I agree that most philosophical literature on person-affecting views ends up focusing on transitive views that can’t be Dutch booked in this particular way (I think precisely because not many people want to defend intransitivity).
I think the typical person-affecting intuitions that people actually have are better captured by the view in my post than by any of these four families of views, and that’s the audience to which I’m writing. This wasn’t meant to be a serious engagement with the population ethics literature; I’ve now signposted that more clearly.
EDIT: I just ran these positions (except actualism, because I don’t understand how you make decisions with actualism) by someone who isn’t familiar with population ethics, and they found all of them intuitively ridiculous. They weren’t thrilled with the view I laid out but they did find it more intuitive.
Okay, that seems fair. And I agree that the Dutch book is a good argument against the person-affecting intuitions you lay out. But the argument only shows that people initially attracted to those person-affecting intuitions should move to a non-Dutch-bookable person-affecting view. If we want to move people away from person-affecting views entirely, we need other arguments.
The person-affecting views endorsed by philosophers these days are more complex than the families I listed. They’re not so intuitively ridiculous (though I think they still have problems. I have a couple of draft papers on this.).
Also a minor terminological note, you’ve called your argument a Dutch book and so have I. But I think it would be more standard to call it a money pump. Dutch books are a set of gambles all taken at once that are guaranteed to leave a person worse off. Money pumps are a set of trades taken one after the other that are guaranteed to leave a person worse off.
If we want to move people away from person-affecting views entirely, we need other arguments.
Fwiw, I wasn’t particularly trying to do this. I’m not super happy with any particular view on population ethics and I wouldn’t be that surprised if the actual view I settled on after a long reflection was pretty different from anything that exists today, and does incorporate something vaguely like person-affecting intuitions.
I mostly notice that people who have some but not much experience with longtermism are often very aware of the Repugnant Conclusion and other objections to total utilitarianism, and conclude that actually person-affecting intuitions are the right way to go. In at least two cases they seemed to significantly reconsider upon presenting this argument. It seems to me like, amongst the population of people who haven’t engaged with the population ethics literature, critiques of total utilitarianism are much better known than critiques of person affecting intuitions. I’m just trying to fix that discrepancy.
Also a minor terminological note, you’ve called your argument a Dutch book and so have I. But I think it would be more standard to call it a money pump.
Here’s another good argument against person-affecting views that can be explained pretty simply, due to Tomi Francis.
Person-affecting views imply that it’s not good to add happy people. But Q is better than P, because Q is better for the hundred already-existing people, and the ten billion extra people in Q all live happy lives. And R is better than Q, because moving to R makes one hundred people’s lives slightly worse and ten billion people’s lives much better. Since betterness is transitive, R is better than P. R and P are identical except for the extra ten billion people living happy lives in R. Therefore, it’s good to add happy people, and person-affecting views are false.
There are also Parfit’s original Mere Addition argument and Huemer’s Benign Addition argument for the Repugnant Conclusion. They’re the familiar A≤A+<B arguments, adding a large marginally positive welfare population, and then redistributing the welfare evenly, except with Huemer’s, A<A+, strictly, because those in A are made slightly better off in A+.
I think this kind of argument can be used to show that actualism endorses the RC and Very RC in some cases, because the original world without the extra people does not maximize “self-conditional value” (if the original people in A are better off in A+, via benign addition), whereas B does, using additive aggregation.
I think the Tomi Francis example also only has R maximizing self-conditional value, among the three options, when all three are available. And we could even make the original 100 people worse off than 40 each in R, and this would still hold.
I guess HMVs, presentist and necessitarian views may work to avoid the RC and VRC, but AFAICT, you only get the procreation asymmetry by assuming some kind of asymmetry with these views. And they all have some pretty unusual prescriptions I find unintuitive, even as someone very sympathetic to person-affecting views.
Frick’s conditional interests still seem promising and could maybe be used to justify the procreation asymmetry for some kind of HMV or negative axiology.
I agree that most philosophical literature on person-affecting views ends up focusing on transitive views that can’t be Dutch booked in this particular way (I think precisely because not many people want to defend intransitivity).
