Exactly. I’m actually a bit puzzled as to why this needs to be made explicit. When we say “indifferent about making happy people”, it seems hard to interpret this as indifferent about whether future people will be happy or not. Or am I misreading something here?
It’s possible you are. There are some strains of person-affecting view that are genuinely indifferent to future people, but most person-affecting theorists do accept that being in the future isn’t what makes the difference. What I (and I think some others in this thread) are pointing to is that, even though in theory person-affecting views care about the welfare of future generations, in practice, without making some very difficult modifications to the way the theory thinks of identity that arguably no one has fully pulled off, it still implies near total indifference between impacts on the future.
The reason is basically that personal identity is very fragile. If you were conceived a moment earlier or later, it would have been with a different sperm. Even if it was the same sperm, what if it splits and you have an identical twin in one timeline, and it doesn’t split in the other, which of you is made happier by benefits to this timeline where the zygote doesn’t split? Given this, and the messy, ripple effects that basically all attempts to impact the future even a couple of generations out will have, you are choosing between two different sets of future people whenever you are choosing between policies that impact the future. That is, you are not making future people better off rather than worse off, you are choosing whether a happy group of people gets born, or a different, less happy group.
This sounds academic and easy to just escape from in same number of people cases, but the tricky thing about choosing between distributions of happy people rather than just making people happy is the future scenarios in which not only the identities, but also numbers of these people differ. If you try to construct a view which cares about whatever people exist being well-off, and is indifferent to both these identity considerations and numbers, the most obvious formalization of this is averagism for instance. Unforunately averagism conflicts pretty strongly with person-affecting views, including in ways people often find very absurd (which is why most people aren’t averagists).
Consider for instance the “sadistic conclusion”. If you have a group of very happy people, and you can choose to either bring into existence one person whose life isn’t worth living, or many people whose lives are worth living, but much less happy than the existing people, than averagism can tell you to bring into existence the life not worth living. The basic problem is that, between two options, it can favor the world in which no one is better off and some are worse off, if this happens in such a way that the distribution of welfare is shifted to have more of the population in the best off group.
Averagism isn’t person-affecting at all,though, since it can prioritize creation over existing people, all else equal, and even if it were the most obvious formulation, this doesn’t seem very relevant, since we should consider the best formulations to steelman person-affecting views.
There are person-affecting views that handle different number and different identity cases, although I suppose they’re mostly pretty recent (from the last ~10 years), e.g.:
I think the obvious formulation is relevant to the point I was trying to make, in particular, I was trying to get ahead of what I think is a pretty common first reaction to the non-identity problem. That it is an interesting point, but also clearly too technical and academic to really undermine the theory in practice, so whatever it says it cares about, we should just modify the theory so that it doesn’t care about that. I think this is a natural first reaction, but also the non-identity problem raises genuine substantial issues that have stumped philosophers for decades, and just about any solution you come up with is going to have serious costs and/or revisions from a conventional person-affecting view, for instance if averagism is more superficially similar to person-affecting views (in terms of caring about quality of life rather than quantity), totalism is actually closer to person-affecting logic in practice (it is more intuitive that you in some sense can benefit someone by bringing them into a life worth living than that you benefit someone by making sure they aren’t born into a life worth living but less so than average), but these are the things totalism and averagism respectively can tradeoff against the welfare of those two worlds have in common. It wouldn’t surprise me if there was more promising work out there on this issue, you certainly seem better read on it than me, though it would surprise me if it really contradicted the point about serious costs and revisions I am trying to indicate.
I think the main costs for wide person-affecting views relative to narrow ones for someone who wanted to solve the nonidentity problem are in terms of justifiability (not seeming too ad hoc or arbitrary) and complexity in order to “match” merely possible people with different identities across possible worlds, as in the nondidentity problem. I think for someone set on solving both the nonidentity problem and holding person-affecting views, there will be views that will do intuitively better to them than the closest narrow person-affecting in basically all cases. What I’m imagining is that for most narrow views, there’s a wide modification of the view based on identifying counterparts across worlds that would just match their intuitions about cases better in some cases and never worse. I’m of course not 100% certain, but I expect this to usually approximately be the case.
Exactly. I’m actually a bit puzzled as to why this needs to be made explicit. When we say “indifferent about making happy people”, it seems hard to interpret this as indifferent about whether future people will be happy or not. Or am I misreading something here?
