Thanks for posting! I agree this is far from obvious at first glance. Here are most of the main intuitions that together make me very skeptical of “care about making people happy, not happy people”:
The reasoning you use would also support conclusions that to me feel very unintuitive. You could just as easily argue, “creating more humans doesn’t really matter morally, even if they would be utterly miserable, because the unborn can’t care about being born.”
Indifference to the well-being of potential people would imply that many people don’t matter (in certain decisions). My starting assumption is heavy skepticism toward any view that advocates indifference to the well-being of many people, since historically, such views have horrific track records.
Arguably, personal identity does not persist over time. For example, I will not exist in a decade or even in a second; instead, I will grow into someone who is similar to me, but not quite the same person. So whenever we “make people happy,” we are creating new happy people who are slightly different from whoever would have existed otherwise. If that’s the case, then making people happy is a way of making happy people. So it’s contradictory [edit: or requires additional, complex assumptions] to value making people happy if we never value making happy people.
So the view that making people happy matters but making happy people doesn’t is asymmetric (or unintuitive), frequently indifferent, self-contradictory [edit: or additionally complex], and intransitive [edit: or not independent of irrelevant alternatives].
Wide person-affecting views that solve the nonidentity problem can address points 2 and 3.
FWIW, Parfit also worked on a Relation R (or R-Relation), which is like psychological inheritance, to replace transitive numerical identity. IIRC, the idea is that those whose psychologies are causally descended from yours in the right way are “you” in the sense of being inheritors, but they aren’t identical to each other. It’s like the bodies of identical twins who descend from the same cells; they’re inheritors of the same physical system, but not literally identical to each other after separation. Then, we can just replace identity with Relation R, which agrees with our normal intuitions about identity in almost all real world cases. I’m not totally convinced by this, and it probably requires some arbitrariness or imprecision in cases where there are questions about the degree to which one individual is related to another, but it doesn’t seem inconsistent or incoherent to me. Other important phenomena may be imprecise, too, like consciousness, preferences, pleasure and suffering.
Finally, a bit of a technical nitpick, but rather than intransitive preferences, person-affecting views can violate the independence of irrelevant alternatives. In general, they violate transitivity or IIA, and the two are pretty similar. It’s generally possible to construct similiar intransitive views from those that violate IIA, by assuming the pairwise comparisons from with only two options available hold even with more options added, and to construct similar IIA-violating views from intransitive ones, by using certain voting methods like Schulze/beatpath voting. (These constructions won’t generally be literal inverses of one another in each direction; some structure will be lost.)
Wide person-affecting views that solve the nonidentity problem can address points 2 and 3.
That seems right. My comment mainly wasn’t intended as a response to these views, although I could have made that clearer. (If I understand them correctly, wide person-affecting views are not always indifferent to creating happy people, so they’re outside the scope of what the original post was discussing.) (Edit: Still, I don’t yet see how wide person-affecting views can address point 2. If you feel like continuing this thread, I’d be curious to hear an example of a wide person-affecting view that does this.)
Re: relation R, good point, we can do that, and that seems much less bad than self-contradiction. (Editing my earlier comment accordingly.) Still, I think the extra complexity of this view loses points via simplicity priors (especially if we tack on more complexity to get relation R to exclude inheritance relations that intuitively “increase population,” like reproduction—without excluding those, plausibly we’ve gone back to valuing making happy people). (The extra complexity of valuing consciousness / happiness also loses points by the same reasoning, but I’m more willing to bite that bullet.)
On your last point, I’m not sure I see yet how person-affecting views can avoid intransitivity. Let’s say we have:
World A: Happy Bob
World B: Sad Bob
World C: No one
Wouldn’t ~all person-affecting views hold that A ~ C and C ~ B, but A > B, violating transitivity? (I guess transitivity is usually discussed in the context of inequalities, while here it’s the indifference relation that’s intransitive.)
If I understand them correctly, wide person-affecting views are not always indifferent to creating happy people, so they’re outside the scope of what the original post was discussing.
I’m not sure the author intended them to be outside the scope of the post. When people say they’re indifferent to creating happy people, they could just mean relative to not creating them at all, not relative to creating people who would be less happy. This is what I usually have in mind.
Fair about preferring simpler views wrt Relation R. I don’t think you’re rationally required to give much weight to simplicity, though, but you can do so.
On the example, a transitive view violating IIA could rank B<A, B<C and A~C when all three options are available. When only B and C are available, a symmetric person-affecting view (or an asymmetric person-affecting view, but with Bob’s life not net negative in B) would rank B~C (or B and C are incomparable), but that doesn’t lead to intransitivity within any option set, since {A, B, C} and {B, C} are different option sets, with different transitive orders on them.
Another possibility I forgot to mention in my first reply is incomparability. Rather than being indifferent in questions of creation, you might just take the options to be incomparable, and any option from a set of mutually incomparable options could be permissible.
Thank you both. Yes, what Michael wrote here below is what I meant (I thought it was obvious but maybe it’s not):
”When people say they’re indifferent to creating happy people, they could just mean relative to not creating them at all, not relative to creating people who would be less happy. This is what I usually have in mind.”
Good points, and thanks for the example! That all seems right. I’ve been assuming that it didn’t matter whether the option sets were all available at once, but now I see that amounts to assuming IIA.
