Here’s one problematic case. A woman is pregnant. She can take a drug that will treat an illness but will cause substantial birth defects (a real-life example of this would be Thalidomide). According to TRIA, the mother would do little or nothing wrong in taking the drug because the foetus currently has quite weak interests in its own future.
I don’t think this is accurate. In explaining the wrong of pre-natal injury (which causes harm to the future adult), McMahan writes that “we must evaluate the act in terms of its effect on all those time-relative interests it affects, present or future.” (The Ethics of Killing, p. 283.) That is, while the pre-natal being has little or no time-relative interest in avoiding the pre-natal injury, the future adult’s time-relative interests would be gravely affected (we may suppose), which explains why the pre-natal injury is a morally weighty affair. (In case of pre-natal death, by contrast, there are no future time-relative interests to be negatively affected; the death prevents those interests from arising in the first place.)
You outline a moral dichotomy between the following:
Actions which negatively affect a person’s future interests,
e.g. a mother taking a drug which causes birth defects in her child,
which are morally wrong
Actions which prevent the occurrence of a person having future interests,
e.g. a mother preventing the birth of her child,
which are morally neutral
It seems to me that longtermism explicitly rejects this dichotomy, because longtermists believe the prevention of the occurrence of the interests of innumerable future people would be a catastrophic moral loss. A believer in this dichotomy would argue that a human extinction event is morally neutral with respect to the interests of innumerable future people who would have lived, because the extinction event simply “prevents those interests from arising in the first place”. Do you agree that this dichotomy is inconsistent with longtermism?
The dichotomy merely suggests that failing to create a person does not harm or wrong that individual in the way that negatively affecting their interests (e.g. by killing them as a young adult) does. Contraception isn’t murder, and neither is abstinence.
But avoiding wrongs isn’t all that matters. We can additionally claim that there’s always some (albeit weaker) reason to positively benefit possible future people by bringing them into a positive existence. So there’s some moral reason to have kids, for example, even though it doesn’t wrong anyone to remain childless by choice.
And when you multiply those individually weak reasons by zillions, you can end up with overwhelmingly strong reasons to prevent human extinction, just as longtermists claim. (This reason is so strong it would plausibly be wrong to neglect or violate it, even though it does not wrong any particular individual. Just as the non-identity problem shows that one outcome can be worse than another without necessarily being worse for any particular individual.)
I’m currently taking a class with Jeff McMahan in which he discusses prenatal injury, and I’m pretty sure he would agree with how you put it here, Richard. This doesn’t affect your point, but he now likes to discuss a complication to this: what he calls “the divergent lives problem.” The idea is that an early injury can lead to a very different life path, and that once you’re far enough down this path—and have the particular interests that you do, and the particular individuals in your life who are important to you—Jeff thinks it can be irrational to regret the injury. So, if someone’s being injured as a fetus leads them to later meet the particular life partner they love and to have particular the children they have, and if their life is good, Jeff thinks they probably shouldn’t regret the injury—even if avoiding the injury would have led to their having a life with more wellbeing. That’s because avoiding the injury would have led to them having particular people and interests in their life which they don’t in fact care about from their standpoint now. However, Jeff does add that if an early injury makes the later life not worth living, or maybe even barely worth living, then the future person who developed from the injured fetus does have reason to regret that injury. He would say that children of mothers who took Thalidomide have reason to regret that.
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.
I don’t think this is accurate. In explaining the wrong of pre-natal injury (which causes harm to the future adult), McMahan writes that “we must evaluate the act in terms of its effect on all those time-relative interests it affects, present or future.” (The Ethics of Killing, p. 283.) That is, while the pre-natal being has little or no time-relative interest in avoiding the pre-natal injury, the future adult’s time-relative interests would be gravely affected (we may suppose), which explains why the pre-natal injury is a morally weighty affair. (In case of pre-natal death, by contrast, there are no future time-relative interests to be negatively affected; the death prevents those interests from arising in the first place.)
You outline a moral dichotomy between the following:
Actions which negatively affect a person’s future interests,
e.g. a mother taking a drug which causes birth defects in her child,
which are morally wrong
Actions which prevent the occurrence of a person having future interests,
e.g. a mother preventing the birth of her child,
which are morally neutral
It seems to me that longtermism explicitly rejects this dichotomy, because longtermists believe the prevention of the occurrence of the interests of innumerable future people would be a catastrophic moral loss. A believer in this dichotomy would argue that a human extinction event is morally neutral with respect to the interests of innumerable future people who would have lived, because the extinction event simply “prevents those interests from arising in the first place”. Do you agree that this dichotomy is inconsistent with longtermism?
Not exactly—though it is a good question!
The dichotomy merely suggests that failing to create a person does not harm or wrong that individual in the way that negatively affecting their interests (e.g. by killing them as a young adult) does. Contraception isn’t murder, and neither is abstinence.
But avoiding wrongs isn’t all that matters. We can additionally claim that there’s always some (albeit weaker) reason to positively benefit possible future people by bringing them into a positive existence. So there’s some moral reason to have kids, for example, even though it doesn’t wrong anyone to remain childless by choice.
And when you multiply those individually weak reasons by zillions, you can end up with overwhelmingly strong reasons to prevent human extinction, just as longtermists claim. (This reason is so strong it would plausibly be wrong to neglect or violate it, even though it does not wrong any particular individual. Just as the non-identity problem shows that one outcome can be worse than another without necessarily being worse for any particular individual.)
I’m currently taking a class with Jeff McMahan in which he discusses prenatal injury, and I’m pretty sure he would agree with how you put it here, Richard. This doesn’t affect your point, but he now likes to discuss a complication to this: what he calls “the divergent lives problem.” The idea is that an early injury can lead to a very different life path, and that once you’re far enough down this path—and have the particular interests that you do, and the particular individuals in your life who are important to you—Jeff thinks it can be irrational to regret the injury. So, if someone’s being injured as a fetus leads them to later meet the particular life partner they love and to have particular the children they have, and if their life is good, Jeff thinks they probably shouldn’t regret the injury—even if avoiding the injury would have led to their having a life with more wellbeing. That’s because avoiding the injury would have led to them having particular people and interests in their life which they don’t in fact care about from their standpoint now. However, Jeff does add that if an early injury makes the later life not worth living, or maybe even barely worth living, then the future person who developed from the injured fetus does have reason to regret that injury. He would say that children of mothers who took Thalidomide have reason to regret that.
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.