In fact, I don’t even see the immorality of human extinction for someone interested in making people happy, unless the thought of our species extinction, or of a future without our progeny, or the reality of not birthing progeny, somehow makes us unhappy for genetic or social or cultural reasons. And that might be true. I think there was a movie about that, a dystopian near-future where humanity suddenly loses the ability to reproduce, and society collapsed. In principle, we could simply all use birth control, never have more children, and our species would die out.
Do you believe that we associate value with:
our species continuance,
or with procreation,
or with having children in society,
or some other feature of continuing to make people,
whether or not we make happy people?
I ask because I believe that the intellectual support for challenging indifference to future happy people (as opposed to nonexistent people) is weak.
Hi Noah, just to be clear on the dialectic: my post isn’t trying to argue a committed anti-natalist out of their view. Instead, the population ethics section is just trying to make clear that Setiya’s appeal to the “intuition of neutrality” is not a cost-free solution for someone with ordinary views who is worried about the repugnant conclusion, and in fact there are far better alternative solutions available that don’t require resorting to neutrality. (Here I take for granted that my target audience shares the initial intuition that “utopia is better than a barren rock”. Again, this isn’t targeted at committed nihilists or anti-natalists who reject that claim.)
But you raise an interesting further question, of how one might best try to challenge “indifference to future happy people”. I think it’s pretty difficult to challenge indifference in general. If someone is insistently indifferent to non-human animal welfare (or the global poor, or...), for example, you’re not realistically going to be able to argue them out of that.
That said, I think some rational pressure can be put on indifference to future good lives through a combination of:
(i) showing that the putative advantages of the view (e.g. apparent helpfulness for avoiding the repugnant conclusion) are largely illusory, as I argue in the OP, and
(ii) showing that the view introduces further costs, e.g. violating independently plausible principles or axioms.
I’m not going to pursue the latter task in any depth here, but just to give a rough sketch of how it might go, consider the following dilemma for anti-natalists. Either:
(a) They deny that future good lives can have impersonal value, which is implausibly nihilistic, or (b) They grant this axiological claim, but then violate the bridging principle that we always have some moral reason to prefer an impersonally better world to a worse one (such that, all else equal, we should bring about the better world).
Of course, they can always just bite the bullet and insist that they don’t find (a) bothersome. I think argument runs out at that point. You can’t argue people out of nihilism. All you can do, I think, is to express sadness and discourage others from following that bleak path.
I find the comparison you draw a bit pro-natalist. I can see comparing a utopia to a dystopia, where the utopia is obviously better. However, to reasonably compare utopia to a barren rock, you should believe that people living happy lives are somehow a container of moral value, and that by there being happy people existing, there’s moral value or goodness in the fact of their existence.
I am comfortable with taking a person with moral status who currently exists as a given, and running calculations based on their moral status from there, on the presumption that I might make their life better or worse, and a moral thing to do is to contribute to their well-being, given that I affect them somehow. However, I cannot do the same calculations in their absence from existence.
Funny that you use the phrase “a bit pro-natalist” as though that’s a bad thing! I am indeed unabashedly in favour of good things existing rather than nothing at all. And I’m also quite unembarrassed to share that I regard good lives to be a good thing :-)
So yes, I think good lives contain value. You might be concerned to avoid the view that people are merely containers of value. But you shouldn’t deny that our lives (when good for us) are, in fact, valuable.
I think the sensible view here is to distinguish personal and impersonal value. Creating value-filled lives is impersonally good: it makes the universe a better place. But of course we shouldn’t just care about the universe. We should also care about particular persons.
Indeed, whenever possible (i.e. when dealing with existing persons, to whom we can directly refer), our concern should be primarily person-directed. Visit your friend in the hospital for her sake, not just to boost aggregate happiness. But not all moral action can be so personally motivated. To donate to charities or otherwise save “statistical” lives, we need to fall back on our general desire to promote the good. And likewise for solving the non-identity problem: preferring better futures over worse ones (when different people would exist in either case). And, yes, this fall-back desire to promote better outcomes should also, straightforwardly, lead us to prefer good futures over lifeless futures (and lifeless futures over miserable futures).
I cannot do the same calculations in their absence from existence.
Then you would give me a lollipop even at the cost of bringing many miserable new lives into existence. That would clearly be wrong. But once you bring yourself to acknowledge reasons to not bring bad lives into existence (perhaps because the eventual person would regret your violating them), there’s no deep metaphysical difference between that and the positive reasons to bring good lives into existence (which the eventual person would praise your following).
