Ah, well maybe we should just defer to Broome and Greaves and not engage in the object-level discussions at all! That would certainly save time… FWIW, it’s pretty common in philosophy to say “Person X conceptualises problem P in such and such a way. What they miss out is such and such.”
All views in pop ethics have bonkers results, something that is widely agreed by population ethicists. Your latest example is about the procreative asymmetry (creating happy lives neutral, creating unhappy lives bad). Quite of lot of people with person-affecting intuitions think there is a procreative asymmetry, so would agree with you, but it’s proved quite hard to defend. Ralph Bader, here, has a rather interesting and novel defence of it: https://homeweb.unifr.ch/BaderR/Pub/Asymmetry (R. Bader).pdf. Another strategy is to say you have no reason not to create the miserable child, but you have reason to end it’s life once it starts existing; this doesn’t help with scenarios where you can’t end the life.
You may just write me off as a monster, but I quite like symmetries and I’m minded to accept a symmetrical person-affecting view (at least, I quite a bunch of credence in it). The line of thought is that existence and non-existence are not comparable. The challenge in defending an asymmetric person-affecting view is arguing why it’s not good for someone to be creatied with a happy life, but why it is bad for them to have an unhappy life.
The line of thought is that existence and non-existence are not comparable. The challenge in defending an asymmetric person-affecting view is arguing why it’s not good for someone to be creatied with a happy life, but why it is bad for them to have an unhappy life.
Maybe the first is good in a sense, but the goodness and badness should be thought of as moral reasons directed from outcomes in which they exist to (the same or other) outcomes, or something like world-dependent rankings. Existence and non-existence are comparable for an individual, but only in outcomes in which the individual actually exists (or comes to exist). You might imagine this like a process of deliberation, starting from one outcome/choice, and then following the moral reasons to others whenever compelled to do so. You would check what happens starting from each choice/outcome. To illustrate the procreation asymmetry, which is pretty simple:
There’s no arrow starting from Nonexistence, and the person who doesn’t exist wouldn’t rank any outcomes (or have outcomes ranked for them) precisely because they don’t/won’t exist. So Nonexistence is permissible despite the presence of Positive existence as an option, since from Nonexistence, nothing is strictly better; there’s no reason from this outcome to choose otherwise.
From Negative existence, Nonexistence and Positive existence look better, since the individual would rank Nonexistence better for themself, or this is done for them.
From Positive existence, Positive existence is ranked higher than Nonexistence and Negative existence and not worse than any option, so it is permissible. It is not obligatory because of 1.
Ah, well maybe we should just defer to Broome and Greaves and not engage in the object-level discussions at all!
Hah perhaps I deserved this. I was just trying to indicate that there are people who both ‘understand the theory’ and hold that the <A, B1, B2> argument is important which was a response to your “I find people do tend to very easily dismiss the view, but usually without really understanding how it works!” comment. I concede though that you weren’t saying that of everyone.
All views in pop ethics have bonkers results, something that is widely agreed by population ethicists.
Yes I understand that it’s a matter of accepting the least bonkers result. Personally I find the idea that it might be neutral to bring miserable lives into this world is up there with some of the more bonkers results.
You may just write me off as a monster, but I quite like symmetries and I’m minded to accept a symmetrical person-affecting view
I don’t write you off as a monster! We all have different intuitions about what is repugnant. It is useful to have (I think) reached a better understanding of both of our views.
My view goes something like:
I am not willing to concede that it might be neutral to bring terrible lives into this world which means I reject necessitarianism and therefore feel the force of the <A, B1, B2> argument (as I also hold transitivity to be an important axiom). I’m not sure if I’m convinced by your argument that necessitarianism gets you out the quandary (maybe it does, I would have to think about it more) but ultimately it doesn’t matter to me as I reject necessitarianism anyway.
I note that MichaelStJules says that you can hold onto transitivity at the expense of IIA, but I don’t think this does a whole lot for me. I am also concerned by the non-identity problem. Ultimately I’m not really convinced by arguably the least objectionable person-affecting view out there (you can see my top-level comment on this post), and this all leads me to having more credence in total utilitarianism than person-affecting views (which certainly wasn’t always the case).
