I meant, in the post, for the following paragraphs to address the general issue you mention:
Some people don’t think that gratitude of this kind makes sense. Being created, we might say, can’t have been “better for” me, because if I hadn’t been created, I wouldn’t exist, and there would be no one that Wilbur’s choice was “worse for.” And if being created wasn’t better for me, the thought goes, then I shouldn’t be grateful to Wilbur for creating me.
Maybe the issues here are complicated, but at a high level: I don’t buy it. It seems to me very natural to see Wilbur as having done, for me, something incredibly significant — to have given me, on purpose, something that I value deeply. One option, for capturing this, is to say that something can be good for me, without being “better” for me (see e.g. McMahan (2009)). Another option is just to say that being created is better for me than not being created, even if I only exist — at least concretely — in one of the cases. Overall, I don’t feel especially invested in the metaphysics/semantics of “good for” and “better for” in this sort of case. I don’t have a worked out account of these issues, but neither do I see them as especially forceful reason not to be glad that I’m alive, or grateful to someone who caused me to be so.
That is, I don’t take myself to be advocating directly for comparativism here (though a few bits of the language in the post, in particular the reference to “better off dead,” do suggest that). As the quoted paragraphs note, comparativism is one option; another is to say that creating me is good for me, even if it’s not better for me (a la McMahan).
FWIW, though, I do currently feel intuitively open/sympathetic to comparativism, partly because it seems plausible that we can say truly things like “Joe would prefer to be live rather than not to live,” even if Joe doesn’t and never will exist; and clear that we can truly say “Joe prefers to live” in worlds where he does exist; and I tend to think about treating people well as centrally about being responsive to what they care about/would care about. But I haven’t tried to dig in on this stuff, partly because I see things like being glad I’m alive, and grateful to someone who caused me to be so, as on more generally solid ground than things like “betterness for Joe is a relation that requires two concrete Joe lives as relata” (see e.g. the Menagerie argument in Hilary’s powerpoint, p. 13, for the type of thing that makes me think that metaphysical premises like that aren’t a “super solid ground” type area).
At a higher level, though: the point I’m arguing against is specifically that the neutrality intuition is directly intuitive. I don’t see it that way, and the point of “poetically tugging at people’s intuitions” was precisely to try to illustrate and make vivid the intuitive situation as I see it. But as I note at the end — e.g., “direct intuitions about neutrality aren’t the only data available” — it’s a further question whether there is more to be said for neutrality overall (indeed, I think there is — though metaphysical issues like the ones you mention aren’t very central for me here). That said, I tend to see much of person-affecting ethics as driven at least in substantial part by appeal direct intuition, so I do think it would change the overall dialectical landscape a bit if people come in going “intuitively, we have strong reasons to create happy lives. But there are some metaphysical/semantic questions about how to make sense of this…”
I enjoyed the McMahan/Parfit move of saying things are ‘good for’ without being ‘better for’. I think it’s clever, but I don’t buy it. It seems like an linguistic sleight of hand and I don’t really understand how it works.
I agree we have preferences over existing, but, well, so what? The fact I do or would have a preference does not automatically reveal what the axiological facts are. It’s hard to know, even if we grant this, how it extends to not yet existing people. A present non-existing possible person doesn’t have any preference, including whether to exist. We might suppose that, if they could have preferences in their non-existent state, they would have a preference to exist, but this just seems arcane. What sort of hypothetical non-existent entity are we channeling here?
There’s much the same to be said about being glad. I think I’m glad to be alive. But, again, so what? Who said my psychological attitudes generate or reveal axiological facts? Note, we can ask “I am glad, but am I justified in being glad?” and then we have to have the debates about comparativism etc. we’ve been having.
I understand that someone might think this point about understanding the betterness relation is somehow linguistic obscurantism, but it’s not supposed to be. I think I understand how the ‘better for’ relationship works and, because of this, I don’t see how comparativism works. If you say “existence is better for me than non-existence”, I think I am entitled to ask “okay, and what do you mean by ‘better for’?”