As far as people being containers of value, I don’t find moral goodness in the mere fact of their existence at some level of happiness. This is easiest to tolerate with the view that a suffering person is not good by the fact of their existence or that a person that inflicts suffering on others is not good by the fact of their existence. However, I apply that view to all people, suffering or not, or that do or do not cause others to suffer.
A person’s existence at some level of happiness or altruistic behavior is not sufficient to establish that their existence is good. Instead, they might have good experiences or do good actions. They might be successfully selfish or successfully altruistic or both or neither. In general, I just don’t see any person’s existence as good, per se. Experiences can be good, and experiences of existent things are usually better than experiences of illusory things. Likewise, actions of people can be good, and actions with good consequences are usually better than actions with merely good intentions. So, decided in terms of experiences or actions, a person can “be” good, but that form of “being” is really a linguistic shorthand for the person’s experiences or actions.
I wrote:
I cannot do the same calculations in their absence from existence.
and you replied:
Then you would give me a lollipop even at the cost of bringing many miserable new lives into existence. That would clearly be wrong.
I was hoping to get some clarification of the thinking behind some of these thought experiments, and I guess I got some. I don’t quite get the lollipop reference, maybe that you would give me the lollipop at that cost to me, and I wouldn’t care? Or are you writing that, since I can’t do any calculations, I’d take any exchange of value.
I think you mistook my meaning though. I’m capable of knowing that happy or unhappy future lives couldexist and can understand when exchanges of value serve my interests and when they don’t.
However, unless I believe that people will exist, I don’t consider them in my moral calculations. Some I do believe will exist, some I don’t believe will exist. For example, I believe that many people will continue to be conceived over the next few decades.
I should have written, “I cannot do the same calculations in the eternal absence of their existence.” which is a bit more clear than “I cannot do the same calculations in the absence of their existence.” In fact, I take the fact of people existing as I find it, directly or indirectly, for example, through statistics about their existence or by face-to-face meetings.
I don’t agree with the presumptions that:
some set of people that you assert will exist therefore will exist. I readily agree that they could, but not that they will. I believe that many people will continue to be conceived over the next few decades, for sure.
I might make people at some cost, or with some benefit, to myself. I’m not fertile and I don’t sponsor new conceptions somehow, except through my food choices, unintentionally.
You believe that actions that bring about or prevent the existence of future people have no moral valence
Therefore, you believe that an action that brings about suffering lives is also morally neutral
Therefore, you would take any small positive moral trade (like getting a lollipop) in exchange for bringing about arbitrarily large amounts of suffering lives
If I’m not misinterpreting what you’ve said, it sounds like you’d be willing to bite this bullet?
Maybe it’s true that you won’t actually be able to make these choices, but we’re talking about thought experiments, where implausible things happen all the time.
I think that actions that avoid the conception of future people (for example, possible parents deciding to use birth control) have no moral significance as far as the future moral status of the avoided future being goes since that being never exists.
Why would my thinking that actions like using birth control are morally neutral imply that I should also think that having children is morally neutral?
Perhaps I will understand this better if you explain this to me carefully like I’m not that smart.
Sounds like there are four distinct kinds of actions we’re talking about here:
Bringing about positive lives
Bringing about negative lives
Preventing positive lives
Preventing negative lives
I think I was previously only considering the “positive/negative” aspect, and ignoring the “bringing about/preventing” aspect.
So now I believe you’d consider 3 and 4 to be neutral, and 2 to be negative, which seems fair enough to me.
Why would my thinking that actions like using birth control are morally neutral imply that I should also think that having children is morally neutral?
Aren’t you implying here that you think having children is not morally neutral, and so you would consider 1 to be positive? Wouldn’t 1 best represent existential risk reduction—increasing the chances that happy people get to exist? It sounds like your argument would support x-risk reduction if anything.
You are correct about my assessments of 2-4. I would add 5 and 6:
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)
I see having children as either morally neutral or negative toward the child, not morally positive or negative toward the child. I see having children as morally negative toward other people, in our current circumstances. Overall, any decision to have children is hard to justify as morally neutral.
I guess I would feel more inclined to add:
7. Bringing about conception of positive lives that are also positive for other people (morally positive)
for the sake of the thought experiment.
Is there some perspective or implication that I’m still missing here?
Looking ahead, believing that I will be a necessary cause in conception of a happy life of someone else, that leaves out the consequences for other people of the creation of that happy life. If I include those consequences, the balance of contributions to the self-interests of others (their welfare) tends towards neutral or negative. I should have written:
1. Bringing about conception of positive lives (morally neutral or negative)
but qualified with “all other things equal”, I think the conception is just morally neutral. Why not morally positive? I find it hard to convince myself that happy experience or satisfaction of self-interest is ever morally neutral, but that is what we’re talking about. I actually think that it’s impossible. However, for thought experiment’s sake, I added in 7.
