Curious what you make of writings like these. I think they directly addresses your crux of whether there are long-lasting, negative lock-in scenarios on the horizon which we can avoid or shape.
Relatedly, you mention wanting to give the values of people who are suffering the most more weight. Those and related readings make what some find a good case for thinking that those who suffer most will be future generations—I imagine they’d wish more of their ancestors had been longtermists.
I personally find arguments like these and these compelling for being tentatively optimistic about the value of the long-term future, despite sharing many of your intuitions in sections (2) and (3).
These assume that positive experiences/lives are at least of nontrivial value, relative to the disvalue of suffering. It’s not fully clear to me from this post whether that matches your values.
Since you mention you care about others’ reflected values being implemented, it seems relevant that:
In the absence of a long, flourishing future, a wide range of values (not just happiness) would go for a very long time unfulfilled: freedom/autonomy, relationships (friendship/family/love), art/beauty/expression, truth/discovery, the continuation of tradition/ancestors’ efforts, etc.
Most people seem to value the creation of happiness and happy people quite a bit, relative to the prevention of suffering. This is suggested by e.g. a survey and the fact that most adults have (or say they want) children.
(Maybe these aren’t their reflected values, but they’re potentially decent proxies for reflected values.)
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Additional thoughts:
I do not see how this is possible without at least soft totalitarianism, which brings its own risks of reducing the value of the future.
I think the word “totalitarianism” is pulling too much weight here. I’m sympathetic to something like “existential security requires a great combination of preventative capabilities and civilizational resilience.” I don’t see why that must involve anything as nasty as totalitarianism. As one alternative, advances in automation might allow for decentralized, narrow, and transparent forms of surveillance—preventing harmful actions without leaving room for misuse of data (which I’d guess is our usual main concern about mass surveillance).
(Calling something “soft totalitarianism” also feels like a bit odd, like calling something “mild extremism.” Totalitarianism has historically been horrible in large part because it’s been so far from being soft/moderate, so sticking the connotations of totalitarianism onto soft/moderate futures may mislead us into underestimating their value.)
I also have traditional Pascal’s mugging type concerns for prioritizing the potentially small probability of a very large civilisation.
On your second bullet point what I would add to Carl’s and Ben’s posts you link to is that suffering is not the only type of disvalue or at least “nonvalue” (e.g. meaninglessness comes to mind). Framing this in Haidt’s moral foundations theory, suffering is only addressing the care/harm foundation.
Also, I absolutely value positive experiences! More so for making existing people happy, but also somewhat for creating happy people. I think I just prioritise it a bit less than the longtermists around me compared to avoiding misery.
I will try to respond to the s-risk point elsewhere.
Thanks! I’m not very familiar with Haidt’s work, so this could very easily be misinformed, but I imagine that other moral foundations / forms of value could also give us some reasons to be quite concerned about the long term, e.g.:
We might be concerned with degrading—or betraying—our species / traditions / potential.
You mention meaninglessness—a long, empty future strikes me as a very meaningless one.
(This stuff might not be enough to justify strong longtermism, but maybe it’s enough to justify weak longtermism—seeing the long term as a major concern.)
Also, I absolutely value positive experiences! [...] I think I just prioritise it a bit less
Oh, interesting! Then (with the additions you mentioned) you might find the arguments compelling?
We might be concerned with degrading—or betraying—our species / traditions / potential.
Yeah this is a major motivation for me to be a longtermist. As far as I can see a Haidt/conservative concern for a wider range of moral values, which seem like they might be lost ‘by default’ if we don’t do anything, is a pretty longtermist concern. I wonder if I should write something long up on this.
In the absence of a long, flourishing future, a wide range of values (not just happiness) would go for a very long time unfulfilled: freedom/autonomy, relationships (friendship/family/love), art/beauty/expression, truth/discovery, the continuation of tradition/ancestors’ efforts, etc.
I think many (but not all) of these values are mostly conditional on future people existing or directed at their own lives, not the lives of others, and you should also consider the other side: in an empty future, everyone has full freedom/autonomy and gets everything they want, no one faces injustice, no one suffers, etc..
Most people seem to value the creation of happiness and happy people quite a bit, relative to the prevention of suffering. This is suggested by e.g. a survey and the fact that most adults have (or say they want) children.
