Yes, I really like this work in terms of pruning the premises. Which is why I’m digging into how firm those premises really are (even if I personally tend to believe them).
It seems like the principle of scale is in fact implied by separability. I’d guess it’s rather weaker, but I don’t know of any well-defined examples which accept scale but not separability.
I do find your framing of 3 a little suspect. When we have a solid explanation for just why it’s great in ordinary situations, and we can see that this explanation doesn’t apply in strange situations, it seems like the extrapolation shouldn’t get too much weight. Actually most of my weight for believing the principle of scale comes the fact that it’s a consequence of separability.
One more way the principle might break down:
4) You might accept the principle for helping people at a given time, but not as a way of comparing between helping people at different times.
Indeed in this case it’s not so clear most people would accept the small-scale version (probably because intuitions are driven by factors such as improving lives earlier gets more time to have indirect effects acting to improve lives later).
Assuming I’m understanding the principle of scale correctly, I would have thought that the Average View is an example of something where Scale holds, but Separability fails. As it seems that whenever Scale is applied, the population is the same size in both cases (via a suppressed other-things-equal clause).
Yes, I really like this work in terms of pruning the premises. Which is why I’m digging into how firm those premises really are (even if I personally tend to believe them).
It seems like the principle of scale is in fact implied by separability. I’d guess it’s rather weaker, but I don’t know of any well-defined examples which accept scale but not separability.
I do find your framing of 3 a little suspect. When we have a solid explanation for just why it’s great in ordinary situations, and we can see that this explanation doesn’t apply in strange situations, it seems like the extrapolation shouldn’t get too much weight. Actually most of my weight for believing the principle of scale comes the fact that it’s a consequence of separability.
One more way the principle might break down:
4) You might accept the principle for helping people at a given time, but not as a way of comparing between helping people at different times.
Indeed in this case it’s not so clear most people would accept the small-scale version (probably because intuitions are driven by factors such as improving lives earlier gets more time to have indirect effects acting to improve lives later).
Assuming I’m understanding the principle of scale correctly, I would have thought that the Average View is an example of something where Scale holds, but Separability fails. As it seems that whenever Scale is applied, the population is the same size in both cases (via a suppressed other-things-equal clause).
Yes, good example.