2) Existence, population, persons and moral philosophy
[...] the principles of impartial concern and temporal neutrality are underrated by most people, but overrated by some moral philosophers.
[..] Often, the dispute seems “merely” practical—something like:
[…] In these cases, it often seems like people are talking past each other, and are in greater agreement than they realise. C.f. Multi-level utilitarianism.
[…] Williams thinks of philosophy as fundamentally about “making sense of being human”, so the metaphysical moral realists’ attempt to represent “the world as it is anyway”—to construct a theory of value abstracted from any human perspective—strikes him as misguided.
I agree with these claims. However, I think (and that’s more Scheffler’s fault than yours) they neglect one of the cores of the debate between utilitarians vs. almost everyone else: the argument over personal identity and the separability of persons.
One of the main accusations that Rawls (and other members of the MIND group that gravitated around him: Nozick, Dworkin, Nagel...) throws against utilitarianism is that they violate the separability of persons. For instance, Dworkin (Ch. 16 of Justice for Hedgehogs) says that utilitarian impartiality expresses equal respect for a commodity (i.e., mental states like pleasure, pain, or preferences), not for persons. B. Williams, who seems to dislike weird thought experiments, uses a “body switch” example to argue for a strong notion of personal identity.
However, Parfit’s discussion on personal identity, backed by a straightforward (ontological, even if not epistemic) scientific reductivism has convinced me that personal identity is an illusion; there’s a long philosophical tradition along this line. A funnier (and maybe more persuasive) argument is expressed in Raymond Smullyan’s Is God a Taoist? – which I believe should be mandatory for philosophy students.
That being said, I’d add that I believe a rebuttal to Williams’s limited relativism would be that we can actually conceive of ourselves as part of a large community of rational agents across generations; we do that every time we partake intergenerational projects – even with things as mundane as long-term bonds. It’s way easier to think like that today than 2000 years ago, when we needed to believe in some eternal afterlife to adopt this stance to, e.g., build cathedrals. We do that whenever we judge our ancestors’ decisions—which can be extrapolated to how we want to be judged by future generations. I believe this results, in practice, in a somewhat middle ground between Scheffler’s conservative view and an impartial POVU—“point of view of the universe”.
I say this because I’m still writing my third comment on why, even though I think personal identity is an illusion, and I’m all with Parfit on the non-identity problem, it’s hard for me to make sense of the notion of POVU. This goes way beyond the “practical / psychological limitations” for utilitarians.
2) Existence, population, persons and moral philosophy
I agree with these claims. However, I think (and that’s more Scheffler’s fault than yours) they neglect one of the cores of the debate between utilitarians vs. almost everyone else: the argument over personal identity and the separability of persons.
One of the main accusations that Rawls (and other members of the MIND group that gravitated around him: Nozick, Dworkin, Nagel...) throws against utilitarianism is that they violate the separability of persons. For instance, Dworkin (Ch. 16 of Justice for Hedgehogs) says that utilitarian impartiality expresses equal respect for a commodity (i.e., mental states like pleasure, pain, or preferences), not for persons. B. Williams, who seems to dislike weird thought experiments, uses a “body switch” example to argue for a strong notion of personal identity.
However, Parfit’s discussion on personal identity, backed by a straightforward (ontological, even if not epistemic) scientific reductivism has convinced me that personal identity is an illusion; there’s a long philosophical tradition along this line. A funnier (and maybe more persuasive) argument is expressed in Raymond Smullyan’s Is God a Taoist? – which I believe should be mandatory for philosophy students.
That being said, I’d add that I believe a rebuttal to Williams’s limited relativism would be that we can actually conceive of ourselves as part of a large community of rational agents across generations; we do that every time we partake intergenerational projects – even with things as mundane as long-term bonds. It’s way easier to think like that today than 2000 years ago, when we needed to believe in some eternal afterlife to adopt this stance to, e.g., build cathedrals. We do that whenever we judge our ancestors’ decisions—which can be extrapolated to how we want to be judged by future generations. I believe this results, in practice, in a somewhat middle ground between Scheffler’s conservative view and an impartial POVU—“point of view of the universe”.
I say this because I’m still writing my third comment on why, even though I think personal identity is an illusion, and I’m all with Parfit on the non-identity problem, it’s hard for me to make sense of the notion of POVU. This goes way beyond the “practical / psychological limitations” for utilitarians.