Funny that you use the phrase āa bit pro-natalistā as though thatās a bad thing! I am indeed unabashedly in favour of good things existing rather than nothing at all. And Iām 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 shouldnāt 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 shouldnāt 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 āstatisticalā 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), thereās 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 donāt 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 personās 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 donāt see any personās 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 ābeā good, but that form of ābeingā is really a linguistic shorthand for the personās 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 donāt quite get the lollipop reference, maybe that you would give me the lollipop at that cost to me, and I wouldnāt care? Or are you writing that, since I canāt do any calculations, Iād take any exchange of value.
I think you mistook my meaning though. Iām capable of knowing that happy or unhappy future lives couldexist and can understand when exchanges of value serve my interests and when they donāt.
However, unless I believe that people will exist, I donāt consider them in my moral calculations. Some I do believe will exist, some I donāt believe will exist. For example, I believe that many people will continue to be conceived over the next few decades.
I should have written, āI cannot do the same calculations in the eternal absence of their existence.ā which is a bit more clear than āI cannot do the same calculations in the absence of their existence.ā 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 donāt 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. Iām not fertile and I donāt 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 Iām not misinterpreting what youāve said, it sounds like youād be willing to bite this bullet?
Maybe itās true that you wonāt actually be able to make these choices, but weāre 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 Iām not that smart.
Sounds like there are four distinct kinds of actions weāre 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 āpositive/ānegativeā aspect, and ignoring the ābringing about/āpreventingā aspect.
So now I believe youād 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?
Arenāt you implying here that you think having children is not morally neutral, and so you would consider 1 to be positive? Wouldnāt 1 best represent existential risk reductionāincreasing 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 Iām 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 āall other things equalā, 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 weāre talking about. I actually think that itās impossible. However, for thought experimentās 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 otherās 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 donāt believe that that control is available, much less utilized.
Iām 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 āA 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.ā 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.
Iām just talking about intrinsic value here, i.e. all else equal.
You write: āWhy 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 weāre talking about. I actually think that itās impossible.ā
I have no idea what this means, so I still donāt 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 personās life quality/āhappiness/āetc to be morally positive all other things equal, then the person has intrinsic value to me. If I consider this true regardless of the personās identity, then people have intrinsic value to me.
You might be right. For me a troublesome part of the thought experiment is the āall other things equalā 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:
.*.*. ā .-.+.
.-.-. ā .*.+ .
.+.*. ā .*.+.-.
.*.*.-. ā .-.+.
.+.*.-. ā .*.+.+.-.
.*.*.-.-.-. ā .+.*.+.-.-.-.-.-.-.
I do not see things like:
.*. ā .+.+.
.-. ā .+.
The making people happy vs making happy people thought experiment presumes that improvement in a personās quality of life has no impact on others, or that making a person happy or making a happy person is about just one personās 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/ānegative 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 āintrinsic valueā to mean something, but itās just one side of a partition of value by āinstrumentalā and āintrinsic.ā 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 āintrinsic valueā I do not mean a value that is a property of a personās 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 Iām 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
ā¦ according to some concept of āgoodā 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 elseās self-interests. That is, I am treating āmorally good actionā as another way of saying āserving someone elseās self-interests.ā I have not identified any form of āmoral goodnessā 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 otherās 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 shouldnāt can unexpectedly harm me in various ways.)
is it valid to call a moral calculus āmoralā 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. Itās 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.)
Iām 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 havenāt been discussing intrinsic value intentionally, more just the value to the self-interest of oneself or others.
Funny that you use the phrase āa bit pro-natalistā as though thatās a bad thing! I am indeed unabashedly in favour of good things existing rather than nothing at all. And Iām 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 shouldnāt 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 shouldnāt 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 āstatisticalā 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), thereās 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 donāt 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 personās 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 donāt see any personās 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 ābeā good, but that form of ābeingā is really a linguistic shorthand for the personās 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 donāt quite get the lollipop reference, maybe that you would give me the lollipop at that cost to me, and I wouldnāt care? Or are you writing that, since I canāt do any calculations, Iād take any exchange of value.
I think you mistook my meaning though. Iām capable of knowing that happy or unhappy future lives could exist and can understand when exchanges of value serve my interests and when they donāt.
However, unless I believe that people will exist, I donāt consider them in my moral calculations. Some I do believe will exist, some I donāt believe will exist. For example, I believe that many people will continue to be conceived over the next few decades.
I should have written, āI cannot do the same calculations in the eternal absence of their existence.ā which is a bit more clear than āI cannot do the same calculations in the absence of their existence.ā 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 donāt 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. Iām not fertile and I donāt 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 Iām not misinterpreting what youāve said, it sounds like youād be willing to bite this bullet?
Maybe itās true that you wonāt actually be able to make these choices, but weāre 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 Iām not that smart.
Sounds like there are four distinct kinds of actions weāre 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 āpositive/ānegativeā aspect, and ignoring the ābringing about/āpreventingā aspect.
So now I believe youād consider 3 and 4 to be neutral, and 2 to be negative, which seems fair enough to me.
Arenāt you implying here that you think having children is not morally neutral, and so you would consider 1 to be positive? Wouldnāt 1 best represent existential risk reductionāincreasing 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 Iām still missing here?
I would like to know.
Whatās 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 āall other things equalā, 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 weāre talking about. I actually think that itās impossible. However, for thought experimentās 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 otherās 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 donāt believe that that control is available, much less utilized.
Iām 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).
Iām just talking about intrinsic value here, i.e. all else equal.
You write: āWhy 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 weāre talking about. I actually think that itās impossible.ā
I have no idea what this means, so I still donāt 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 personās life quality/āhappiness/āetc to be morally positive all other things equal, then the person has intrinsic value to me. If I consider this true regardless of the personās identity, then people have intrinsic value to me.
You might be right. For me a troublesome part of the thought experiment is the āall other things equalā 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:
.*.*. ā .-.+.
.-.-. ā .*.+ .
.+.*. ā .*.+.-.
.*.*.-. ā .-.+.
.+.*.-. ā .*.+.+.-.
.*.*.-.-.-. ā .+.*.+.-.-.-.-.-.-.
I do not see things like:
.*. ā .+.+.
.-. ā .+.
The making people happy vs making happy people thought experiment presumes that improvement in a personās quality of life has no impact on others, or that making a person happy or making a happy person is about just one personās life. It is not.
When you write:
Let me expand my list of moral positive/ānegative 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 āintrinsic valueā to mean something, but itās just one side of a partition of value by āinstrumentalā and āintrinsic.ā 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 āintrinsic valueā I do not mean a value that is a property of a personās 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 Iām 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
ā¦ according to some concept of āgoodā 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 elseās self-interests. That is, I am treating āmorally good actionā as another way of saying āserving someone elseās self-interests.ā I have not identified any form of āmoral goodnessā 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 otherās 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 shouldnāt can unexpectedly harm me in various ways.)
is it valid to call a moral calculus āmoralā 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. Itās 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.)
Iām 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 havenāt been discussing intrinsic value intentionally, more just the value to the self-interest of oneself or others.
Is there no difference to you?