One is that views of the âmaking people happyâ 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 âmaking people happyâ one means 1) intrinsically valuing adding happiness to existing peopleâs lives, or 2) valuing âmaking them happyâ 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 thatâs 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 donât see any moral obligation to make them happier (state B), so I donât 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 peopleâs âperson-affectingâ intuitions really boil down to the intuition that preferences that donât existâand will not existâhave 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 isnât brought about, so it doesnât provide reasons to that world in the same way
It depends if by valuing âmaking people happyâ one means 1) intrinsically valuing adding happiness to existing peopleâs lives, or 2) valuing âmaking them happyâ 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 thatâs 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 donât see any moral obligation to make them happier (state B), so I donât 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 peopleâs âperson-affectingâ intuitions really boil down to the intuition that preferences that donât existâand will not existâhave no need to be fulfilled, as you allude to in your last big paragraph: