I think this is actually a central question that is relatively unresolved among philosophers, but it is my impression that philosophers in general, and EAs in particular, lean in the “making happy people” direction. I think of there as being roughly three types of reason for this. One is that views of the “making people happy” variety basically always wind up facing structural weirdness when you formalize them. It was my impression until recently that all of these views imply intransitive preferences (i.e something like A>B>C>A), until I had a discussion with Michael St Jules in which he pointed out more recent work that instead denies the independence of irrelevant alternatives. This avoids some problems, but leaves you with something very structurally weird or even absurd to some. I think Larry Temkin has a good quote about it something like “I will have the chocolate ice-cream, unless you have vanilla, in which case I will have strawberry”.
The second reason is the non-identity problem, formalized by Derek Parfit. Basically the issue this raises is that almost all of our decisions that impact the longer term future in some way also change who gets born, so a standard person affecting view seems to allow us to do almost anything to future generations. Use up all their resources, bury radioactive waste, you name it.
The third maybe connects more directly to why EAs in particular often reject these views. Most EAs subscribe to a sort of universalist, beneficent ethics, that seems to imply that if something is genuinely good for someone, then that something is good in a more impersonal sense that tugs on ethics for all. For those of us who live lives worth living, are glad we were born, and don’t want to die, it seems clear that existence is good for us. If this is the case, it seems like this presents a reason for action to anyone who can impact it if we accept this sort of universal form of ethics. Therefore, it seems like we are left with three choices. We can say that our existence actually is good for us, and so it is also good for others to bring it about, we can say that it is not good for others to bring it about, and therefore it is not actually good for us after all, or we can deny that ethics has this omnibenevolent quality. To many EAs, the first choice is clearly best.
I think here is where a standard person-affecting view might counter that it cares about all reasons that actually exist, and if you aren’t born, you don’t actually exist, and so a universal ethics on this timeline cannot care about you either. The issue is that without some better narrowing, this argument seems to prove too much. All ethics is about choosing between possible worlds, so just saying that a good only exists in one possible world doesn’t seem like it will help us in making decisions between these worlds. Arguably the most complete spelling out of a view like this looks sort of like “we should achieve a world in which no reasons for this world not to exist are present, and nothing beyond this equilibrium matters in the same way”. I actually think some variation of this argument is sometimes used by negative utilitarians and people with similar views. A frustrated interest exists in the timeline it is frustrated in, and so any ethics needs to care about it. A positive interest (i.e. having something even better than an already good or neutral state) does not exist in a world in which it isn’t brought about, so it doesn’t provide reasons to that world in the same way. Equilabrium is already adequetely reached when no one is badly off.
This is coherent, but again it proves much more than most people want to about what ethics should actually look like, so going down that route seems to require some extra work.
One is that views of the “making people happy” variety basically always wind up facing structural weirdness when you formalize them. It was my impression until recently that all of these views imply intransitive preferences (i.e something like A>B>C>A), until I had a discussion with Michael St Jules in which he pointed out more recent work that instead denies the independence of irrelevant alternatives.
It depends if by valuing “making people happy” one means 1) intrinsically valuing adding happiness to existing people’s lives, or 2) valuing “making them happy” in the sense of relieving their suffering (practically, this is often what happiness does for people). I agree that violations of transitivity or IIA seem inevitable for views of type (1), and that’s pretty bad.
But (2) is an alternative that I think has gotten weirdly sidelined in (EA) population axiology discourse. If some person is completely content and has no frustrated desires (state A), I don’t see any moral obligation to make them happier (state B), so I don’t violate transitivity by saying the world is not better by adding person A and also not better by adding person B. I suspect lots of people’s “person-affecting” intuitions really boil down to the intuition that preferences that don’t exist—and will not exist—have no need to be fulfilled, as you allude to in your last big paragraph:
A frustrated interest exists in the timeline it is frustrated in, and so any ethics needs to care about it. A positive interest (i.e. having something even better than an already good or neutral state) does not exist in a world in which it isn’t brought about, so it doesn’t provide reasons to that world in the same way
I think this is actually a central question that is relatively unresolved among philosophers, but it is my impression that philosophers in general, and EAs in particular, lean in the “making happy people” direction. I think of there as being roughly three types of reason for this. One is that views of the “making people happy” variety basically always wind up facing structural weirdness when you formalize them. It was my impression until recently that all of these views imply intransitive preferences (i.e something like A>B>C>A), until I had a discussion with Michael St Jules in which he pointed out more recent work that instead denies the independence of irrelevant alternatives. This avoids some problems, but leaves you with something very structurally weird or even absurd to some. I think Larry Temkin has a good quote about it something like “I will have the chocolate ice-cream, unless you have vanilla, in which case I will have strawberry”.
The second reason is the non-identity problem, formalized by Derek Parfit. Basically the issue this raises is that almost all of our decisions that impact the longer term future in some way also change who gets born, so a standard person affecting view seems to allow us to do almost anything to future generations. Use up all their resources, bury radioactive waste, you name it.
The third maybe connects more directly to why EAs in particular often reject these views. Most EAs subscribe to a sort of universalist, beneficent ethics, that seems to imply that if something is genuinely good for someone, then that something is good in a more impersonal sense that tugs on ethics for all. For those of us who live lives worth living, are glad we were born, and don’t want to die, it seems clear that existence is good for us. If this is the case, it seems like this presents a reason for action to anyone who can impact it if we accept this sort of universal form of ethics. Therefore, it seems like we are left with three choices. We can say that our existence actually is good for us, and so it is also good for others to bring it about, we can say that it is not good for others to bring it about, and therefore it is not actually good for us after all, or we can deny that ethics has this omnibenevolent quality. To many EAs, the first choice is clearly best.
I think here is where a standard person-affecting view might counter that it cares about all reasons that actually exist, and if you aren’t born, you don’t actually exist, and so a universal ethics on this timeline cannot care about you either. The issue is that without some better narrowing, this argument seems to prove too much. All ethics is about choosing between possible worlds, so just saying that a good only exists in one possible world doesn’t seem like it will help us in making decisions between these worlds. Arguably the most complete spelling out of a view like this looks sort of like “we should achieve a world in which no reasons for this world not to exist are present, and nothing beyond this equilibrium matters in the same way”. I actually think some variation of this argument is sometimes used by negative utilitarians and people with similar views. A frustrated interest exists in the timeline it is frustrated in, and so any ethics needs to care about it. A positive interest (i.e. having something even better than an already good or neutral state) does not exist in a world in which it isn’t brought about, so it doesn’t provide reasons to that world in the same way. Equilabrium is already adequetely reached when no one is badly off.
This is coherent, but again it proves much more than most people want to about what ethics should actually look like, so going down that route seems to require some extra work.
It depends if by valuing “making people happy” one means 1) intrinsically valuing adding happiness to existing people’s lives, or 2) valuing “making them happy” in the sense of relieving their suffering (practically, this is often what happiness does for people). I agree that violations of transitivity or IIA seem inevitable for views of type (1), and that’s pretty bad.
But (2) is an alternative that I think has gotten weirdly sidelined in (EA) population axiology discourse. If some person is completely content and has no frustrated desires (state A), I don’t see any moral obligation to make them happier (state B), so I don’t violate transitivity by saying the world is not better by adding person A and also not better by adding person B. I suspect lots of people’s “person-affecting” intuitions really boil down to the intuition that preferences that don’t exist—and will not exist—have no need to be fulfilled, as you allude to in your last big paragraph: