Iām pretty suspicious about approaches which rely on personal identity across counterfactual worlds; it seems pretty clear that either thereās no fact of the matter here, or else almost everything you can do leads to different people being born (e.g. by changing which sperm leads to their conception).
These approaches donāt need to rely on personal identity across worlds; either they already āworkā even without this (i.e. solve the nonidentity problem) or (I think) you can modify them into wide person-affecting views, using partial injections like the counterpart relations in this paper/āEA Forum summary (but dropping the personal identity preservation condition, and using pairwise mappings between all pairs of options instead of for all available options at once).
And secondly, this leads us to the conclusion that unless we quickly reach a utopia where everyone has positive lives forever, then the best thing to do is end the world as soon as possible.
I donāt see how this follows for the particular views Iāve mentioned, and I think it contradicts what I said about soft asymmetry, which does not rely on personal identity and which some of the views described in Thomasās paper and my attempt to generalize the view in my post satisfy (Iām not sure about Dasguptaās approach). These views donāt satisfy the independence of irrelevant alternatives (most person-affecting views donāt), and the option of ensuring everyone has positive lives forever is not practically available to us (except as an unlikely fluke, which an approach dealing with uncertainty appropriately should handle, like in Thomasās paper), so we canāt use it to rule out other options.
Which I donāt see a good reason to accept.
Even if they did imply this (I donāt think they do), the plausibility of the views would be at least a reason to accept the conclusion, right? Even if you have stronger reasons to reject it.
These approaches donāt need to rely on personal identity across worlds; either they already āworkā even without this (i.e. solve the nonidentity problem) or (I think) you can modify them into wide person-affecting views, using partial injections like the counterpart relations in this paper/āEA Forum summary (but dropping the personal identity preservation condition, and using pairwise mappings between all pairs of options instead of for all available options at once).
I donāt see how this follows for the particular views Iāve mentioned, and I think it contradicts what I said about soft asymmetry, which does not rely on personal identity and which some of the views described in Thomasās paper and my attempt to generalize the view in my post satisfy (Iām not sure about Dasguptaās approach). These views donāt satisfy the independence of irrelevant alternatives (most person-affecting views donāt), and the option of ensuring everyone has positive lives forever is not practically available to us (except as an unlikely fluke, which an approach dealing with uncertainty appropriately should handle, like in Thomasās paper), so we canāt use it to rule out other options.
Even if they did imply this (I donāt think they do), the plausibility of the views would be at least a reason to accept the conclusion, right? Even if you have stronger reasons to reject it.