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If a mind exists and suffers, we’d think it better had it not existed (by virtue of its interest in not suffering). And if a mind exists and experiences joy, we’d think it worse had it not existed (by virtue of its interest in experiencing joy). Prima facie this seem exactly symmetrical, at least as far as the principles laid out here are concerned.
Depending on exactly how you make your view precise, I’d think that we’d either end up not caring at all about whether new minds exist (since if they didn’t exist there’d be no relevant interests), or balancing the strength of those interests in some way to end up with a “zero” point where we are indifferent (since minds come with interests in both directions concerning their own existence). I don’t yet see how you end up with the asymmetric view here.
(Note: My judgments between outcomes here should be qualified with “ignoring other reasons”, specifically reasons that don’t come from interests or their satisfaction for the existence of those interests or interest holders over their nonexistence.)
Ok, I think I first have to make my claim stronger (actually capturing the first part of its first statement in the intro):
Only Actual Interests: Interests provide reasons for their further satisfaction, but neither an interest nor its satisfaction provides reasons for the existence of that interest over its nonexistence.
It follows from this that a mind with no interests at all is no worse than a mind with interests, regardless of how satisfied its interests might have been. In particular, a joyless mind with no interest in joy is no worse than one with joy. A mind with no interests isn’t much of a mind at all, so I would say that this effectively means it’s no worse for the mind to not exist.
It would also follow that nonexistence of the mind is not worse, from the universal rejection of the Transfer Thesis (I was mistaken about its equivalence to Only Actual Interests). In my language:
No Transfer: Interests provide reasons for their further satisfaction, but neither an interest nor its satisfaction provides reasons for the existence of that interest’s holder over its nonexistence.
On suffering,
Only Actual Interests at least says it’s no worse for a mind to not have an interest in the absence of suffering, and hence to not suffer than it is to suffer, because Suffering implies an interest in its absence, by my definition. Similarly, No Transfer would imply it’s not worse for the mind to not exist.
There are a few ways to complete the argument that come to mind:
1. If a mind has a constant interest in not suffering which is satisfied to the degree it is not suffering, then not suffering at all would fully satisfy this interest, and not existing at all would be no worse, according to No Transfer.
2. If not, to start, we should assume that if a mind is suffering, if it were suffering less but still suffering (or another mind existed in its place and was suffering less), that would be better, because, e.g. its interest in not suffering would be more satisfied or its interest in not suffering would not be as strong. In particular, its interest in not suffering through its given experience would be completely unsatisfied in both cases, but stronger in the case of worse suffering.
Then, denote by A an outcome in which the mind is suffering, and by B the outcome in which the mind is not suffering (or does not exist). If we can use the independence of irrelevant alternatives (IIA), transitivity, completeness, and claim the existence of a hypothetical outcome C in which the mind (or a replacement) would be suffering less, then we would get A≺B . To start by our choice of C, we have A≺C. Since C is suffering, we would get C⪯B by completeness, and then by transitivity and IIA, A≺B, so it would be better for the mind to not suffer (or not exist). Unfortunately, if there is a minimum amount of suffering in a suffering experience (over all hypothetical outcomes), this argument wouldn’t apply to it.
If you make this argument that “it’s no worse for the joyful mind to not exist,” you can make an exactly symmetrical argument that “it’s not better for the suffering mind to not exist.” If there was a suffering mind they’d have an interest in not existing, and if there was a joyful mind they’d have an interest in existing.
In either case, if there is no mind then we have no reason to care about whether the mind exists, and if there is a mind then we have a reason to act—in one case we prefer the mind exist, and in the other case we prefer the mind not exist.
To carry your argument you need an extra principle along the lines of “the existence of unfulfilled interests is bad.” Of course that’s what’s doing all the work of the asymmetry—if unfulfilled interests are bad and fulfilled interests are not good, then existence is bad. But this has nothing to do with actual interests, it’s coming from very explicitly setting the zero point at the maximally fulfilled interest.
If I make these claims without argument, yes, but I am giving arguments for the first and against the second, based on a more general claim which is intuitively asymmetric and a few intuitive assumptions about the ordering of outcomes, which together imply “the existence of unfulfilled interests is bad”, but not on their own.
