Hi,Richard. I will try again to think this through.
I think I understand your idea of intrinsic value better now. If I understand you properly:
when I consider improvement to a person’s life quality/happiness/etc to be morally positive all other things equal, then the person has intrinsic value to me. If I consider this true regardless of the person’s identity, then people have intrinsic value to me.
You might be right. For me a troublesome part of the thought experiment is the “all other things equal” part.
If I take a life of neutral happiness .*. and change it to one with much greater happiness .+., then I seem to have improved the situation. However, I am used to transformations like this:
.*.*. ⇒ .-.+.
.-.-. ⇒ .*.+ .
.+.*. ⇒ .*.+.-.
.*.*.-. ⇒ .-.+.
.+.*.-. ⇒ .*.+.+.-.
.*.*.-.-.-. ⇒ .+.*.+.-.-.-.-.-.-.
I do not see things like:
.*. ⇒ .+.+.
.-. ⇒ .+.
The making people happy vs making happy people thought experiment presumes that improvement in a person’s quality of life has no impact on others, or that making a person happy or making a happy person is about just one person’s life. It is not.
When you write:
You grant that negative lives have negative (intrinsic) value. It would seem most consistent to also grant that positive lives have positive (intrinsic) value.
Let me expand my list of moral positive/negative distinctions a little:
Bringing about conception of positive lives (morally neutral)
Bringing about conception of negative lives (morally negative)
Preventing conception of positive lives (morally neutral)
Preventing conception of negative lives (morally neutral)
Making existing lives more negative (morally negative)
Making existing lives more positive (morally positive)
Bringing about conception of positive lives that are also positive for other people (morally positive)
Bringing about conception of positive lives that are negative for other people (morally negative)
Bringing about conception of negative lives that are negative for other people (morally negative)
Bringing about conception of negative lives that are positive for other people (morally negative)
and now generalize it:
preventing conception (morally neutral toward the eternally nonconceived)
making all lives more positive (morally positive toward all)
making any lives more negative (morally negative toward some)
making some lives more positive without affecting any others negatively (morally positive toward some)
conceiving negative lives (morally negative toward the conceived)
conceiving positive lives that are positive for all (morally positive toward all)
conceiving positive lives (morally positive toward the conceived)
All that I mean there by morally positive or morally negative actions is actions that serve or work against the interests of a (sub)set of who the action affects. A person with a positive life for themselves is one with positive experience. A person with a positive life for others is one who takes actions with positive consequences for others.
I do use “intrinsic value” to mean something, but it’s just one side of a partition of value by “instrumental” and “intrinsic.” Whether a person has intrinsic value only comes up for me in thought experiments about control of others and the implications for their moral status. By “intrinsic value” I do not mean a value that is a property of a person’s identity (e.g., a friend) or type (e.g., human).
Rather, intrinsic value is value that I assign to someone that is value not contingent on whether they serve my interests by the manifestation of that value. For example, some person X might go have a romance with someone else even though I’m also interested in X romantically. That might upset me, but that person X has intrinsic value, so they get to go be romantic with whomever they want instead of me and I still factor them into my moral calculations.
EDIT: as far as what it means to factor someone into my moral calculations, I mean that I consider the consequences of my actions for them not just in terms of selfish criteria, but also in terms of altruistic or moral criteria. I run the altruism numbers, so to speak, or at least I should, for the consequences of my actions toward them.
A different partitioning scheme of value is between contingent value and absolute value, but that scheme starts to test the validity of the concept of value, so I will put that aside for the moment.
I want to head off a semantics debate about moral status in case that comes up. For me, moral status of a person only means that they figure in moral calculations of the consequences of actions. For me, a person having moral status does not mean that the person:
is a container of some amount of goodness
is intrinsically good
has an existence that is good, per se
is someone for whom betterment of experience is good
… according to some concept of “good” that I do not believe applies (for example, approval by god).
OK, so hopefully I explained my thinking a bit more fully.
Can someone reveal the paradox in my thinking to me, if there is one (or more)?
EDIT: As far as I know, I have not claimed that altruistic action or an altruistic consequence of an action is good in some way distinct from the fact of serving someone else’s self-interests. That is, I am treating “morally good action” as another way of saying “serving someone else’s self-interests.” I have not identified any form of “moral goodness” that is distinct from serving the self-interests of entities affected by actions or events in the world.
I recognize that it seems naive to treat moral goodness as simply serving other’s self-interests. I have to answer questions like:
who defines those interests or their importance to a person? (me, ultimately, using whatever evidence or causal models I have)
what epistemological assumptions support continuing my moral calculations for entities without instrumental value to me? (I assume that real-world events and other people are unpredictable or uncontrollable. Therefore, denying moral status to people I shouldn’t can unexpectedly harm me in various ways.)
is it valid to call a moral calculus “moral” if it is contrasts with how morality is typically decided? (If I am clear about it, then people understand my choice of terms and that my approach to altruism or morality is my personal one, not a description of some wider standard)
is it moral to serve my own self-interest? (No. It’s selfish. I think selfishness is really interesting.)
why do I perform moral calculations? (For selfish reasons.)
why do I ever behave morally instead of selfishly? (Good question.)
I’m still stuck thinking that:
eternally nonexistent people have no moral status.
there is nothing morally preferable about a world of happy people as opposed to a barren rock, but there is something personally preferable about a world of happy people.