(Maybe these aren’t their reflected values, but they’re potentially decent proxies for reflected values.)
I think most people think of the badness of extinction as primarily the deaths, not the prevented future lives, though, so averting extinction wouldn’t get astronomical weight. From this article (this paper):
According to the survey results, most people think that we lose more between 1 and 2 than between 2 and 3. In other words, they see most of the tragedy as the present-day deaths; they don’t see the end of the human race as a larger additional tragedy.
I think many (but not all) of these values are mostly conditional on future people existing or directed at their own lives, not the lives of others
Curious why you think this first part? Seems plausible but not obvious to me.
in an empty future, everyone has full freedom/autonomy and gets everything they want
I have trouble seeing how this is a meaningful claim. (Maybe it’s technically right if we assume that any claim about the elements of an empty set is true, but then it’s also true that, in an empty future, everyone is oppressed and miserable. So non-empty flourishing futures remain the only futures in which there is flourishing without misery.)
in an empty future [...] no one faces injustice, no one suffers
Yup, agreed that empty futures are better than some alternatives under many value systems. My claim is just that many value systems leave substantial room for the world to be better than empty.
I think most people think of the badness of extinction as primarily the deaths, not the prevented future lives, though, so averting extinction wouldn’t get astronomical weight.
Yeah, agreed that something probably won’t get astronomical weight if we’re doing (non-fanatical forms of) moral pluralism. The paper you cite seems to suggest that, although people initially see the badness of extinction as primarily the deaths, that’s less true when they reflect:
More people find extinction uniquely bad when [...] they are explicitly prompted to consider long-term consequences of the catastrophes. [...] Finally, we find that (d) laypeople—in line with prominent philosophical arguments—think that the quality of the future is relevant: they do find extinction uniquely bad when this means forgoing a utopian future.
Curious why you think this first part? Seems plausible but not obvious to me.
I think, for example, it’s silly to create more people just so that we can instantiate autonomy/freedom in more people, and I doubt many people think of autonomy/freedom this way. I think the same is true for truth/discovery (and my own example of justice). I wouldn’t be surprised if it wasn’t uncommon for people to want more people to be born for the sake of having more love or beauty in the world, although I still think it’s more natural to think of these things as only mattering conditionally on existence, not as a reason to bring them into existence (compared to non-existence, not necessarily compared to another person being born, if we give up the independence of irrelevant alternatives or transitivity).
I also think a view of preference satisfaction that assigns positive value to the creation and satisfaction of new preferences is perverse in a way, since it allows you to ignore a person’s existing preferences if you can create and satisfy a sufficiently strong preference in them, even against their wishes to do so.
I have trouble seeing how this is a meaningful claim. (Maybe it’s technically right if we assume that any claim about the elements of an empty set is true, but then it’s also true that, in an empty future, everyone is oppressed and miserable. So non-empty flourishing futures remain the only futures in which there is flourishing without misery.)
Sorry, I should have been more explicit. You wrote “In the absence of a long, flourishing future, a wide range of values (not just happiness) would go for a very long time unfulfilled”, but we can also have values that would go frustrated for a very long time too if we don’t go extinct, and including even in a future that looks mostly utopian. I also think it’s likely the future will contain misery.
More people find extinction uniquely bad when [...] they are explicitly prompted to consider long-term consequences of the catastrophes. [...] Finally, we find that (d) laypeople—in line with prominent philosophical arguments—think that the quality of the future is relevant: they do find extinction uniquely bad when this means forgoing a utopian future.
That’s fair. From the paper:
(Recall that the first difference was the difference between no catastrophe and a catastrophe killing 80%, and the second difference the difference between a catastrophe killing 80% and a catastrophe killing 100%.) We therefore asked participants who gave the expected ranking (but not the other participants) which difference they judged to be greater. We found that most people did not find extinction uniquely bad: only a relatively small minority (23.47%, 50⁄213 participants) judged the second difference to be greater than the first difference.
It is worth noting that this still doesn’t tell us how much greater the difference between total extinction and a utopian future is compared an 80% loss of life in a utopian future. Furthermore, people are being asked to assume the future will be utopian (“a future which is better than today in every conceivable way. There are no longer any wars, any crimes, or any people experiencing depression or sadness. Human suffering is massively reduced, and people are much happier than they are today.”), which we may have reason to doubt.
