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.
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.