The ‘bonkers result’ with total utilitarianism is the repugnant conclusion which I don’t find to be repugnant as I think “lives barely worth living” are actually pretty decent—they are worth living after all! But then there’s the “very repugnant conclusion” which still somewhat bothers me. (EDIT: I am also interested by the claim in this paper that the repugnant conclusion afflicts all population axiologies, including person-affecting views, although I haven’t actually read through the paper yet to understand it completely).
So overall I’m still somewhat morally uncertain about population axiology, but probably have highest credence in total utilitarianism. In any case it is interesting to note that it has been argued that even minimal credence in total utilitarianism can justify acting as a total utilitarian, if one resolves moral uncertainty by maximising expected moral value.
So all in all I’m content to act as a total utilitarian, at least for now.
I am also interested by the claim in this paper that the repugnant conclusion afflicts all population axiologies, including person-affecting views, although I haven’t actually read through the paper yet to understand it completely
I’d just check the definition of the Extended very repugnant conclusion (XVRC) on p. 19. Roughly, tiny changes in welfare (e.g. pin pricks, dust specks) to an appropriate base population can make up for the addition of any number of arbitrarily bad lives and the foregoing of any number of arbitrarily good lives. The base population depends on the magnitude of the change in welfare, and the bad and good lives.
The claim of the paper is that basically all theories so far have led to the XVRC.
It’s possible to come up with theories that don’t. Take Meacham’s approach, and instead of using the sum of harms, use the maximum individual harm (and the counterpart relations should be defined to minimize the max harm in the world).
Or do something like this for pairwise comparisons only, and then extend using some kind of voting method, like beatpath, as discussed in Thomas’s paper on the asymmetry.
This is similar to the view the animal rights ethicist Tom Regan described here:
Given that these conditions are fulfilled, the choice concerning who should be saved must be decided by what I term the harm principle. Space prevents me from explaining that principle fully here (see The Case, chapters 3 and 8, for my considered views). Suffice it to say that no one has a right to have his lesser harm count for more than the greater harm of another. Thus, if death would be a lesser harm for the dog than it would be for any of the human survivors—(and this is an assumption Singer does not dispute)—then the dog’s right not to be harmed would not be violated if he were cast overboard. In these perilous circumstances, assuming that no one’s right to be treated with respect has been part of their creation, the dog’s individual right not to be harmed must be weighed equitably against the same right of each of the individual human survivors.
To weigh these rights in this fashion is not to violate anyone’s right to be treated with respect; just the opposite is true, which is why numbers make no difference in such a case. Given, that is, that what we must do is weigh the harm faced by any one individual against the harm faced by each other individual, on an individual, not a group or collective basis, it then makes no difference how many individuals will each suffer a lesser, or who will each suffer a greater, harm. It would not be wrong to cast a million dogs overboard to save the four human survivors, assuming the lifeboat case were otherwise the same. But neither would it be wrong to cast a million humans overboard to save a canine survivor, if the harm death would be for the humans was, in each case, less than the harm death would be for the dog.
These approaches all sacrifice the independence of irrelevant alternatives or transitivity.
Another way to “avoid” it is to recognize gaps in welfare, so that the smallest change in welfare (in one direction from a given level) allowed is intuitively large. For example, maybe there’s a lexical threshold for sufficiently intense suffering, and a gap in welfare just before it. Suffering may be bearable to different degrees, but some kinds may just be completely unbearable, and the threshold could be where it becomes completely unbearable; see some discussion of thresholds here. Then people people past the threshold is extremely bad, no matter where they start, whether that’s right next to the threshold, or from non-existence.
Or, maybe there’s no gap, but just barely pushing people past that threshold is extremely bad anyway, and roughly as bad as bringing people into existence already past that threshold. I think a gap in welfare is functionally the same, but explains this better.
I am also interested by the claim in this paper that the repugnant conclusion afflicts all population axiologies, including person-affecting views
Not negative utilitarian axiology. The proof relies on the assumption that the utility variable u can be positive.
What if “utility” is meant to refer to the objective aspects of the beings’ experience etc. that axiologies would judge as good or bad—rather than to moral goodness or badness themselves? Then I think there are two problems:
1) Supposing it’s a fair move to aggregate all these aspects into one scalar, the theorem assumes the function f must be strictly increasing. Under this interpretation the NU function would be f(u) = min(u, 0).