I think the typical person-affecting intuitions that people actually have are better captured by the view in my post than by any of these four families of views, and that’s the audience to which I’m writing. This wasn’t meant to be a serious engagement with the population ethics literature; I’ve now signposted that more clearly.
EDIT: I just ran these positions (except actualism, because I don’t understand how you make decisions with actualism) by someone who isn’t familiar with population ethics, and they found all of them intuitively ridiculous. They weren’t thrilled with the view I laid out but they did find it more intuitive.
Okay, that seems fair. And I agree that the Dutch book is a good argument against the person-affecting intuitions you lay out. But the argument only shows that people initially attracted to those person-affecting intuitions should move to a non-Dutch-bookable person-affecting view. If we want to move people away from person-affecting views entirely, we need other arguments.
The person-affecting views endorsed by philosophers these days are more complex than the families I listed. They’re not so intuitively ridiculous (though I think they still have problems. I have a couple of draft papers on this.).
Also a minor terminological note, you’ve called your argument a Dutch book and so have I. But I think it would be more standard to call it a money pump. Dutch books are a set of gambles all taken at once that are guaranteed to leave a person worse off. Money pumps are a set of trades taken one after the other that are guaranteed to leave a person worse off.
Fwiw, I wasn’t particularly trying to do this. I’m not super happy with any particular view on population ethics and I wouldn’t be that surprised if the actual view I settled on after a long reflection was pretty different from anything that exists today, and does incorporate something vaguely like person-affecting intuitions.
I mostly notice that people who have some but not much experience with longtermism are often very aware of the Repugnant Conclusion and other objections to total utilitarianism, and conclude that actually person-affecting intuitions are the right way to go. In at least two cases they seemed to significantly reconsider upon presenting this argument. It seems to me like, amongst the population of people who haven’t engaged with the population ethics literature, critiques of total utilitarianism are much better known than critiques of person affecting intuitions. I’m just trying to fix that discrepancy.
Thanks, I’ve changed this.
I see. That seems like a good thing to do.
Here’s another good argument against person-affecting views that can be explained pretty simply, due to Tomi Francis.
Person-affecting views imply that it’s not good to add happy people. But Q is better than P, because Q is better for the hundred already-existing people, and the ten billion extra people in Q all live happy lives. And R is better than Q, because moving to R makes one hundred people’s lives slightly worse and ten billion people’s lives much better. Since betterness is transitive, R is better than P. R and P are identical except for the extra ten billion people living happy lives in R. Therefore, it’s good to add happy people, and person-affecting views are false.
There are also Parfit’s original Mere Addition argument and Huemer’s Benign Addition argument for the Repugnant Conclusion. They’re the familiar A≤A+<B arguments, adding a large marginally positive welfare population, and then redistributing the welfare evenly, except with Huemer’s, A<A+, strictly, because those in A are made slightly better off in A+.
Huemer’s is here: https://philpapers.org/rec/HUEIDO
I think this kind of argument can be used to show that actualism endorses the RC and Very RC in some cases, because the original world without the extra people does not maximize “self-conditional value” (if the original people in A are better off in A+, via benign addition), whereas B does, using additive aggregation.
I think the Tomi Francis example also only has R maximizing self-conditional value, among the three options, when all three are available. And we could even make the original 100 people worse off than 40 each in R, and this would still hold.
Voting methods extending from pairwise comparisons also don’t seem to avoid the problem, either: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/fqynQ4bxsXsAhR79c/teruji-thomas-the-asymmetry-uncertainty-and-the-long-term?commentId=ockB2ZCyyD8SfTKtL
I guess HMVs, presentist and necessitarian views may work to avoid the RC and VRC, but AFAICT, you only get the procreation asymmetry by assuming some kind of asymmetry with these views. And they all have some pretty unusual prescriptions I find unintuitive, even as someone very sympathetic to person-affecting views.
Frick’s conditional interests still seem promising and could maybe be used to justify the procreation asymmetry for some kind of HMV or negative axiology.
Nice, I hadn’t seen this argument before.