It’s possible you are. There are some strains of person-affecting view that are genuinely indifferent to future people, but most person-affecting theorists do accept that being in the future isn’t what makes the difference. What I (and I think some others in this thread) are pointing to is that, even though in theory person-affecting views care about the welfare of future generations, in practice, without making some very difficult modifications to the way the theory thinks of identity that arguably no one has fully pulled off, it still implies near total indifference between impacts on the future.
The reason is basically that personal identity is very fragile. If you were conceived a moment earlier or later, it would have been with a different sperm. Even if it was the same sperm, what if it splits and you have an identical twin in one timeline, and it doesn’t split in the other, which of you is made happier by benefits to this timeline where the zygote doesn’t split? Given this, and the messy, ripple effects that basically all attempts to impact the future even a couple of generations out will have, you are choosing between two different sets of future people whenever you are choosing between policies that impact the future. That is, you are not making future people better off rather than worse off, you are choosing whether a happy group of people gets born, or a different, less happy group.
This sounds academic and easy to just escape from in same number of people cases, but the tricky thing about choosing between distributions of happy people rather than just making people happy is the future scenarios in which not only the identities, but also numbers of these people differ. If you try to construct a view which cares about whatever people exist being well-off, and is indifferent to both these identity considerations and numbers, the most obvious formalization of this is averagism for instance. Unforunately averagism conflicts pretty strongly with person-affecting views, including in ways people often find very absurd (which is why most people aren’t averagists).
Consider for instance the “sadistic conclusion”. If you have a group of very happy people, and you can choose to either bring into existence one person whose life isn’t worth living, or many people whose lives are worth living, but much less happy than the existing people, than averagism can tell you to bring into existence the life not worth living. The basic problem is that, between two options, it can favor the world in which no one is better off and some are worse off, if this happens in such a way that the distribution of welfare is shifted to have more of the population in the best off group.
Averagism isn’t person-affecting at all,though, since it can prioritize creation over existing people, all else equal, and even if it were the most obvious formulation, this doesn’t seem very relevant, since we should consider the best formulations to steelman person-affecting views.
There are person-affecting views that handle different number and different identity cases, although I suppose they’re mostly pretty recent (from the last ~10 years), e.g.:
Frick, “Conditional Reasons and the Procreation Asymmetry” (not mathematically formalized)
Thomas, “The Asymmetry, Uncertainty, and the Long Term” (wide versions)
Meacham, “Person-Affecting Views and Saturating Counterpart Relations” (objections here, but the idea of counterparts can be reused to turn narrow views into wide ones)
I think the obvious formulation is relevant to the point I was trying to make, in particular, I was trying to get ahead of what I think is a pretty common first reaction to the non-identity problem. That it is an interesting point, but also clearly too technical and academic to really undermine the theory in practice, so whatever it says it cares about, we should just modify the theory so that it doesn’t care about that. I think this is a natural first reaction, but also the non-identity problem raises genuine substantial issues that have stumped philosophers for decades, and just about any solution you come up with is going to have serious costs and/or revisions from a conventional person-affecting view, for instance if averagism is more superficially similar to person-affecting views (in terms of caring about quality of life rather than quantity), totalism is actually closer to person-affecting logic in practice (it is more intuitive that you in some sense can benefit someone by bringing them into a life worth living than that you benefit someone by making sure they aren’t born into a life worth living but less so than average), but these are the things totalism and averagism respectively can tradeoff against the welfare of those two worlds have in common. It wouldn’t surprise me if there was more promising work out there on this issue, you certainly seem better read on it than me, though it would surprise me if it really contradicted the point about serious costs and revisions I am trying to indicate.
I think the main costs for wide person-affecting views relative to narrow ones for someone who wanted to solve the nonidentity problem are in terms of justifiability (not seeming too ad hoc or arbitrary) and complexity in order to “match” merely possible people with different identities across possible worlds, as in the nondidentity problem. I think for someone set on solving both the nonidentity problem and holding person-affecting views, there will be views that will do intuitively better to them than the closest narrow person-affecting in basically all cases. What I’m imagining is that for most narrow views, there’s a wide modification of the view based on identifying counterparts across worlds that would just match their intuitions about cases better in some cases and never worse. I’m of course not 100% certain, but I expect this to usually approximately be the case.