2) I deny that such aggregation even is a reasonable move. Restricting to hedonic welfare for simplicity, it would be more appropriate for f to be a function of two variables, happiness and suffering. Collapsing this into a scalar input, I think, obscures some massive moral differences between different formulations of the Repugnant Conclusion, for example. Interestingly, though, if we formulate the VRC as in that paper by treating all positive values of u as “only happiness, no suffering” and all negative values as “only suffering, no happiness” (thereby making my objection on this point irrelevant) the theorem still goes through for all those axiologies. But not for NU.
Edit: The paper seems to acknowledge point #2, though not the implications for NU:
One way to see that a ε increase could be very repugnant is to recall Portmore’s (1999) suggestion that ε lives in the restricted RC could be “roller coaster” lives, in which there is much that is wonderful, but also much terribly suffering, such that the good ever-so-slightly outweighs the bad. Here, one admitted possibility is that an ε-change could substantially increase the terrible suffering in a life, and also increase good components; such a ε-change is not the only possible ε-change, but it would have the consequence of increasing the total amount of suffering. … Moreover, if ε-changes are of the “roller coaster” form, they could increase deep suffering considerably beyond even the arbitrarily many [u < 0] lives, and in fact could require everyone in the chosen population to experience terrible suffering.
Plenty of theories avoid the RC and VRC, but this paper extends the VRC on p. 19. Basically, you can make up for the addition of an arbitrary number of arbitrarily bad lives instead of an arbitrary number of arbitrarily good lives with arbitrarily small changes to welfare to a base population, which depends on the previous factors.
For NU (including lexical threshold NU), this can mean adding an arbitrarily huge number of new people to hell to barely reduce the suffering for each person in a sufficiently large population already in hell. (And also not getting the very positive lives, but NU treats them as 0 welfare anyway.)
Also, related to your edit, epsilon changes could flip a huge number of good or neutral lives in a base population to marginally bad lives.
For NU (including lexical threshold NU), this can mean adding an arbitrarily huge number of new people to hell to barely reduce the suffering for each person in a sufficiently large population already in hell. (And also not getting the very positive lives, but NU treats them as 0 welfare anyway.)
This may be counterintuitive to an extent, but to me it doesn’t reach “very repugnant” territory. Misery is still reduced here; an epsilon change of the “reducing extreme suffering” sort, evenly if barely so, doesn’t seem morally frivolous like the creation of an epsilon-happy life or, worse, creation of an epsilon roller coaster life. But I’ll have to think about this more. It’s a good point, thanks for bringing it to my attention.
For NU (including lexical threshold NU), this can mean adding an arbitrarily huge number of new people to hell to barely reduce the suffering for each person in a sufficiently large population already in hell.
What would it mean to repeat this step (up to an infinite number of times)?
Intuitively, it sounds to me like the suffering gets divided more equally between those who already exist and those who do not, which ultimately leads to an infinite population where everyone has a subjectively perfect experience.
In the finite case, it leads to an extremely large population of almost perfectly untroubled lives.
If extrapolated in this way, it seems quite plausible that the population we eventually get by repeating this step is much better than the initial population.
FWIW, there’s a sense in which total utilitarianism is my 2nd favourite view: I like its symmetry and I think it has the right approach to aggregation. In so far as I am totalist, I don’t find the repugnant conclusion repugant. I just have issues with comparativism and impersonal value.
It’s not obvious to me totalism does ‘swamp’ if one appeals to moral uncertainty, but that’s another promissory note.
Ralph Bader, here, has a rather interesting and novel defence of it: https://homeweb.unifr.ch/BaderR/Pub/Asymmetry (R. Bader).pdf. Another strategy is to say you have no reason not to create the miserable child, but you have reason to end it’s life once it starts existing; this doesn’t help with scenarios where you can’t end the life.
Ya, this is interesting. Bader’s approach basically is premised on the fact that you’d want to end the life of a miserable child, and you’d want to do it as soon as possible, and ensuring this as soon as possible (in theory, not in practice) basically looks like not bringing them into existence in the first place. You could do this with the amount of badness in general, too, e.g. intensity of experiences, as I described in point 2 here until the end of the comment for suffering specifically.
