Thanks for the detailed reply. For now, I will only address your comments at the end, since I haven’t read the sources you cite and haven’t thought about this much beyond what I wrote previously. (As a note of color, Johann and I did the BPhil together and used to meet every week for several hours to discuss philosophy, although he kept developing his views about population ethics after he moved to Harvard; you have rekindled my interest in reading his dissertation.)
What do you mean by “the phenomenology of the intuitions” here?
I mean that the intuitions triggered by the interpersonal and the intrapersonal cases feel very similar from the inside. For example, if I try to describe why the interpersonal case feels repugnant, I’m inclined to say stuff like “it feels like something would be missing” or “there’s more to life than that”; and this is exactly what I would also say to describe why the intrapersonal case feels repugnant. How these two intuitions feel also makes me reasonably confident that fMRI scans of people presented with both cases would show very similar patterns of brain activity.
One important difference between the interpersonal and intrapersonal cases is that in the intrapersonal case, people may (or may not!) prefer to live much longer overall, even sacrificing their other interests. It’s not clear they’re actually worse off overall or even at each moment in something that might “look” like Z, once we take the preference(s) for Z over A into account. We might be miscalculating the utilities before doing so. For something similar to happen in the interpersonal case, the people in A would have to prefer Z, and then similarly, Z wouldn’t seem so objectionable.
I think that supposed difference is ruled out by the way the intrapersonal case is constructed. In any case, what I regard as the most interesting intrapersonal version is one where it is analogous to the interpersonal version in this respect. Of course, we can discuss a scenario of the sort you describe, but then I would no longer say that my intuitions about the two cases feel very similar, or that we can learn much by comparing the two cases.
I have moral uncertainty, and I’m sympathetic to multiple views, but what they have in common is that I deny the existence of terminal goods (whose creation is good in itself, or that can make up for bads or for other things that matter going worse than otherwise) and that I recognize the existence of terminal bads. They’re all versions of negative prioritarianism/utilitarianism or very similar.
Thanks for the detailed reply. For now, I will only address your comments at the end, since I haven’t read the sources you cite and haven’t thought about this much beyond what I wrote previously. (As a note of color, Johann and I did the BPhil together and used to meet every week for several hours to discuss philosophy, although he kept developing his views about population ethics after he moved to Harvard; you have rekindled my interest in reading his dissertation.)
I mean that the intuitions triggered by the interpersonal and the intrapersonal cases feel very similar from the inside. For example, if I try to describe why the interpersonal case feels repugnant, I’m inclined to say stuff like “it feels like something would be missing” or “there’s more to life than that”; and this is exactly what I would also say to describe why the intrapersonal case feels repugnant. How these two intuitions feel also makes me reasonably confident that fMRI scans of people presented with both cases would show very similar patterns of brain activity.
I think that supposed difference is ruled out by the way the intrapersonal case is constructed. In any case, what I regard as the most interesting intrapersonal version is one where it is analogous to the interpersonal version in this respect. Of course, we can discuss a scenario of the sort you describe, but then I would no longer say that my intuitions about the two cases feel very similar, or that we can learn much by comparing the two cases.
Makes sense. Thanks for the clarification.