Re your last point, I’m not sure I understand your objective: you are trying to say something is intuitive when others say it isn’t? But aren’t our intuitions, well, intuitive, and it’s just a psychological matter of fact whether we have them or not? I assume the neutrality intuition is intuitive for some and not others. It’s a further question whether, on reflection, that intuition is plausible and that’s the issue I was aiming to engage with.
Hi Michael —
I meant, in the post, for the following paragraphs to address the general issue you mention:
That is, I don’t take myself to be advocating directly for comparativism here (though a few bits of the language in the post, in particular the reference to “better off dead,” do suggest that). As the quoted paragraphs note, comparativism is one option; another is to say that creating me is good for me, even if it’s not better for me (a la McMahan).
FWIW, though, I do currently feel intuitively open/sympathetic to comparativism, partly because it seems plausible that we can say truly things like “Joe would prefer to be live rather than not to live,” even if Joe doesn’t and never will exist; and clear that we can truly say “Joe prefers to live” in worlds where he does exist; and I tend to think about treating people well as centrally about being responsive to what they care about/would care about. But I haven’t tried to dig in on this stuff, partly because I see things like being glad I’m alive, and grateful to someone who caused me to be so, as on more generally solid ground than things like “betterness for Joe is a relation that requires two concrete Joe lives as relata” (see e.g. the Menagerie argument in Hilary’s powerpoint, p. 13, for the type of thing that makes me think that metaphysical premises like that aren’t a “super solid ground” type area).
At a higher level, though: the point I’m arguing against is specifically that the neutrality intuition is directly intuitive. I don’t see it that way, and the point of “poetically tugging at people’s intuitions” was precisely to try to illustrate and make vivid the intuitive situation as I see it. But as I note at the end — e.g., “direct intuitions about neutrality aren’t the only data available” — it’s a further question whether there is more to be said for neutrality overall (indeed, I think there is — though metaphysical issues like the ones you mention aren’t very central for me here). That said, I tend to see much of person-affecting ethics as driven at least in substantial part by appeal direct intuition, so I do think it would change the overall dialectical landscape a bit if people come in going “intuitively, we have strong reasons to create happy lives. But there are some metaphysical/semantic questions about how to make sense of this…”
Hello Joe!
I enjoyed the McMahan/Parfit move of saying things are ‘good for’ without being ‘better for’. I think it’s clever, but I don’t buy it. It seems like an linguistic sleight of hand and I don’t really understand how it works.
I agree we have preferences over existing, but, well, so what? The fact I do or would have a preference does not automatically reveal what the axiological facts are. It’s hard to know, even if we grant this, how it extends to not yet existing people. A present non-existing possible person doesn’t have any preference, including whether to exist. We might suppose that, if they could have preferences in their non-existent state, they would have a preference to exist, but this just seems arcane. What sort of hypothetical non-existent entity are we channeling here?
There’s much the same to be said about being glad. I think I’m glad to be alive. But, again, so what? Who said my psychological attitudes generate or reveal axiological facts? Note, we can ask “I am glad, but am I justified in being glad?” and then we have to have the debates about comparativism etc. we’ve been having.
I understand that someone might think this point about understanding the betterness relation is somehow linguistic obscurantism, but it’s not supposed to be. I think I understand how the ‘better for’ relationship works and, because of this, I don’t see how comparativism works. If you say “existence is better for me than non-existence”, I think I am entitled to ask “okay, and what do you mean by ‘better for’?”
Re your last point, I’m not sure I understand your objective: you are trying to say something is intuitive when others say it isn’t? But aren’t our intuitions, well, intuitive, and it’s just a psychological matter of fact whether we have them or not? I assume the neutrality intuition is intuitive for some and not others. It’s a further question whether, on reflection, that intuition is plausible and that’s the issue I was aiming to engage with.