The second approach you mention seems like it would lead to dynamic inconsistency or a kind of money pump, which seems similar to Bader’s point (from this comment):
if people decide to have a child they know will be forever miserable because they don’t count the harm ahead of time, once the child is born (or the decision to have the child is made), the parent(s) may decide to euthanize (abort, etc.) them for the child’s sake. And then, they could do this [have a child expected to be miserable and then euthanize/abort them] again and again and again, knowing they’ll change their minds at each point, because at each point, although they might recognize the harm, they don’t count it until after the decision is made.
The reason they might do this is because they recognize some benefit to having the child at all, and do not anticipate the need to euthanize/abort them until after the child “counts”. Euthanizing/aborting the child could be costly and outweigh the initial benefits of having the child in the first place, so it seems best to not have the child in the first place. You might respond that not having the child is therefore in the parents’ interests, given expectations about how they will act in the future and this has nothing to do with the child’s interests, so can be handled with a symmetric person-affecting view. However, this is only true because they’re predicting they will take the child’s interests into account. So, they already are taking the child’s interests into account when deciding whether or not to have them at all, just indirectly.
And I can see some person-affecting views approaching mere/benign addition and the repugnant conclusion similarly. You bring the extra people with marginally good lives into existence to get A+, since it’s no worse than A (or better, by benign addition instead of mere addition), but then you’re compelled to redistribute welfare after the fact, and this puts you in an outcome you’d find significantly worse than had you not brought the extra people into existence in the first place. You should predict that you will want to redistribute welfare after the fact when deciding whether or not to bring the extra people into existence at all.
Yup. I suspect Bader’s approach is ultimately ad hoc (I saw him present it at a conf and haven’t been through the paper closely) but I do like it.
On the second bit, I think that’s right with the A, A+ bit: the person-affector can see that letting them new people arrive and then redistributing to everyone is worse for the original people. So if you think that’s what will happen, you should avoid it. Much the same thing to say about the child.
Ah, well maybe we should just defer to Broome and Greaves and not engage in the object-level discussions at all! That would certainly save time… FWIW, it’s pretty common in philosophy to say “Person X conceptualises problem P in such and such a way. What they miss out is such and such.”
All views in pop ethics have bonkers results, something that is widely agreed by population ethicists. Your latest example is about the procreative asymmetry (creating happy lives neutral, creating unhappy lives bad). Quite of lot of people with person-affecting intuitions think there is a procreative asymmetry, so would agree with you, but it’s proved quite hard to defend. Ralph Bader, here, has a rather interesting and novel defence of it: https://homeweb.unifr.ch/BaderR/Pub/Asymmetry (R. Bader).pdf. Another strategy is to say you have no reason not to create the miserable child, but you have reason to end it’s life once it starts existing; this doesn’t help with scenarios where you can’t end the life.
You may just write me off as a monster, but I quite like symmetries and I’m minded to accept a symmetrical person-affecting view (at least, I quite a bunch of credence in it). The line of thought is that existence and non-existence are not comparable. The challenge in defending an asymmetric person-affecting view is arguing why it’s not good for someone to be creatied with a happy life, but why it is bad for them to have an unhappy life.
Maybe the first is good in a sense, but the goodness and badness should be thought of as moral reasons directed from outcomes in which they exist to (the same or other) outcomes, or something like world-dependent rankings. Existence and non-existence are comparable for an individual, but only in outcomes in which the individual actually exists (or comes to exist). You might imagine this like a process of deliberation, starting from one outcome/choice, and then following the moral reasons to others whenever compelled to do so. You would check what happens starting from each choice/outcome. To illustrate the procreation asymmetry, which is pretty simple:
There’s no arrow starting from Nonexistence, and the person who doesn’t exist wouldn’t rank any outcomes (or have outcomes ranked for them) precisely because they don’t/won’t exist. So Nonexistence is permissible despite the presence of Positive existence as an option, since from Nonexistence, nothing is strictly better; there’s no reason from this outcome to choose otherwise.
From Negative existence, Nonexistence and Positive existence look better, since the individual would rank Nonexistence better for themself, or this is done for them.
From Positive existence, Positive existence is ranked higher than Nonexistence and Negative existence and not worse than any option, so it is permissible. It is not obligatory because of 1.
1 and 2 together are the procreation asymmetry.
I discuss this more here.
