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.
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?