7. Bringing about conception of positive lives that are also positive for other people (morally positive)
If someone could prove to me that, on balance, a positive life also contributes to other’s lives overall, and that control of that life were possible to allow both experiences and behaviors aligned with a positive life that is also positive for others, then choice of conception of such a life, with that control available and utilized, would be morally positive. However, I don’t believe that that control is available, much less utilized.
I’m also not comfortable with the problem of individual harm for collective help. So, for example, a situation that I take from:
that is, turning most neutrals into positives but some neutrals into negatives (* is neutral), does not necessarily appeal to me. Adding a person to a population could contribute positively to most lives but harm some as well. In that case, I tend to see the consequences (and so the choice) of the additional person as morally negative, depending on the details.
Aaron Wolff in their red team mentions eating other beings having less positive value to the consumer than negative value for the consumed. Those sorts of asymmetries are common in modern life as we live it now (for example, in goods production vs use).
From Aaron:
There is arguably also an asymmetry between how good a universe filled with pleasure would be compared to how bad a universe filled with pain would be because it is possible for pain to be much worse than pleasure is good. As Schopenhauer put it “A quick test of the assertion that enjoyment outweighs pain in this world, or that they are at any rate balanced, would be to compare the feelings of an animal engaged in eating another with those of the animal being eaten.” If you buy this argument, then even say a 25% chance of the future being dominated by astronomical suffering could offset a 75% chance of utopia or, similarly, if the future will likely contain relatively small pockets of astronomical suffering, that could fully offset any value outside those pockets.
I’m just talking about intrinsic value here, i.e. all else equal.
You write: “Why not morally positive? I find it hard to convince myself that happy experience or satisfaction of self-interest is ever morally neutral, but that is what we’re talking about. I actually think that it’s impossible.”
I have no idea what this means, so I still don’t know why you deny that positive lives have positive value. You grant that negative lives have negative (intrinsic) value. It would seem most consistent to also grant that positive lives have positive (intrinsic) value. To deny this obvious-seeming principle, some argument is needed!
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.
I mean that our lives are not consequence-free for others, so not morally neutral to live. Our lives are something along the lines of a negative-sum game, approaching a zero-sum game, but hard to equate to a positive sum game ever for all affected.
I haven’t been discussing intrinsic value intentionally, more just the value to the self-interest of oneself or others.
In fact, I don’t even see the immorality of human extinction for someone interested in making people happy, unless the thought of our species extinction, or of a future without our progeny, or the reality of not birthing progeny, somehow makes us unhappy for genetic or social or cultural reasons. And that might be true. I think there was a movie about that, a dystopian near-future where humanity suddenly loses the ability to reproduce, and society collapsed. In principle, we could simply all use birth control, never have more children, and our species would die out.
Do you believe that we associate value with:
our species continuance,
or with procreation,
or with having children in society,
or some other feature of continuing to make people,
whether or not we make happy people?
I ask because I believe that the intellectual support for challenging indifference to future happy people (as opposed to nonexistent people) is weak.
Hi Noah, just to be clear on the dialectic: my post isn’t trying to argue a committed anti-natalist out of their view. Instead, the population ethics section is just trying to make clear that Setiya’s appeal to the “intuition of neutrality” is not a cost-free solution for someone with ordinary views who is worried about the repugnant conclusion, and in fact there are far better alternative solutions available that don’t require resorting to neutrality. (Here I take for granted that my target audience shares the initial intuition that “utopia is better than a barren rock”. Again, this isn’t targeted at committed nihilists or anti-natalists who reject that claim.)
But you raise an interesting further question, of how one might best try to challenge “indifference to future happy people”. I think it’s pretty difficult to challenge indifference in general. If someone is insistently indifferent to non-human animal welfare (or the global poor, or...), for example, you’re not realistically going to be able to argue them out of that.
That said, I think some rational pressure can be put on indifference to future good lives through a combination of:
(i) showing that the putative advantages of the view (e.g. apparent helpfulness for avoiding the repugnant conclusion) are largely illusory, as I argue in the OP, and
(ii) showing that the view introduces further costs, e.g. violating independently plausible principles or axioms.
I’m not going to pursue the latter task in any depth here, but just to give a rough sketch of how it might go, consider the following dilemma for anti-natalists. Either:
(a) They deny that future good lives can have impersonal value, which is implausibly nihilistic, or
(b) They grant this axiological claim, but then violate the bridging principle that we always have some moral reason to prefer an impersonally better world to a worse one (such that, all else equal, we should bring about the better world).