Hah perhaps I deserved this. I was just trying to indicate that there are people who both ‘understand the theory’ and hold that the <A, B1, B2> argument is important which was a response to your “I find people do tend to very easily dismiss the view, but usually without really understanding how it works!” comment. I concede though that you weren’t saying that of everyone.
Yes I understand that it’s a matter of accepting the least bonkers result. Personally I find the idea that it might be neutral to bring miserable lives into this world is up there with some of the more bonkers results.
I don’t write you off as a monster! We all have different intuitions about what is repugnant. It is useful to have (I think) reached a better understanding of both of our views.
My view goes something like:
I am not willing to concede that it might be neutral to bring terrible lives into this world which means I reject necessitarianism and therefore feel the force of the <A, B1, B2> argument (as I also hold transitivity to be an important axiom). I’m not sure if I’m convinced by your argument that necessitarianism gets you out the quandary (maybe it does, I would have to think about it more) but ultimately it doesn’t matter to me as I reject necessitarianism anyway.
I note that MichaelStJules says that you can hold onto transitivity at the expense of IIA, but I don’t think this does a whole lot for me. I am also concerned by the non-identity problem. Ultimately I’m not really convinced by arguably the least objectionable person-affecting view out there (you can see my top-level comment on this post), and this all leads me to having more credence in total utilitarianism than person-affecting views (which certainly wasn’t always the case).
The ‘bonkers result’ with total utilitarianism is the repugnant conclusion which I don’t find to be repugnant as I think “lives barely worth living” are actually pretty decent—they are worth living after all! But then there’s the “very repugnant conclusion” which still somewhat bothers me. (EDIT: I am also interested by the claim in this paper that the repugnant conclusion afflicts all population axiologies, including person-affecting views, although I haven’t actually read through the paper yet to understand it completely).
So overall I’m still somewhat morally uncertain about population axiology, but probably have highest credence in total utilitarianism. In any case it is interesting to note that it has been argued that even minimal credence in total utilitarianism can justify acting as a total utilitarian, if one resolves moral uncertainty by maximising expected moral value.
So all in all I’m content to act as a total utilitarian, at least for now.
It was actually fairly useful to write that out.
I’d just check the definition of the Extended very repugnant conclusion (XVRC) on p. 19. Roughly, tiny changes in welfare (e.g. pin pricks, dust specks) to an appropriate base population can make up for the addition of any number of arbitrarily bad lives and the foregoing of any number of arbitrarily good lives. The base population depends on the magnitude of the change in welfare, and the bad and good lives.
The claim of the paper is that basically all theories so far have led to the XVRC.
It’s possible to come up with theories that don’t. Take Meacham’s approach, and instead of using the sum of harms, use the maximum individual harm (and the counterpart relations should be defined to minimize the max harm in the world).
Or do something like this for pairwise comparisons only, and then extend using some kind of voting method, like beatpath, as discussed in Thomas’s paper on the asymmetry.
This is similar to the view the animal rights ethicist Tom Regan described here:
These approaches all sacrifice the independence of irrelevant alternatives or transitivity.
Another way to “avoid” it is to recognize gaps in welfare, so that the smallest change in welfare (in one direction from a given level) allowed is intuitively large. For example, maybe there’s a lexical threshold for sufficiently intense suffering, and a gap in welfare just before it. Suffering may be bearable to different degrees, but some kinds may just be completely unbearable, and the threshold could be where it becomes completely unbearable; see some discussion of thresholds here. Then people people past the threshold is extremely bad, no matter where they start, whether that’s right next to the threshold, or from non-existence.
Or, maybe there’s no gap, but just barely pushing people past that threshold is extremely bad anyway, and roughly as bad as bringing people into existence already past that threshold. I think a gap in welfare is functionally the same, but explains this better.
Not negative utilitarian axiology. The proof relies on the assumption that the utility variable u can be positive.
What if “utility” is meant to refer to the objective aspects of the beings’ experience etc. that axiologies would judge as good or bad—rather than to moral goodness or badness themselves? Then I think there are two problems:
1) Supposing it’s a fair move to aggregate all these aspects into one scalar, the theorem assumes the function f must be strictly increasing. Under this interpretation the NU function would be f(u) = min(u, 0).