Hi,Richard. I will try again to think this through.
I think I understand your idea of intrinsic value better now. If I understand you properly:
when I consider improvement to a person’s life quality/happiness/etc to be morally positive all other things equal, then the person has intrinsic value to me. If I consider this true regardless of the person’s identity, then people have intrinsic value to me.
You might be right. For me a troublesome part of the thought experiment is the “all other things equal” part.
If I take a life of neutral happiness .*. and change it to one with much greater happiness .+., then I seem to have improved the situation. However, I am used to transformations like this:
.*.*. ⇒ .-.+.
.-.-. ⇒ .*.+ .
.+.*. ⇒ .*.+.-.
.*.*.-. ⇒ .-.+.
.+.*.-. ⇒ .*.+.+.-.
.*.*.-.-.-. ⇒ .+.*.+.-.-.-.-.-.-.
I do not see things like:
.*. ⇒ .+.+.
.-. ⇒ .+.
The making people happy vs making happy people thought experiment presumes that improvement in a person’s quality of life has no impact on others, or that making a person happy or making a happy person is about just one person’s life. It is not.
When you write:
Let me expand my list of moral positive/negative distinctions a little:
Bringing about conception of positive lives (morally neutral)
Bringing about conception of negative lives (morally negative)
Preventing conception of positive lives (morally neutral)
Preventing conception of negative lives (morally neutral)
Making existing lives more negative (morally negative)
Making existing lives more positive (morally positive)
Bringing about conception of positive lives that are also positive for other people (morally positive)
Bringing about conception of positive lives that are negative for other people (morally negative)
Bringing about conception of negative lives that are negative for other people (morally negative)
Bringing about conception of negative lives that are positive for other people (morally negative)
and now generalize it:
preventing conception (morally neutral toward the eternally nonconceived)
making all lives more positive (morally positive toward all)
making any lives more negative (morally negative toward some)
making some lives more positive without affecting any others negatively (morally positive toward some)
conceiving negative lives (morally negative toward the conceived)
conceiving positive lives that are positive for all (morally positive toward all)
conceiving positive lives (morally positive toward the conceived)
All that I mean there by morally positive or morally negative actions is actions that serve or work against the interests of a (sub)set of who the action affects. A person with a positive life for themselves is one with positive experience. A person with a positive life for others is one who takes actions with positive consequences for others.
I do use “intrinsic value” to mean something, but it’s just one side of a partition of value by “instrumental” and “intrinsic.” Whether a person has intrinsic value only comes up for me in thought experiments about control of others and the implications for their moral status. By “intrinsic value” I do not mean a value that is a property of a person’s identity (e.g., a friend) or type (e.g., human).
Rather, intrinsic value is value that I assign to someone that is value not contingent on whether they serve my interests by the manifestation of that value. For example, some person X might go have a romance with someone else even though I’m also interested in X romantically. That might upset me, but that person X has intrinsic value, so they get to go be romantic with whomever they want instead of me and I still factor them into my moral calculations.
EDIT: as far as what it means to factor someone into my moral calculations, I mean that I consider the consequences of my actions for them not just in terms of selfish criteria, but also in terms of altruistic or moral criteria. I run the altruism numbers, so to speak, or at least I should, for the consequences of my actions toward them.
A different partitioning scheme of value is between contingent value and absolute value, but that scheme starts to test the validity of the concept of value, so I will put that aside for the moment.
I want to head off a semantics debate about moral status in case that comes up. For me, moral status of a person only means that they figure in moral calculations of the consequences of actions. For me, a person having moral status does not mean that the person:
is a container of some amount of goodness
is intrinsically good
has an existence that is good, per se
is someone for whom betterment of experience is good
… according to some concept of “good” that I do not believe applies (for example, approval by god).
OK, so hopefully I explained my thinking a bit more fully.
Can someone reveal the paradox in my thinking to me, if there is one (or more)?EDIT: As far as I know, I have not claimed that altruistic action or an altruistic consequence of an action is good in some way distinct from the fact of serving someone else’s self-interests. That is, I am treating “morally good action” as another way of saying “serving someone else’s self-interests.” I have not identified any form of “moral goodness” that is distinct from serving the self-interests of entities affected by actions or events in the world.
I recognize that it seems naive to treat moral goodness as simply serving other’s self-interests. I have to answer questions like:
who defines those interests or their importance to a person? (me, ultimately, using whatever evidence or causal models I have)
what epistemological assumptions support continuing my moral calculations for entities without instrumental value to me? (I assume that real-world events and other people are unpredictable or uncontrollable. Therefore, denying moral status to people I shouldn’t can unexpectedly harm me in various ways.)
is it valid to call a moral calculus “moral” if it is contrasts with how morality is typically decided? (If I am clear about it, then people understand my choice of terms and that my approach to altruism or morality is my personal one, not a description of some wider standard)
is it moral to serve my own self-interest? (No. It’s selfish. I think selfishness is really interesting.)
why do I perform moral calculations? (For selfish reasons.)
why do I ever behave morally instead of selfishly? (Good question.)
I’m still stuck thinking that:
eternally nonexistent people have no moral status.
there is nothing morally preferable about a world of happy people as opposed to a barren rock, but there is something personally preferable about a world of happy people.