When they were just asked to consider the very long-term consequences in the salience condition, only about 50% in the UK sample thought extinction was uniquely bad and <40% did in the US sample. This is the salience condition:
When you do so, please remember to consider the long-term consequences each scenario will have for humanity. If humanity does not go extinct, it could go on to a long future. This is true even if many (but not all) humans die in a catastrophe, since that leaves open the possibility of recovery. However, if humanity goes extinct (if 100% are killed), there will be no future for humanity.
They were also not asked their views on futures that could be worse than now for the average person (or moral patient, generally).
Fair points. Your first paragraph seems like a good reason for me to take back the example of freedom/autonomy, although I think the other examples remain relevant, at least for nontrivial minority views. (I imagine, for example, that many people wouldn’t be too concerned about adding more people to a loving future, but they would be sad about a future having no love at all, e.g. due to extinction.)
(Maybe there’s some asymmetry in people’s views toward autonomy? I share your intuition that most people would see it as silly to create people so they can have autonomy. But I also imagine that many people would see extinction as a bad affront to the autonomy that future people otherwise would have had, since extinction would be choosing for them that their lives aren’t worthwhile.)
only about 50% in the UK sample thought extinction was uniquely bad
This seems like more than enough to support the claim that a wide variety of groups disvalue extinction, on (some) reflection.
I think you’re generally right that a significant fraction of non-utilitarian views wouldn’t be extremely concerned by extinction, especially under pessimistic empirical assumptions about the future. (I’d be more hesitant to say that many would see it as an actively good thing, at least since many common views seem like they’d strongly disapprove of the harm that would be involved in many plausible extinction scenarios.) So I’d weaken my original claim to something like: a significant fraction of non-utilitarian views would see extinction as very bad, especially under somewhat optimistic assumptions about the future (much weaker assumptions than e.g. “humanity is inherently super awesome”).
Re: the dependence on future existence concerning the values of “freedom/autonomy, relationships (friendship/family/love), art/beauty/expression, truth/discovery, the continuation of tradition/ancestors’ efforts, etc.,” I think that most of these (freedom/autonomy, relationships, truth/discovery) are considered valuable primarily because of their role in “the good life,” i.e. their contribution to individual wellbeing (as per “objective list” theories of wellbeing), so the contingency seems pretty clear here. Much less so for the others, unless we are convinced that people only value these instrumentally.
Thanks! I think I see how these values are contingent in the sense that, say, you can’t have human relationships without humans. Are you saying they’re also contingent in the sense that (*) creating new lives with these things has no value? That’s very unintuitive to me. If “the good life” is significantly more valuable than a meh life, and a meh life is just as valuable as nonexistence, doesn’t it follow that a flourishing life is significantly more valuable than nonexistence?
(In other words, “objective list” theories of well-being (if they hold some lives to be better than neutral) + transitivity seem to imply that creating good lives is possible and valuable, which implies (*) is false. People with these theories of well-being could avoid that conclusion by (a) rejecting that some lives are better than neutral, or (b) by rejecting transitivity. Do they?)
I mostly meant to say that someone who otherwise rejects totalism would agree to (*), so as to emphasize that these diverse values are really tied to our position on the value of good lives (whether good = virtuous or pleasurable or whatever).
Similarly, I think the transitivity issue has less to do with our theory of wellbeing (what counts as a good life) and more to do with our theory of population ethics. As to how we can resolve this apparent issue, there are several things we could say. We could (as I think Larry Temkin and others have done) agree with (b), maintaining that ‘better than’ or ‘more valuable than’ is not a transitive relation. Alternatively, we could adopt a sort of “tethered good approach” (following Christine Korsgaard), where we maintain that claims like “A is better/more valuable than B” are only meaningful insofar as they are reducible to claims like “A is better/more valuable than B for person P.” In that case, we might deny that “a meh life is just as valuable as [or more/less valuable than] nonexistence ” is meaningful, since there’s no one for whom it is more valuable (assuming we reject comparativism, the view that things can be better or worse for merely possible persons). Michael St. Jules is probably aware of better ways this could be resolved. In general, I think that a lot of this stuff is tricky and our inability to find a solution right now to theoretical puzzles is not always a good reason to abandon a view.