The negation of “neither an interest nor its satisfaction provides reasons for the existence of that interest over its nonexistence” would mean pulling interests up by their bootstraps (for at least one specific interest):
“an interest or its satisfaction provides reasons for the existence of that interest over its nonexistence”. I think this is far less plausible, see my section “Why Only Actual Interests”.
The symmetric claim also seems less plausible:
“neither an interest nor its unsatisfaction provides reasons for the nonexistence of that interest over its existence”
For example, the fact that you would fail to keep a promise is indeed a reason not to make it in the first place. Or, that fact that you would not climb mount Everest successfully is a reason to not try to do so in the first place.
Fehige defends the asymmetry between preference satisfaction and frustration on rationality grounds. This is my take:
Let’s consider a given preference from the point of view of a given outcome after choosing it, in which the preference either exists or does not:
1. The preference exists:
a. If there’s an outcome in which the preference exists and is more satisfied, and all else is equal, it would have been irrational to have chosen this one (over it, and at all).
b. If there’s an outcome in which the preference exists and is less satisfied, and all else is equal, it would have been irrational to have chosen the other outcome (over this one, and at all).
c. If there’s an outcome in which the preference does not exist, and all else is equal, the preference itself does not tell us if either would be irrational to have chosen.
2. The preference doesn’t exist:
a. If there’s an outcome in which the preference exists, regardless of its degree of satisfaction, and all else equal, the preference itself does not tell us if either would have been irrational to have chosen.
So, all else equal besides the existence or degree of satisfaction of the given preference, it’s always rational to choose an outcome in which the preference does not exist, but it’s irrational to choose an outcome in which the preference exists but is less satisfied than in another outcome.
(I made the same argument here, but this is a cleaner statement.)
Michael wrote this:
And you write:
A question here is whether “interests to not suffer” are analogous to “interests in experiencing joy.” I believe that Michael’s point is that, while we cannot imagine suffering without some kind of interest to have it stop (at least in the moment itself), we can imagine a mind that does not care for further joy.
So maybe we could sum up the claim that there’s an asymmetry in this way: More suffering is always worse; more happiness isn’t always better.
Let’s say I see a cute squirrel and it makes me happy. Is it bad that I’m not in virtual reality experiencing the greatest joys imagineable? Maybe it would be bad, if I was the sort of person who had the life goal to experience as much pleasure as possible. But what if I just enjoy going for walks in the real world and occasionally encountering a squirrel? For whom, and why exactly, is it bad that I’m “only” glad and excited to see the squirrel, as opposed to being blissed out of my mind in virtual reality?
The relevant comparison, I think, is between (1) someone who experiences suffering and wants this suffering to stop and (2) someone who experiences happiness and wants this happiness not to stop. It seems that you and Michael think that one can plausibly deny only (2), but I just don’t see why that is so, especially if one focuses on comparisons where the positive and negative experiences are of the same intensity. Like Paul, I think the two scenarios are symmetrical.
[EDIT: I hadn’t seen Paul’s reply when I first posted my comment.]
Some sleeping pills can give you a positive feeling of intense comfort. And yet people fall asleep on them rather than fighting their tiredness in order to enjoy the feeling a bit longer. I suppose you can point out an analogous-seeming case with depressed people who lack the willpower to improve anything about their low mood. But in the case of depression, there’s clearly something broken about the system. Depression does not feel reflectively stable to depressed people (at least absent unfortunate beliefs like “I’m bad and I deserve this”). In the case of me going to sleep rather than staying up, I can be totally reflectively comfortable with going to sleep. Is this example confounded? It seems to me that in order to decide that it’s confounded, you have to import some additional intuition(s) which I simply don’t share with you. (The same might be true for arguing that it’s not confounded, but I always point out that people with different foundational intuitions may not necessarily end up in ethical agreement.)
Interesting example. I have never taken such pills, but if they simply intensify the ordinary experience of sleepiness, I’d say that the reason I (as a CU) don’t try to stay awake is that I can’t dissociate the pleasantness of falling asleep from actually falling asleep: if I were to try to stay awake, I would also cease to have a pleasant experience. (If anyone knows of an effective dissociative technique, please send it over to Harri Besceli, who once famously remarked that “falling asleep is the highlight of my day.”)
