I appreciate the intention of keeping argumentative standards on the forum high, but I think this misses the mark. (Edit: I want this comment’s tone to come off less as “your criticism is wrong” and more like “you’re probably right that this isn’t great philosophy; I’m just trying to do a different thing.”)
I don’t claim to be presenting the strongest case for person-affecting views, and I acknowledge in the post that non-presentist person-affecting views don’t have these problems. As I wrote, I have repeatedly encountered these views “in the wild” and am presenting this as a handbook for pumping the relevant intuitions, not as a philosophical treatise that shows the truth of the total view. The point of the post is to help people share their intuitions with skeptics, not to persuade moral philosophers.
In general, I’m confused by the standard of arguing against the strongest possible version of a view rather than the view people actually have and express. If someone said “I’m going to buy Home Depot because my horoscope said I will find my greatest treasure in the home,” my response wouldn’t be “I’ll ignore that and argue against the strongest possible case for buying Home Depot stock,” it would be to argue that astrology is not a good way of making investment decisions. I also am not sure where you’re seeing the post “assuming a position is true.” My methodology here is to present a case and see what conclusions we’d have to draw if the position weren’t true. Utilitarians do in fact have to explain either why the organ harvesting is actually fine or why utilitarianism doesn’t actually justify it, so it seems fine to ask those who hold presentist person-affecting view to either bite the bullet or explain why I’m wrong about the implication.
Finally, for what it’s worth, I did initially include a response: Émile Torres’s response to a version of Case 2. I decided including Torres’s response — which was literally to “shrug” because if utilitarians get to not care about the repugnant conclusion then they get to ignore these cases — would not have enriched the post and indeed might have seemed combative and uncharitable towards the view. (This response, and the subsequent discussion that argued that “western ethics is fundamentally flawed,” leads me to think the post wouldn’t benefit much by trying to steelman the opposition. Maybe western ethics is fundamentally flawed, but I’m not trying to wade into that debate in this post.)
I appreciate the intention of keeping argumentative standards on the forum high
, but I think this misses the mark. (Edit: I want this comment’s tone to come off less as “your criticism is wrong” and more like “you’re probably right that this isn’t great philosophy; I’m just trying to do a different thing.”)I don’t claim to be presenting the strongest case for person-affecting views, and I acknowledge in the post that non-presentist person-affecting views don’t have these problems. As I wrote, I have repeatedly encountered these views “in the wild” and am presenting this as a handbook for pumping the relevant intuitions, not as a philosophical treatise that shows the truth of the total view. The point of the post is to help people share their intuitions with skeptics, not to persuade moral philosophers.
In general, I’m confused by the standard of arguing against the strongest possible version of a view rather than the view people actually have and express. If someone said “I’m going to buy Home Depot because my horoscope said I will find my greatest treasure in the home,” my response wouldn’t be “I’ll ignore that and argue against the strongest possible case for buying Home Depot stock,” it would be to argue that astrology is not a good way of making investment decisions. I also am not sure where you’re seeing the post “assuming a position is true.” My methodology here is to present a case and see what conclusions we’d have to draw if the position weren’t true. Utilitarians do in fact have to explain either why the organ harvesting is actually fine or why utilitarianism doesn’t actually justify it, so it seems fine to ask those who hold presentist person-affecting view to either bite the bullet or explain why I’m wrong about the implication.
Finally, for what it’s worth, I did initially include a response: Émile Torres’s response to a version of Case 2. I decided including Torres’s response — which was literally to “shrug” because if utilitarians get to not care about the repugnant conclusion then they get to ignore these cases — would not have enriched the post and indeed might have seemed combative and uncharitable towards the view. (This response, and the subsequent discussion that argued that “western ethics is fundamentally flawed,” leads me to think the post wouldn’t benefit much by trying to steelman the opposition. Maybe western ethics is fundamentally flawed, but I’m not trying to wade into that debate in this post.)