(FWIW, I never downvoted your comments and have upvoted them instead, and I appreciate the engagement and thoughtful questions/pushback, since it helps me make my own views clearer. Since I spent several hours on this thread, I might not respond quickly or at all to further comments.)
The question is, then, simply: “If bringing about Z sacrifices people in A, why doesn’t bringing about A sacrifice people in Z?” You say that you’d be sacrificing someone “even if they would be far better off than the first person”, which seems to commit you to the claim that you would indeed be sacrificing people in Z by bringing about A.
Sorry, I tried to respond to that in an edit you must have missed, since I realized I didn’t after posting my reply. In short, a wide person-affecting view means that Z would involve “sacrifice” and A would not, if both populations are completely disjoint and contingent, roughly because the people in A have worse off “counterparts” in Z, and the excess positive welfare people in Z without counterparts don’t compensate for this. No one in Z is better off than anyone in A, so none are better off than their counterparts in A, so there can’t be any sacrifice in a “wide” way in this direction. The Nonidentity problem would involve “sacrifice” in one way only, too, under a wide view.
(If all the people in Z already exist, and none of the people in A exist, then going from Z to A by killing everyone in Z could indeed mean “sacrificing” the people in Z for those in A, under some person-affecting views, and be bad under some such views.
Under a narrow view (instead of a wide one), with disjoint contingent populations, we’d be indifferent between A and Z, or they’d be incomparable, and both or neither would involve “sacrifice”.)
On value receptacles, here’s a quote by Frick (on his website), from a paper in which he defends the procreation asymmetry:
For another, it feeds a common criticism of utilitarianism, namely that it treats people as fungible and views them in a quasi-instrumental fashion. Instrumental valuing is an attitude that we have towards particulars. However, to value something instrumentally is to value it, in essence, for its causal properties. But these same causal properties could just as well be instantiated by some other particular thing. Hence, insofar as a particular entity is valued only instrumentally, it is regarded as fungible. Similarly, a teleological view which regards our welfare-related reasons as purely state-regarding can be accused of taking a quasi-instrumental approach towards people. It views them as fungible receptacles for well-being, not as mattering qua individuals.29 Totalist utilitarianism, it is often said, does not take persons sufficiently seriously. By treating the moral significance of persons and their well-being as derivative of their contribution to valuable states of affairs, it reverses what strikes most of us as the correct order of dependence.30 Human wellbeing matters because people matter – not vice versa.
I haven’t thought much about this particular way of framing the receptacle objection, and what I have in mind is basically what Frick wrote later:
any reasons to confer well-being on a person are conditional on the fact of her existence.
This is a bit vague: what do we mean by “conditional”? But there are plausible interpretations that symmetric person-affecting views, asymmetric person-affecting views and negative axiologies satisfy, while the total view, reverse asymmetric person-affecting views and positive axiologies don’t really seem to have such plausible interpretations (or have fewer and/or less plausible interpretations).
I have two ways in mind that seem compatible with the procreation asymmetry, but not the total view:
First, in line with my linked shortform comment about the asymmetry, a person’s interests should only direct us from outcomes in which they (the person, or the given interests) exist or will exist to the same or other outcomes (possibly including outcomes in which they don’t exist), and all reasons with regards to a given person are of this form. I think this is basically an actualist argument (which Frick discusses and objects to in his paper). Having reasons regarding an individual A in an outcome in which they don’t exist direct us towards an outcome in which they do exist would not seem conditional on A’s existence. It’s more “conditional” if the reasons regarding a given outcome come from that outcome than from other outcomes.
Second, there’s Frick’s approach. Here’s a simplified evaluative version:
All of our reasons with regards to persons should be of the following form:
It is in one way better that the following is satisfied: if person A exists, then P(A),
where P is a predicate that depends terminally only on A’s interests.
Setting P(A)=”A has a life worth living” would give us reason to prevent lives not worth living. Plus, there’s no P(A) we could use that would imply that a given world with A is in one way better (due to the statement with P(A)) than a given world without A. So, this is compatible with the procreation asymmetry, but not the total view.
It could be “wide” and solve the Nonidentity problem, since we can find P such that P would be satisfied for B but not A, if B would be better off than A, so we would have more reasons for A not to exist than for B not to exist.
It’s also compatible with antifrustrationism and negative utilitarianism in a few ways:
If we apply it to preferences instead of whole persons, with predicates like P(A)=”A is satisfied”
If we use predicates like “P(A)=if A has interest y, then y is satisfied at least to degree d”
If we use predicates like “P(A)=A has welfare at least w”, allowing for the possibility of positive welfare being better than less in an existing individual, but being perfectionistic about it, so that anything worse than the best is worse than nonexistence.
I think part of what follows in Frick’s paper is about applying/extending this in a way that isn’t basically antinatalist.
For a negative utilitarian, it seems that whether the assumption is made is in fact crucial, since the “muzak and potatoes” life is as good as it can be (it lacks any unpleasantness) whereas other lives could contain huge amounts of suffering.
