then this still seems paternalistic in a sense, but less objectionably so, and if weâre making continuous tradeoffs, too, then there would be cases where we would keep them alive involuntary for their sake and against their wishes.
Thereâs also the possibility that a preference still continues to count terminally even after itâs 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! Iâd emphasize two main points in reply:
(i) While preference continuity is a component of person identity, it isnât clear that itâs 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 âalready diedâ.
(ii) re: âpaternalismâ, itâs worth distinguishing between acting against anotherâs considered preferences vs merely believing that their considered preferences donât in fact coincide with their best interests. I donât think the latter is âpaternalisticâ in any objectionable sense. I think itâs 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 arenât 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 isnât really the issue here. Weâre just assessing the axiological question of whether it would, as a matter of principle, be bad for the temporary depressive to dieâwhether 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.
Thatâs a good point. Iâd say the organ transplant case is disanalogous for basically person-affecting reasons (in the case where these contingent people donât come to exist, they have no need or interest to further satisfy), but to evaluate this claim of disanalogy, we need to consider âthe first-order question of which view is simply right on the meritsâ, as you say. (Iâm not sympathetic to denying impartiality, though, and I donât 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 âpositiveâ lives or âgoodsâ) 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 whatâs 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 youâve discussed elsewhere), neutrality seems to give a stronger principled reason, since the welfare of a new child wouldnât make up for a parentâs 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/âcreate and satisfy sufficiently strong new preferences in them. Preference-affecting views â basically person-affecting views, but treating individual preferences like persons* â can avoid this problem, and some can avoid âsymmetricâ 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), weâd need a theory that assigns suitably more weight to quality than quantity. And if youâve got such a theory, you donât need neutrality for interpersonal cases either.
Fair enough if you just donât 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, âRethinking the Asymmetryâ.) 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 âstronger principled reasonâ. Protecting bodily autonomy by denying the in-principle value of people in need of organ transplants would be horrifying, not satisfying. So I donât 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/âpreferences, might as well just die, even if heâd have a happy, flourishing future).
I donât think this solves the problem, at least if one has the intuition (as I do) that itâs not the current existence of the people who are extremely harmed to produce happy lives that makes this tradeoff âvery repugnant.â It doesnât 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 arenât just muzak and potatoes, but very blissful. (One might think that is âhorribly evilâ or âutterly disastrous,â and isnât 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 Iâd prefer these discussions not involve labels like âevilâ at all. Though I sympathize with wanting to treat this with moral seriousness!
Interesting! Yeah, a committed anti-natalist who regrets all of existenceâeven in an âapproximate utopiaââon 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 donât 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 Robertsâ âdeeper intuition that the existing Ann must in some way come before need-not-ever-exist-at-all Benâ).
I agree. I happen to agree with you that the attempts to accommodate the procreation asymmetry without lexically disvaluing suffering donât hold up to scrutiny. Setiyaâs 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 âdeeper intuition that the existing Ann must in some way come before need-not-ever-exist-at-all Benâ plausibly boils down to some kind of antifrustrationist or tranquilist intuition. Ann comes first because she has actual preferences (/âexperiences of desire) that get violated when sheâs deprived of happiness. Not creating Ben doesnât violate any preferences of Benâs.
I donât think so. Iâm 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 theyâunlike traditional value relationsâare not meant to be transitive. If youâre not familiar with the idea, I sketch a rough intro here.
âExtinguishâ evokes the wrong connotations since neutrality is just about not creating new lives. You make it seem like thereâs 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 itâs 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 âextinguishâ is borderline disingenuous. [edit: I didnât mean to imply dishonesty â I was being hyperbolic in a way that isnât conducive to good discussion norms.]
Likewise, the Cleopatra example in the OP is misleading â at the very least it begs the question. It isnât 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.
âDisingenuousâ? I really donât think itâs 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 âmisleadingâ.
But fwiw, I strongly disagree that itâs misleading. Human extinction is obviously a âtrajectory changeâ. Quite apart from what anyone wantsâmaybe the party is sufficient incentive to change their preferences, for exampleâI think itâs perfectly reasonable to expect the continuation of the species by default. But Iâm 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. Iâm not appealing to âexisting people not wanting to dieâ, but rather existing people being glad that they got to come into existence, which is rather more obviously relevant. (But I wonât accuse you of dishonesty over this. I just think youâre confused.)
Sorry, I didnât mean to accuse you of dishonesty (Iâm adding an edit to the OP to make that completely clear). I still think the framing isnât defensible (but philosophy is contested and people can disagree over whatâs defensible).
Yes, but thatâs different from extinguishing future people. If the last remaining members of a family name tradition voluntarily decide against having children, are they âextinguishing their lineageâ? To me, âextinguishing a lineageâ evokes central examples like killing the last person in the lineage or carrying out an evil plot to make the remaining members infertile. It doesnât evoke examples like âa couple decides not to have children.â
To be clear, I didnât mean to say that I expect extinction. I agree that what we expect in reality doesnât 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 ânon-moral reasons,â Iâm 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 âthere should be no future peopleâ 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 thereâs clearly an element of deprivation when we as existing people imagine Cleopatra doing something that prevents us from coming to exist. Itâs kind of hard â arguably even impossible â 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 arenât looking back to us from the vantage point of existence).
To be clear, itâs 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 âgotchaâ quality that made it seem like people donât have coherent beliefs if they (1) really enjoy their lives but (2) wouldnât 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 âgratefulâ in a sense thatâs more limited than the axiologically relevant sense â âgratefulâ in a personal sense but not in the sense of âthis means itâs important to create other people like me.â (Iâm 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 doesnât necessarily mean Iâm 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 havenât put a lot of thought into this specific account. Another reply could be that itâs simply unclear how to go about comparing oneâs existence to never having been born.])
I think if weâre already counting implicit preferences, so that, for example, people still have desires/âpreferences while in deep dreamless sleep and those still count, itâs very hard to imagine someone losing all of their desires/âpreferences without dying or otherwise having their brains severely damaged, in which case their moral status seems pretty questionable. Thereâs also a question of whether this has broken (psychological) continuity enough that we shouldnât 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 theyâd have the same desires/âpreferences 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 thatâs best according to the preference-affecting view), even if theyâd have a happy, flourishing future. The above responses wouldnât work for this case. But keeping them alive involuntarily also seems problematic. Furthermore, if we think itâs better for them to stay alive even if theyâre indifferent overall, then this still seems paternalistic in a sense, but less objectionably so, and if weâre making continuous tradeoffs, too, then there would be cases where we would keep them alive involuntary for their sake and against their wishes.
Thereâs also the possibility that a preference still continues to count terminally even after itâs 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! Iâd emphasize two main points in reply:
(i) While preference continuity is a component of person identity, it isnât clear that itâs 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 âalready diedâ.
(ii) re: âpaternalismâ, itâs worth distinguishing between acting against anotherâs considered preferences vs merely believing that their considered preferences donât in fact coincide with their best interests. I donât think the latter is âpaternalisticâ in any objectionable sense. I think itâs 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 arenât 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 isnât really the issue here. Weâre just assessing the axiological question of whether it would, as a matter of principle, be bad for the temporary depressive to dieâwhether 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.
Thatâs a good point. Iâd say the organ transplant case is disanalogous for basically person-affecting reasons (in the case where these contingent people donât come to exist, they have no need or interest to further satisfy), but to evaluate this claim of disanalogy, we need to consider âthe first-order question of which view is simply right on the meritsâ, as you say. (Iâm not sympathetic to denying impartiality, though, and I donât 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.