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?
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?