Thanks for posting! I agree this is far from obvious at first glance. Here are most of the main intuitions that together make me very skeptical of “care about making people happy, not happy people”:
The reasoning you use would also support conclusions that to me feel very unintuitive. You could just as easily argue, “creating more humans doesn’t really matter morally, even if they would be utterly miserable, because the unborn can’t care about being born.”
Indifference to the well-being of potential people would imply that many people don’t matter (in certain decisions). My starting assumption is heavy skepticism toward any view that advocates indifference to the well-being of many people, since historically, such views have horrific track records.
Arguably, personal identity does not persist over time. For example, I will not exist in a decade or even in a second; instead, I will grow into someone who is similar to me, but not quite the same person. So whenever we “make people happy,” we are creating new happy people who are slightly different from whoever would have existed otherwise. If that’s the case, then making people happy is a way of making happy people. So it’s contradictory [edit: or requires additional, complex assumptions] to value making people happy if we never value making happy people.
If we care about making people happy but are indifferent to making happy people, this implies intransitive preferences [edit: or non-independence of irrelevant alternatives], which I find very unintuitive.
So the view that making people happy matters but making happy people doesn’t is asymmetric (or unintuitive), frequently indifferent, self-contradictory [edit: or additionally complex], and intransitive [edit: or not independent of irrelevant alternatives].
Wide person-affecting views that solve the nonidentity problem can address points 2 and 3.
FWIW, Parfit also worked on a Relation R (or R-Relation), which is like psychological inheritance, to replace transitive numerical identity. IIRC, the idea is that those whose psychologies are causally descended from yours in the right way are “you” in the sense of being inheritors, but they aren’t identical to each other. It’s like the bodies of identical twins who descend from the same cells; they’re inheritors of the same physical system, but not literally identical to each other after separation. Then, we can just replace identity with Relation R, which agrees with our normal intuitions about identity in almost all real world cases. I’m not totally convinced by this, and it probably requires some arbitrariness or imprecision in cases where there are questions about the degree to which one individual is related to another, but it doesn’t seem inconsistent or incoherent to me. Other important phenomena may be imprecise, too, like consciousness, preferences, pleasure and suffering.
Finally, a bit of a technical nitpick, but rather than intransitive preferences, person-affecting views can violate the independence of irrelevant alternatives. In general, they violate transitivity or IIA, and the two are pretty similar. It’s generally possible to construct similiar intransitive views from those that violate IIA, by assuming the pairwise comparisons from with only two options available hold even with more options added, and to construct similar IIA-violating views from intransitive ones, by using certain voting methods like Schulze/beatpath voting. (These constructions won’t generally be literal inverses of one another in each direction; some structure will be lost.)
That seems right. My comment mainly wasn’t intended as a response to these views, although I could have made that clearer. (If I understand them correctly, wide person-affecting views are not always indifferent to creating happy people, so they’re outside the scope of what the original post was discussing.) (Edit: Still, I don’t yet see how wide person-affecting views can address point 2. If you feel like continuing this thread, I’d be curious to hear an example of a wide person-affecting view that does this.)
Re: relation R, good point, we can do that, and that seems much less bad than self-contradiction. (Editing my earlier comment accordingly.) Still, I think the extra complexity of this view loses points via simplicity priors (especially if we tack on more complexity to get relation R to exclude inheritance relations that intuitively “increase population,” like reproduction—without excluding those, plausibly we’ve gone back to valuing making happy people). (The extra complexity of valuing consciousness / happiness also loses points by the same reasoning, but I’m more willing to bite that bullet.)
On your last point, I’m not sure I see yet how person-affecting views can avoid intransitivity. Let’s say we have:
World A: Happy Bob
World B: Sad Bob
World C: No one
Wouldn’t ~all person-affecting views hold that A ~ C and C ~ B, but A > B, violating transitivity? (I guess transitivity is usually discussed in the context of inequalities, while here it’s the indifference relation that’s intransitive.)
I’m not sure the author intended them to be outside the scope of the post. When people say they’re indifferent to creating happy people, they could just mean relative to not creating them at all, not relative to creating people who would be less happy. This is what I usually have in mind.
Fair about preferring simpler views wrt Relation R. I don’t think you’re rationally required to give much weight to simplicity, though, but you can do so.
On the example, a transitive view violating IIA could rank B<A, B<C and A~C when all three options are available. When only B and C are available, a symmetric person-affecting view (or an asymmetric person-affecting view, but with Bob’s life not net negative in B) would rank B~C (or B and C are incomparable), but that doesn’t lead to intransitivity within any option set, since {A, B, C} and {B, C} are different option sets, with different transitive orders on them.
Another possibility I forgot to mention in my first reply is incomparability. Rather than being indifferent in questions of creation, you might just take the options to be incomparable, and any option from a set of mutually incomparable options could be permissible.
Thank you both. Yes, what Michael wrote here below is what I meant (I thought it was obvious but maybe it’s not):
”When people say they’re indifferent to creating happy people, they could just mean relative to not creating them at all, not relative to creating people who would be less happy. This is what I usually have in mind.”
Good points, and thanks for the example! That all seems right. I’ve been assuming that it didn’t matter whether the option sets were all available at once, but now I see that amounts to assuming IIA.