Hello Richard. I’m familiar with the back-and-forths between McMahan and others over the nature and plausibility of TRIA, e.g. those in Gamlund and Solberg (2019) which I assume is still the state of the art (if there’s something better, I would love to know). However, I didn’t want to get into the details here as it would require the introduction of lots of conceptual machinery for very little payoff. (I’ve even been to a whole term of seminars by Jeff McMahan on this topic when I was at Oxford)
But seeing as you’ve raised it …
As Greaves (2019) presses, there is an issue of which person-stages count:
Are the relevant time-relative interests, for instance, only those of present person-stages (“presentism”)? All actual person-stages (“actualism”)? All person-stages that will exist regardless of how one resolves one’s decision (“necessitarianism”)? All person-stages that would exist given some resolution of one’s decision (“possibilism”)? Or something else again?
Whichever choice the TRIA-advocate makes, they will inherit structurally the same issues for those as one finds for the equivalent theories in population ethics (for those, see Greaves (2017)).
The version of TRIA you are referring to is, I think, actualist person-stage version: if so, then the view is not action-guiding (the issue of normative invariance). If you save the child, it will have those future stages, so it’ll be good that it lived; if you don’t save the child, it won’t, so it won’t be bad that it didn’t. Okay, should you save the child? Well, the view doesn’t tell you either way!
The actualist version can’t be the one at hand, as it doesn’t say that it’s good (for the child) if you save it (vs the case where you don’t).
I am, I think, implicitly assuming a present-stage-interest version of TRIA, as that’s the one that generates the value-of-death-at-different-ages curve that is relevantly different from the deprivationist one.
Hello Richard. I’m familiar with the back-and-forths between McMahan and others over the nature and plausibility of TRIA, e.g. those in Gamlund and Solberg (2019) which I assume is still the state of the art (if there’s something better, I would love to know). However, I didn’t want to get into the details here as it would require the introduction of lots of conceptual machinery for very little payoff. (I’ve even been to a whole term of seminars by Jeff McMahan on this topic when I was at Oxford)
But seeing as you’ve raised it …
As Greaves (2019) presses, there is an issue of which person-stages count:
Whichever choice the TRIA-advocate makes, they will inherit structurally the same issues for those as one finds for the equivalent theories in population ethics (for those, see Greaves (2017)).
The version of TRIA you are referring to is, I think, actualist person-stage version: if so, then the view is not action-guiding (the issue of normative invariance). If you save the child, it will have those future stages, so it’ll be good that it lived; if you don’t save the child, it won’t, so it won’t be bad that it didn’t. Okay, should you save the child? Well, the view doesn’t tell you either way!
The actualist version can’t be the one at hand, as it doesn’t say that it’s good (for the child) if you save it (vs the case where you don’t).
I am, I think, implicitly assuming a present-stage-interest version of TRIA, as that’s the one that generates the value-of-death-at-different-ages curve that is relevantly different from the deprivationist one.