Ya, this seems right to me.
My point is that the phenomenology of the intuitions at the interpersonal and intrapersonal levels is essentially the same, which strongly suggests that the same factor is triggering those intuitions in both cases.
What do you mean by “the phenomenology of the intuitions” here?
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.
Although I’m not sure I’m understanding you correctly, you then seem to be suggesting that your views can in fact vindicate the claim that you’d be sacrificing your future selves or treating them as value receptacles. Is this what you are claiming? It would help me if you describe what you yourself believe, as opposed to discussing the implications of a wide variety of views.
It’s more about my interests/preferences than my future selves, and not sacrificing them or treating them as value receptacles. I think respect for autonomy/preferences requires not treating our preferences as mere value receptacles that you can just make more of to get more value and make things go better, and this can rule out both the interpersonal RC and the intrapersonal RC. This is in principle, ignoring other reasons, indirect effects, etc., so not necessarily in practice.
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.)
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.
(FWIW, I never downvoted your comments and have upvoted them instead, and I appreciate the engagement and thoughtful questions/pushback, since it helps me make my own views clearer. Since I spent several hours on this thread, I might not respond quickly or at all to further comments.)
Sorry, I tried to respond to that in an edit you must have missed, since I realized I didn’t after posting my reply. In short, a wide person-affecting view means that Z would involve “sacrifice” and A would not, if both populations are completely disjoint and contingent, roughly because the people in A have worse off “counterparts” in Z, and the excess positive welfare people in Z without counterparts don’t compensate for this. No one in Z is better off than anyone in A, so none are better off than their counterparts in A, so there can’t be any sacrifice in a “wide” way in this direction. The Nonidentity problem would involve “sacrifice” in one way only, too, under a wide view.
(If all the people in Z already exist, and none of the people in A exist, then going from Z to A by killing everyone in Z could indeed mean “sacrificing” the people in Z for those in A, under some person-affecting views, and be bad under some such views.
Under a narrow view (instead of a wide one), with disjoint contingent populations, we’d be indifferent between A and Z, or they’d be incomparable, and both or neither would involve “sacrifice”.)
On value receptacles, here’s a quote by Frick (on his website), from a paper in which he defends the procreation asymmetry:
I haven’t thought much about this particular way of framing the receptacle objection, and what I have in mind is basically what Frick wrote later:
This is a bit vague: what do we mean by “conditional”? But there are plausible interpretations that symmetric person-affecting views, asymmetric person-affecting views and negative axiologies satisfy, while the total view, reverse asymmetric person-affecting views and positive axiologies don’t really seem to have such plausible interpretations (or have fewer and/or less plausible interpretations).
I have two ways in mind that seem compatible with the procreation asymmetry, but not the total view:
First, in line with my linked shortform comment about the asymmetry, a person’s interests should only direct us from outcomes in which they (the person, or the given interests) exist or will exist to the same or other outcomes (possibly including outcomes in which they don’t exist), and all reasons with regards to a given person are of this form. I think this is basically an actualist argument (which Frick discusses and objects to in his paper). Having reasons regarding an individual A in an outcome in which they don’t exist direct us towards an outcome in which they do exist would not seem conditional on A’s existence. It’s more “conditional” if the reasons regarding a given outcome come from that outcome than from other outcomes.
Second, there’s Frick’s approach. Here’s a simplified evaluative version:
Setting P(A)=”A has a life worth living” would give us reason to prevent lives not worth living. Plus, there’s no P(A) we could use that would imply that a given world with A is in one way better (due to the statement with P(A)) than a given world without A. So, this is compatible with the procreation asymmetry, but not the total view.
It could be “wide” and solve the Nonidentity problem, since we can find P such that P would be satisfied for B but not A, if B would be better off than A, so we would have more reasons for A not to exist than for B not to exist.
It’s also compatible with antifrustrationism and negative utilitarianism in a few ways:
If we apply it to preferences instead of whole persons, with predicates like P(A)=”A is satisfied”
If we use predicates like “P(A)=if A has interest y, then y is satisfied at least to degree d”
If we use predicates like “P(A)=A has welfare at least w”, allowing for the possibility of positive welfare being better than less in an existing individual, but being perfectionistic about it, so that anything worse than the best is worse than nonexistence.
I think part of what follows in Frick’s paper is about applying/extending this in a way that isn’t basically antinatalist.
Ya, this seems right to me.
What do you mean by “the phenomenology of the intuitions” here?
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.
It’s more about my interests/preferences than my future selves, and not sacrificing them or treating them as value receptacles. I think respect for autonomy/preferences requires not treating our preferences as mere value receptacles that you can just make more of to get more value and make things go better, and this can rule out both the interpersonal RC and the intrapersonal RC. This is in principle, ignoring other reasons, indirect effects, etc., so not necessarily in practice.
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.