Hm, I can’t wrap my head around rejecting transitivity.
we could adopt a sort of “tethered good approach” (following Christine Korsgaard), where we maintain that claims like “A is better/more valuable than B” are only meaningful insofar as they are reducible to claims like “A is better/more valuable than B for person P.”
Does this imply that bringing tortured lives into existence is morally neutral? I find that very implausible. (You could get out of that conclusion by claiming an asymmetry, but I haven’t seen reasons to think that people with objective list theories of welfare buy into that.) This view also seems suspiciously committed to sketchy notions of personhood.
Yeah I’m not totally sure what it implies. For consequentialists, we could say that bringing the life into existence is itself morally neutral; but once the life exists, we have reason to end it (since the life is bad for that person, although we’d have to make further sense of that claim). Deontologists could just say that there is a constraint against bringing into existence tortured lives, but this isn’t because of the life’s contribution to some “total goodness” of the world. Presumably we’d want some further explanation for why this constraint should exist. Maybe such an action involves an impermissible attitude of callous disregard for life or something like that. It seems like there are many parameters we could vary but that might seem too ad hoc.
Again, I haven’t actually read this, but this article discusses intransitivity in asymmetric person-affecting views, i.e. I think in the language you used: The value of pleasure is contingent in the sense that creating new lives with pleasure has no value. But the disvalue of pain is not contingent in this way. I think you should be able to directly apply that to other object-list theories that you discuss instead of just hedonistic (pleasure-pain) ones.
An alternative way to deal with intransitivity is to say that not existing and any life are incomparable. This gives you the unfortunate situation that you can’t straightforwardly compare different worlds with different population sizes. I don’t know enough about the literature to say how people deal with this. I think there’s some long work in the works that’s trying to make this version work and that also tries to make “creating new suffering people is bad” work at the same time.
I think some people probably do think that they are comparable but reject that some lives are better than neutral. I expect that that’s rarer though?
That’s very unintuitive to me. If “the good life” is significantly more valuable than a meh life, and a meh life is just as valuable as nonexistence, doesn’t it follow that a flourishing life is significantly more valuable than nonexistence?
Under the asymmetry, any life is at most as valuable as nonexistence, and depending on the particular view of the asymmetry, may be as good only when faced with particular sets of options.
If you can bring a good life into existence or none, it is at least permissible to choose none, and under basically any asymmetry that doesn’t lead to principled antinatalism (basically all but perfect lives are bad), it’s permissible to choose either.
If you can bring a good life into existence or none, it is at least permissible to choose none, and under a non-antinatalist asymmetry, it’s permissible to choose either.
If you can bring a good life into existence, a flourishing life into existence or none, it is at least permissible to choose none, and under a wide view of the asymmetry (basically to solve the nonidentity problem), it is not permissible to bring the merely good life into existence. Under a non-antinatalist asymmetry (which can be wide or narrow), it is permissible to bring the flourishing life into existence. Under a narrow (not wide) non-antinatalist asymmetry, all three options are permissible.
If you accept transitivity and the independence of irrelevant alternatives, instead of having the flourishing life better than none, you could have a principled antinatalism:
Thanks! I can see that for people who accept (relatively strong versions of) the asymmetry. But (I think) we’re talking about what a wide range of ethical views say—is it at all common for proponents of objective list theories of well-being to hold that the good life is worse than nonexistence? (I imagine, if they thought it was that bad, they wouldn’t call it “the good life”?)
is it at all common for proponents of objective list theories of well-being to hold that the good life is worse than nonexistence?
I think this would be pretty much only antinatalists who hold stronger forms of the asymmetry, and this kind of antinatalism (and indeed all antinatalism) is relatively rare, so I’d guess not.
Thanks for this! Quick thoughts:
Curious what you make of writings like these. I think they directly addresses your crux of whether there are long-lasting, negative lock-in scenarios on the horizon which we can avoid or shape.
Relatedly, you mention wanting to give the values of people who are suffering the most more weight. Those and related readings make what some find a good case for thinking that those who suffer most will be future generations—I imagine they’d wish more of their ancestors had been longtermists.
I personally find arguments like these and these compelling for being tentatively optimistic about the value of the long-term future, despite sharing many of your intuitions in sections (2) and (3).
These assume that positive experiences/lives are at least of nontrivial value, relative to the disvalue of suffering. It’s not fully clear to me from this post whether that matches your values.