More generally, I think cases of this sort have rough counterparts for negative experience, e.g. the act of scratching an itch, or of playing with a loose tooth, despite the concomitant pain induced by those activities. I think such cases are sufficiently marginal, and susceptible to alternative explanations, that they do not pose a serious problem to either (1) or (2).
That makes sense. But do you think that the impulse to prolong the pleasant feeling (as opposed to just enjoying it and “laying back in the cockpit”) is a component of the pleasure-feeling itself? To me, they seem distinct! I readily admit that we often want to do things to prolong pleasures or go out of our way to seek particularly rewarding pleasures. But I don’t regard that as a pure feature of what pleasure feels like. Rather, it’s the result of an interaction between what pleasure feels like and a bunch of other things that come in degrees, and can be on or off.
Let’s say I found a technique to prolong the pleasure. Assuming it does take a small bit of effort to use it, it seems that whether I’m in fact going to use it depends on features such as which options I make salient to myself, whether I might develop fear of missing out, whether pleasure pursuit is part of my self-concept, the degree to which I might have cravings or the degree to which I have personality traits related to constantly optimizing things about my personal life, etc.
And it’s not only “whether I’m in fact going to use the technique” that depends on those additional aspects of the situation. I’d argue that even “whether I feel like wanting to use the technique” depends on those additional, contingent factors!
If the additional factors are just right, I can simply loose myself in the positive feeling, “laying back in the cockpit.” That’s why the experience is a positive one, why it lets me lay back. Losing myself in the pleasant sensation means I’m not worrying about the future and whether the feeling will continue. If pleasure was intrinsically about wanting a sensation to continue, it would kind of suck because I’d have to start doing things to make that happen.
My brain doesn’t like to have do things.
(This could be a fundamental feature of personality where there are large interpersonal differences. I have heard that some people always feel a bit restless and as though they need to do stuff to accomplish something or make stuff better. I don’t have that, my “settings” are different. This would explain why many people seem to have troubles understanding the intuitive appeal tranquilism has for some people.)
Anyway, the main point is that “laying back in the cockpit” is something one cannot do when suffering. (Or it’s what experienced meditators can maybe do – and then it’s not suffering anymore.) And the perspective where laying back in the cockpit is actually appealing for myself as a sentient being, rather than some kind of “failure of not being agenty enough,” is what fuels my stance that suffering and happiness are very, very different from one another. The hedonist view that “more happiness is always better” means that, in order to be a good egoist, one needs to constantly be in the cockpit to maximize one’s long-term pleasure maximization. That’s way too demanding for a theory that’s supposed to help me do what is best for me.
Insofar as someone’s hedonism is justified solely via introspection about the nature of conscious experience, I believe that it’s getting something wrong. I’d say that hedonists of this specific type reify intuitions they have about pleasure (specifically, an interrelated cluster of intuitions about more pleasure always being better, that pleasure is better than non-consciousness, that pleasure involves wanting the experience to continue, etc.) as intrinsic components to pleasure. They treat their intuitions as the way things are while shrugging off the “contentment can be perfect” perspective as biased by idiosyncratic intuitions. However, both intuitions are secondary evaluative judgments we ascribe to these positive feelings. Different underlying stances produce different interpretations.
(And I feel like there’s a sense in which the tranquilism perspective is simpler and more elegant. But at this point I’d already be happy if more people started to grant that hedonism is making just as much of a judgment call based on a different foundational intuition.)
Finally, I don’t think all of ethics should be about the value of different experiences. When I think about “Lukas, the sentient being,” then I care primarily about the “laying back in the cockpit” perspective. When I think about “Lukas, the person,” then I care about my life goals. The perspectives cannot be summed into one thing because they are in conflict (except if one’s life goals aren’t perfectly selfish). If people have personal hedonism as one of their life goals, I care about them experiencing posthuman bliss out of my regard for the person’s life goals, but not out of regard of this being the optimal altruistic action regardless of their life goals.
Anecdatally, I’ve taken medication for insomnia before and ended up trying to stay awake for longer because I was enjoying the sensation of sleepiness. Unfortunately fighting to stay awake was kind of unpleasant, and negated the enjoyment.