2) I deny that such aggregation even is a reasonable move. Restricting to hedonic welfare for simplicity, it would be more appropriate for f to be a function of two variables, happiness and suffering. Collapsing this into a scalar input, I think, obscures some massive moral differences between different formulations of the Repugnant Conclusion, for example. Interestingly, though, if we formulate the VRC as in that paper by treating all positive values of u as “only happiness, no suffering” and all negative values as “only suffering, no happiness” (thereby making my objection on this point irrelevant) the theorem still goes through for all those axiologies. But not for NU.
Edit: The paper seems to acknowledge point #2, though not the implications for NU:
Plenty of theories avoid the RC and VRC, but this paper extends the VRC on p. 19. Basically, you can make up for the addition of an arbitrary number of arbitrarily bad lives instead of an arbitrary number of arbitrarily good lives with arbitrarily small changes to welfare to a base population, which depends on the previous factors.
For NU (including lexical threshold NU), this can mean adding an arbitrarily huge number of new people to hell to barely reduce the suffering for each person in a sufficiently large population already in hell. (And also not getting the very positive lives, but NU treats them as 0 welfare anyway.)
Also, related to your edit, epsilon changes could flip a huge number of good or neutral lives in a base population to marginally bad lives.
This may be counterintuitive to an extent, but to me it doesn’t reach “very repugnant” territory. Misery is still reduced here; an epsilon change of the “reducing extreme suffering” sort, evenly if barely so, doesn’t seem morally frivolous like the creation of an epsilon-happy life or, worse, creation of an epsilon roller coaster life. But I’ll have to think about this more. It’s a good point, thanks for bringing it to my attention.
What would it mean to repeat this step (up to an infinite number of times)?
Intuitively, it sounds to me like the suffering gets divided more equally between those who already exist and those who do not, which ultimately leads to an infinite population where everyone has a subjectively perfect experience.
In the finite case, it leads to an extremely large population of almost perfectly untroubled lives.
If extrapolated in this way, it seems quite plausible that the population we eventually get by repeating this step is much better than the initial population.
I wrote some more about this here in reply to Jack.
Glad we made some progress!
FWIW, there’s a sense in which total utilitarianism is my 2nd favourite view: I like its symmetry and I think it has the right approach to aggregation. In so far as I am totalist, I don’t find the repugnant conclusion repugant. I just have issues with comparativism and impersonal value.
It’s not obvious to me totalism does ‘swamp’ if one appeals to moral uncertainty, but that’s another promissory note.
Anyway, a useful discussion.
Definitely a useful discussion and I look forward to seeing you write more on all of this!
Ya, this is interesting. Bader’s approach basically is premised on the fact that you’d want to end the life of a miserable child, and you’d want to do it as soon as possible, and ensuring this as soon as possible (in theory, not in practice) basically looks like not bringing them into existence in the first place. You could do this with the amount of badness in general, too, e.g. intensity of experiences, as I described in point 2 here until the end of the comment for suffering specifically.
The second approach you mention seems like it would lead to dynamic inconsistency or a kind of money pump, which seems similar to Bader’s point (from this comment):
The reason they might do this is because they recognize some benefit to having the child at all, and do not anticipate the need to euthanize/abort them until after the child “counts”. Euthanizing/aborting the child could be costly and outweigh the initial benefits of having the child in the first place, so it seems best to not have the child in the first place. You might respond that not having the child is therefore in the parents’ interests, given expectations about how they will act in the future and this has nothing to do with the child’s interests, so can be handled with a symmetric person-affecting view. However, this is only true because they’re predicting they will take the child’s interests into account. So, they already are taking the child’s interests into account when deciding whether or not to have them at all, just indirectly.
And I can see some person-affecting views approaching mere/benign addition and the repugnant conclusion similarly. You bring the extra people with marginally good lives into existence to get A+, since it’s no worse than A (or better, by benign addition instead of mere addition), but then you’re compelled to redistribute welfare after the fact, and this puts you in an outcome you’d find significantly worse than had you not brought the extra people into existence in the first place. You should predict that you will want to redistribute welfare after the fact when deciding whether or not to bring the extra people into existence at all.
Yup. I suspect Bader’s approach is ultimately ad hoc (I saw him present it at a conf and haven’t been through the paper closely) but I do like it.
On the second bit, I think that’s right with the A, A+ bit: the person-affector can see that letting them new people arrive and then redistributing to everyone is worse for the original people. So if you think that’s what will happen, you should avoid it. Much the same thing to say about the child.