Since you mention you care about others’ reflected values being implemented, it seems relevant that:
In the absence of a long, flourishing future, a wide range of values (not just happiness) would go for a very long time unfulfilled: freedom/autonomy, relationships (friendship/family/love), art/beauty/expression, truth/discovery, the continuation of tradition/ancestors’ efforts, etc.
Most people seem to value the creation of happiness and happy people quite a bit, relative to the prevention of suffering. This is suggested by e.g. a survey and the fact that most adults have (or say they want) children.
(Maybe these aren’t their reflected values, but they’re potentially decent proxies for reflected values.)
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Additional thoughts:
I think the word “totalitarianism” is pulling too much weight here. I’m sympathetic to something like “existential security requires a great combination of preventative capabilities and civilizational resilience.” I don’t see why that must involve anything as nasty as totalitarianism. As one alternative, advances in automation might allow for decentralized, narrow, and transparent forms of surveillance—preventing harmful actions without leaving room for misuse of data (which I’d guess is our usual main concern about mass surveillance).
(Calling something “soft totalitarianism” also feels like a bit odd, like calling something “mild extremism.” Totalitarianism has historically been horrible in large part because it’s been so far from being soft/moderate, so sticking the connotations of totalitarianism onto soft/moderate futures may mislead us into underestimating their value.)
I don’t see how traditional Pascal’s mugging type concerns are applicable here. As I understand them, those apply to using expected value reasoning with very low (subjective) probabilities. But surely “humanity will last with at least our current population for as long as the average mammalian species” (which implies our future is vast) is a far more plausible claim than “I’m a magical mugger from the seventh dimension”?
On your second bullet point what I would add to Carl’s and Ben’s posts you link to is that suffering is not the only type of disvalue or at least “nonvalue” (e.g. meaninglessness comes to mind). Framing this in Haidt’s moral foundations theory, suffering is only addressing the care/harm foundation.
Also, I absolutely value positive experiences! More so for making existing people happy, but also somewhat for creating happy people. I think I just prioritise it a bit less than the longtermists around me compared to avoiding misery.
I will try to respond to the s-risk point elsewhere.
Thanks! I’m not very familiar with Haidt’s work, so this could very easily be misinformed, but I imagine that other moral foundations / forms of value could also give us some reasons to be quite concerned about the long term, e.g.:
We might be concerned with degrading—or betraying—our species / traditions / potential.
You mention meaninglessness—a long, empty future strikes me as a very meaningless one.
(This stuff might not be enough to justify strong longtermism, but maybe it’s enough to justify weak longtermism—seeing the long term as a major concern.)
Oh, interesting! Then (with the additions you mentioned) you might find the arguments compelling?
Yeah this is a major motivation for me to be a longtermist. As far as I can see a Haidt/conservative concern for a wider range of moral values, which seem like they might be lost ‘by default’ if we don’t do anything, is a pretty longtermist concern. I wonder if I should write something long up on this.
I would be interested to read this!
Me too.
My recent post on Scheffler discusses some of these themes:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/NnYrFzXiTWerhTTkK/link-post-sam-scheffler-conservatism-temporal-bias-and
I think many (but not all) of these values are mostly conditional on future people existing or directed at their own lives, not the lives of others, and you should also consider the other side: in an empty future, everyone has full freedom/autonomy and gets everything they want, no one faces injustice, no one suffers, etc..
I think most people think of the badness of extinction as primarily the deaths, not the prevented future lives, though, so averting extinction wouldn’t get astronomical weight. From this article (this paper):
Thanks!
Curious why you think this first part? Seems plausible but not obvious to me.
I have trouble seeing how this is a meaningful claim. (Maybe it’s technically right if we assume that any claim about the elements of an empty set is true, but then it’s also true that, in an empty future, everyone is oppressed and miserable. So non-empty flourishing futures remain the only futures in which there is flourishing without misery.)
Yup, agreed that empty futures are better than some alternatives under many value systems. My claim is just that many value systems leave substantial room for the world to be better than empty.