Of course, they can always just bite the bullet and insist that they don’t find (a) bothersome. I think argument runs out at that point. You can’t argue people out of nihilism. All you can do, I think, is to express sadness and discourage others from following that bleak path.
Thank you for the reply!
I find the comparison you draw a bit pro-natalist. I can see comparing a utopia to a dystopia, where the utopia is obviously better. However, to reasonably compare utopia to a barren rock, you should believe that people living happy lives are somehow a container of moral value, and that by there being happy people existing, there’s moral value or goodness in the fact of their existence.
I am comfortable with taking a person with moral status who currently exists as a given, and running calculations based on their moral status from there, on the presumption that I might make their life better or worse, and a moral thing to do is to contribute to their well-being, given that I affect them somehow. However, I cannot do the same calculations in their absence from existence.
Funny that you use the phrase “a bit pro-natalist” as though that’s a bad thing! I am indeed unabashedly in favour of good things existing rather than nothing at all. And I’m also quite unembarrassed to share that I regard good lives to be a good thing :-)
So yes, I think good lives contain value. You might be concerned to avoid the view that people are merely containers of value. But you shouldn’t deny that our lives (when good for us) are, in fact, valuable.
I think the sensible view here is to distinguish personal and impersonal value. Creating value-filled lives is impersonally good: it makes the universe a better place. But of course we shouldn’t just care about the universe. We should also care about particular persons.
Indeed, whenever possible (i.e. when dealing with existing persons, to whom we can directly refer), our concern should be primarily person-directed. Visit your friend in the hospital for her sake, not just to boost aggregate happiness. But not all moral action can be so personally motivated. To donate to charities or otherwise save “statistical” lives, we need to fall back on our general desire to promote the good. And likewise for solving the non-identity problem: preferring better futures over worse ones (when different people would exist in either case). And, yes, this fall-back desire to promote better outcomes should also, straightforwardly, lead us to prefer good futures over lifeless futures (and lifeless futures over miserable futures).
Then you would give me a lollipop even at the cost of bringing many miserable new lives into existence. That would clearly be wrong. But once you bring yourself to acknowledge reasons to not bring bad lives into existence (perhaps because the eventual person would regret your violating them), there’s no deep metaphysical difference between that and the positive reasons to bring good lives into existence (which the eventual person would praise your following).
As far as people being containers of value, I don’t find moral goodness in the mere fact of their existence at some level of happiness. This is easiest to tolerate with the view that a suffering person is not good by the fact of their existence or that a person that inflicts suffering on others is not good by the fact of their existence. However, I apply that view to all people, suffering or not, or that do or do not cause others to suffer.
A person’s existence at some level of happiness or altruistic behavior is not sufficient to establish that their existence is good. Instead, they might have good experiences or do good actions. They might be successfully selfish or successfully altruistic or both or neither. In general, I just don’t see any person’s existence as good, per se. Experiences can be good, and experiences of existent things are usually better than experiences of illusory things. Likewise, actions of people can be good, and actions with good consequences are usually better than actions with merely good intentions. So, decided in terms of experiences or actions, a person can “be” good, but that form of “being” is really a linguistic shorthand for the person’s experiences or actions.
I wrote:
and you replied:
I was hoping to get some clarification of the thinking behind some of these thought experiments, and I guess I got some. I don’t quite get the lollipop reference, maybe that you would give me the lollipop at that cost to me, and I wouldn’t care? Or are you writing that, since I can’t do any calculations, I’d take any exchange of value.
I think you mistook my meaning though. I’m capable of knowing that happy or unhappy future lives could exist and can understand when exchanges of value serve my interests and when they don’t.
However, unless I believe that people will exist, I don’t consider them in my moral calculations. Some I do believe will exist, some I don’t believe will exist. For example, I believe that many people will continue to be conceived over the next few decades.
I should have written, “I cannot do the same calculations in the eternal absence of their existence.” which is a bit more clear than “I cannot do the same calculations in the absence of their existence.” In fact, I take the fact of people existing as I find it, directly or indirectly, for example, through statistics about their existence or by face-to-face meetings.
I don’t agree with the presumptions that:
some set of people that you assert will exist therefore will exist. I readily agree that they could, but not that they will. I believe that many people will continue to be conceived over the next few decades, for sure.
I might make people at some cost, or with some benefit, to myself. I’m not fertile and I don’t sponsor new conceptions somehow, except through my food choices, unintentionally.
