Fwiw, there’s been some discussion on how to attribute impact to individual agents; e.g. here. I’m not read up on these issues, though, and couldn’t say how participants in that debate would respond to your line of criticism.
If you compensate according to share-of-the-total, then yes.
If you pay everyone according to the their impact vs the case where they did nothing, then no, but you have a different problem. Suppose, for example, you want to reward a firing squad who have killed Hitler. Without any one of the shooters, the others would still have shot Hitler. So none of them can claim any counterfactual impact. But surely they should (collectively, if nothing else), be able to claim a reward.
So there is at least a practical question, of what procedure to use.
Wouldn’t that incentivize bad choices like (a) and (b)?
Fwiw, there’s been some discussion on how to attribute impact to individual agents; e.g. here. I’m not read up on these issues, though, and couldn’t say how participants in that debate would respond to your line of criticism.
Interesting, thanks. Note that the top-rated comment there is Toby Ord making just this Parfitian line of criticism.
If you compensate according to share-of-the-total, then yes.
If you pay everyone according to the their impact vs the case where they did nothing, then no, but you have a different problem. Suppose, for example, you want to reward a firing squad who have killed Hitler. Without any one of the shooters, the others would still have shot Hitler. So none of them can claim any counterfactual impact. But surely they should (collectively, if nothing else), be able to claim a reward.
So there is at least a practical question, of what procedure to use.