Yeah, agreed that something probably won’t get astronomical weight if we’re doing (non-fanatical forms of) moral pluralism. The paper you cite seems to suggest that, although people initially see the badness of extinction as primarily the deaths, that’s less true when they reflect:
I think, for example, it’s silly to create more people just so that we can instantiate autonomy/freedom in more people, and I doubt many people think of autonomy/freedom this way. I think the same is true for truth/discovery (and my own example of justice). I wouldn’t be surprised if it wasn’t uncommon for people to want more people to be born for the sake of having more love or beauty in the world, although I still think it’s more natural to think of these things as only mattering conditionally on existence, not as a reason to bring them into existence (compared to non-existence, not necessarily compared to another person being born, if we give up the independence of irrelevant alternatives or transitivity).
I also think a view of preference satisfaction that assigns positive value to the creation and satisfaction of new preferences is perverse in a way, since it allows you to ignore a person’s existing preferences if you can create and satisfy a sufficiently strong preference in them, even against their wishes to do so.
Sorry, I should have been more explicit. You wrote “In the absence of a long, flourishing future, a wide range of values (not just happiness) would go for a very long time unfulfilled”, but we can also have values that would go frustrated for a very long time too if we don’t go extinct, and including even in a future that looks mostly utopian. I also think it’s likely the future will contain misery.
That’s fair. From the paper:
It is worth noting that this still doesn’t tell us how much greater the difference between total extinction and a utopian future is compared an 80% loss of life in a utopian future. Furthermore, people are being asked to assume the future will be utopian (“a future which is better than today in every conceivable way. There are no longer any wars, any crimes, or any people experiencing depression or sadness. Human suffering is massively reduced, and people are much happier than they are today.”), which we may have reason to doubt.
When they were just asked to consider the very long-term consequences in the salience condition, only about 50% in the UK sample thought extinction was uniquely bad and <40% did in the US sample. This is the salience condition:
They were also not asked their views on futures that could be worse than now for the average person (or moral patient, generally).
Fair points. Your first paragraph seems like a good reason for me to take back the example of freedom/autonomy, although I think the other examples remain relevant, at least for nontrivial minority views. (I imagine, for example, that many people wouldn’t be too concerned about adding more people to a loving future, but they would be sad about a future having no love at all, e.g. due to extinction.)
(Maybe there’s some asymmetry in people’s views toward autonomy? I share your intuition that most people would see it as silly to create people so they can have autonomy. But I also imagine that many people would see extinction as a bad affront to the autonomy that future people otherwise would have had, since extinction would be choosing for them that their lives aren’t worthwhile.)
This seems like more than enough to support the claim that a wide variety of groups disvalue extinction, on (some) reflection.
I think you’re generally right that a significant fraction of non-utilitarian views wouldn’t be extremely concerned by extinction, especially under pessimistic empirical assumptions about the future. (I’d be more hesitant to say that many would see it as an actively good thing, at least since many common views seem like they’d strongly disapprove of the harm that would be involved in many plausible extinction scenarios.) So I’d weaken my original claim to something like: a significant fraction of non-utilitarian views would see extinction as very bad, especially under somewhat optimistic assumptions about the future (much weaker assumptions than e.g. “humanity is inherently super awesome”).
Re: the dependence on future existence concerning the values of “freedom/autonomy, relationships (friendship/family/love), art/beauty/expression, truth/discovery, the continuation of tradition/ancestors’ efforts, etc.,” I think that most of these (freedom/autonomy, relationships, truth/discovery) are considered valuable primarily because of their role in “the good life,” i.e. their contribution to individual wellbeing (as per “objective list” theories of wellbeing), so the contingency seems pretty clear here. Much less so for the others, unless we are convinced that people only value these instrumentally.
Thanks! I think I see how these values are contingent in the sense that, say, you can’t have human relationships without humans. Are you saying they’re also contingent in the sense that (*) creating new lives with these things has no value? That’s very unintuitive to me. If “the good life” is significantly more valuable than a meh life, and a meh life is just as valuable as nonexistence, doesn’t it follow that a flourishing life is significantly more valuable than nonexistence?
(In other words, “objective list” theories of well-being (if they hold some lives to be better than neutral) + transitivity seem to imply that creating good lives is possible and valuable, which implies (*) is false. People with these theories of well-being could avoid that conclusion by (a) rejecting that some lives are better than neutral, or (b) by rejecting transitivity. Do they?)
I mostly meant to say that someone who otherwise rejects totalism would agree to (*), so as to emphasize that these diverse values are really tied to our position on the value of good lives (whether good = virtuous or pleasurable or whatever).