I think Richard was trying to make the point that
You believe that actions that bring about or prevent the existence of future people have no moral valence
Therefore, you believe that an action that brings about suffering lives is also morally neutral
Therefore, you would take any small positive moral trade (like getting a lollipop) in exchange for bringing about arbitrarily large amounts of suffering lives
If I’m not misinterpreting what you’ve said, it sounds like you’d be willing to bite this bullet?
Maybe it’s true that you won’t actually be able to make these choices, but we’re talking about thought experiments, where implausible things happen all the time.
I think that actions that avoid the conception of future people (for example, possible parents deciding to use birth control) have no moral significance as far as the future moral status of the avoided future being goes since that being never exists.
Why would my thinking that actions like using birth control are morally neutral imply that I should also think that having children is morally neutral?
Perhaps I will understand this better if you explain this to me carefully like I’m not that smart.
Sounds like there are four distinct kinds of actions we’re talking about here:
Bringing about positive lives
Bringing about negative lives
Preventing positive lives
Preventing negative lives
I think I was previously only considering the “positive/negative” aspect, and ignoring the “bringing about/preventing” aspect.
So now I believe you’d consider 3 and 4 to be neutral, and 2 to be negative, which seems fair enough to me.
Aren’t you implying here that you think having children is not morally neutral, and so you would consider 1 to be positive? Wouldn’t 1 best represent existential risk reduction—increasing the chances that happy people get to exist? It sounds like your argument would support x-risk reduction if anything.
You are correct about my assessments of 2-4. I would add 5 and 6:
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)
I see having children as either morally neutral or negative toward the child, not morally positive or negative toward the child. I see having children as morally negative toward other people, in our current circumstances. Overall, any decision to have children is hard to justify as morally neutral.
I guess I would feel more inclined to add:
7. Bringing about conception of positive lives that are also positive for other people (morally positive)
for the sake of the thought experiment.
Is there some perspective or implication that I’m still missing here?
I would like to know.
What’s the basis for claiming that (1) is neutral, rather than positive?
Looking ahead, believing that I will be a necessary cause in conception of a happy life of someone else, that leaves out the consequences for other people of the creation of that happy life. If I include those consequences, the balance of contributions to the self-interests of others (their welfare) tends towards neutral or negative. I should have written:
1. Bringing about conception of positive lives (morally neutral or negative)
but qualified with “all other things equal”, I think the conception is just morally neutral. Why not morally positive? I find it hard to convince myself that happy experience or satisfaction of self-interest is ever morally neutral, but that is what we’re talking about. I actually think that it’s impossible. However, for thought experiment’s sake, I added in 7.
7. Bringing about conception of positive lives that are also positive for other people (morally positive)
If someone could prove to me that, on balance, a positive life also contributes to other’s lives overall, and that control of that life were possible to allow both experiences and behaviors aligned with a positive life that is also positive for others, then choice of conception of such a life, with that control available and utilized, would be morally positive. However, I don’t believe that that control is available, much less utilized.
I’m also not comfortable with the problem of individual harm for collective help. So, for example, a situation that I take from:
+.-.*.*.*.*.*. (1 positive, 1 negative, 5 neutrals, 7 total)
to
+.+.-.+.+.+.-.* (5 positives, 2 negatives, 1 neutral, 8 total)
that is, turning most neutrals into positives but some neutrals into negatives (* is neutral), does not necessarily appeal to me. Adding a person to a population could contribute positively to most lives but harm some as well. In that case, I tend to see the consequences (and so the choice) of the additional person as morally negative, depending on the details.
Aaron Wolff in their red team mentions eating other beings having less positive value to the consumer than negative value for the consumed. Those sorts of asymmetries are common in modern life as we live it now (for example, in goods production vs use).
I’m just talking about intrinsic value here, i.e. all else equal.
You write: “Why not morally positive? I find it hard to convince myself that happy experience or satisfaction of self-interest is ever morally neutral, but that is what we’re talking about. I actually think that it’s impossible.”
I have no idea what this means, so I still don’t know why you deny that positive lives have positive value. You grant that negative lives have negative (intrinsic) value. It would seem most consistent to also grant that positive lives have positive (intrinsic) value. To deny this obvious-seeming principle, some argument is needed!
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.
I mean that our lives are not consequence-free for others, so not morally neutral to live. Our lives are something along the lines of a negative-sum game, approaching a zero-sum game, but hard to equate to a positive sum game ever for all affected.
I haven’t been discussing intrinsic value intentionally, more just the value to the self-interest of oneself or others.
Is there no difference to you?