Similarly, I think the transitivity issue has less to do with our theory of wellbeing (what counts as a good life) and more to do with our theory of population ethics. As to how we can resolve this apparent issue, there are several things we could say. We could (as I think Larry Temkin and others have done) agree with (b), maintaining that ‘better than’ or ‘more valuable than’ is not a transitive relation. Alternatively, we could adopt a sort of “tethered good approach” (following Christine Korsgaard), where we maintain that claims like “A is better/more valuable than B” are only meaningful insofar as they are reducible to claims like “A is better/more valuable than B for person P.” In that case, we might deny that “a meh life is just as valuable as [or more/less valuable than] nonexistence ” is meaningful, since there’s no one for whom it is more valuable (assuming we reject comparativism, the view that things can be better or worse for merely possible persons). Michael St. Jules is probably aware of better ways this could be resolved. In general, I think that a lot of this stuff is tricky and our inability to find a solution right now to theoretical puzzles is not always a good reason to abandon a view.
Hm, I can’t wrap my head around rejecting transitivity.
Does this imply that bringing tortured lives into existence is morally neutral? I find that very implausible. (You could get out of that conclusion by claiming an asymmetry, but I haven’t seen reasons to think that people with objective list theories of welfare buy into that.) This view also seems suspiciously committed to sketchy notions of personhood.
Yeah I’m not totally sure what it implies. For consequentialists, we could say that bringing the life into existence is itself morally neutral; but once the life exists, we have reason to end it (since the life is bad for that person, although we’d have to make further sense of that claim). Deontologists could just say that there is a constraint against bringing into existence tortured lives, but this isn’t because of the life’s contribution to some “total goodness” of the world. Presumably we’d want some further explanation for why this constraint should exist. Maybe such an action involves an impermissible attitude of callous disregard for life or something like that. It seems like there are many parameters we could vary but that might seem too ad hoc.
Again, I haven’t actually read this, but this article discusses intransitivity in asymmetric person-affecting views, i.e. I think in the language you used: The value of pleasure is contingent in the sense that creating new lives with pleasure has no value. But the disvalue of pain is not contingent in this way. I think you should be able to directly apply that to other object-list theories that you discuss instead of just hedonistic (pleasure-pain) ones.
An alternative way to deal with intransitivity is to say that not existing and any life are incomparable. This gives you the unfortunate situation that you can’t straightforwardly compare different worlds with different population sizes. I don’t know enough about the literature to say how people deal with this. I think there’s some long work in the works that’s trying to make this version work and that also tries to make “creating new suffering people is bad” work at the same time.
I think some people probably do think that they are comparable but reject that some lives are better than neutral. I expect that that’s rarer though?
Under the asymmetry, any life is at most as valuable as nonexistence, and depending on the particular view of the asymmetry, may be as good only when faced with particular sets of options.
If you can bring a good life into existence or none, it is at least permissible to choose none, and under basically any asymmetry that doesn’t lead to principled antinatalism (basically all but perfect lives are bad), it’s permissible to choose either.
If you can bring a good life into existence or none, it is at least permissible to choose none, and under a non-antinatalist asymmetry, it’s permissible to choose either.
If you can bring a good life into existence, a flourishing life into existence or none, it is at least permissible to choose none, and under a wide view of the asymmetry (basically to solve the nonidentity problem), it is not permissible to bring the merely good life into existence. Under a non-antinatalist asymmetry (which can be wide or narrow), it is permissible to bring the flourishing life into existence. Under a narrow (not wide) non-antinatalist asymmetry, all three options are permissible.
If you accept transitivity and the independence of irrelevant alternatives, instead of having the flourishing life better than none, you could have a principled antinatalism:
meh life < good life < flourishing life ≤ none,
although this doesn’t follow.
Thanks! I can see that for people who accept (relatively strong versions of) the asymmetry. But (I think) we’re talking about what a wide range of ethical views say—is it at all common for proponents of objective list theories of well-being to hold that the good life is worse than nonexistence? (I imagine, if they thought it was that bad, they wouldn’t call it “the good life”?)
I think this would be pretty much only antinatalists who hold stronger forms of the asymmetry, and this kind of antinatalism (and indeed all antinatalism) is relatively rare, so I’d guess not.