>>> I suppose you can point out an analogous-seeming case with depressed people who lack the willpower to improve anything about their low mood.
This reminds me of the ‘Penfield mood organ’ in Philip K. Dick’s ‘Do Android’s Dream of Electric Sheep?’
>>> From the bedroom Iran’s voice came. “I can’t stand TV before breakfast.” “Dial 888,” Rick said as the set warmed. “The desire to watch TV, no matter what’s on it.” “I don’t feel like dialing anything at all now,” Iran said. “Then dial 3,” he said. “I can’t dial a setting that stimulates my cerebral cortex into wanting to dial! If I don’t want to dial, I don’t want to dial that most of all, because then I will want to dial, and wanting to dial is right now the most alien drive I can imagine; I just want to sit here on the bed and stare at the floor.”
(though this description is of someone who stays in a bad mood because they don’t have a desire to change it rather than lacking the willpower to)
I don’t think that’s the relevant analogy though. We should be comparing “Can we imagine suffering without an interest in not having suffered?” to “Can we imagine joy without an interest in having experienced joy?”
I can imagine saying “no” here, but if I do then I’d also say it’s not good that you are not in a virtual reality experiencing great suffering. If you were in a virtual reality experiencing great joy it would be against your interests to prevent that joy, and if you were in a virtual reality experiencing great suffering it would be in your interests to prevent that suffering.
You could say: the actually existing person has an interest in preventing future suffering, while they may have no interest in experiencing future joy. But now the asymmetry is just coming from the actual person’s current interests in joy and suffering, so we didn’t need to bring in all of this other machinery, we can just directly appeal to the claimed asymmetry in interests.
I think it is generally worth seeing population ethics scenarios (like the repugnant conclusion) as being intuition pumps of some principle or another. The core engine of the repugnant conclusion is (roughly) the counter-intuitive implications of how a lot of small things can outweigh a large thing. Thus a huge multitude of ‘slightly better than not’ lives can outweigh a few very blissful ones (or, turning the screws as Arrhenius does, for any number of blissful lives, there some—vastly larger—number of ‘slightly better than not’ lives for which it would be worth making these lives terrible for.)
Yet denying lives can ever go better than neutral (counter-intuitive to most—my life isn’t maximally good, but I think it is pretty great and better than nothing) may evade the repugnant conclusion, but doesn’t avoid this core engine of ‘lots of small things can outweigh a big thing’. Among a given (pre-existing, so possessing actual interests, not that this matters much) population, it can be worth torturing a few of these to avert sufficiently many pin-pricks/minor thwarted preferences to the rest.
I also think negative leaning views (especially with stronger ‘you can’t do better than nothing’ ones as suggested here) generally fare worse with population ethics paradoxes, as we can construct examples which not just share the core engine driving things like the repugnant conclusion, but are amplified further by adding counter-intuitive aspects of the negative view in question.
E.g. (and owed to Carl Shulman): suppose A is a vast population (say Tree(9), whatever) of people who are much happier than we are now, and live lives of almost-perfect preference satisfaction, but for a single mild thwarted preference (say they have to wait in a queue bored for an hour before they get into heaven). Now suppose B is a vast (but vastly smaller, say merely 10^100) population living profoundly awful lives. The view outlined in the OP above seems to recommend B over A (as a lot of small thwarted preferences among those in B can trade off each awful life in B), and generally that that any number of horrendous lives can be outweighed if you can abolish a slightly imperfect utopia of sufficient size, which seems to go (wildly!) wrong both in the determination and the direction (as A gets larger and larger, B becomes a better and better alternative).
I disagree that this is the core engine. I know lots of people who find the repugnant conclusion untenable, while they readily bite the bullet in “dust specks vs. torture”.
I think the part that’s the most unacceptable about the repugnant conclusion is that you go from an initial paradise where all the people who exist are perfectly satisfied (in terms of both life goals and hedonics) to a state where there’s suffering and preference dissatisfaction. A lot of people have the intuition that creating new happy people is not in itself important. That’s what the repugnant conclusion runs against.
I hesitate to exegete intuitions, but I’m not convinced this is the story for most. Parfit’s initial statement of the RP didn’t stipulate the initial population were ‘perfectly satisfied’ but that they ‘merely’ had a “very high quality of life” (cf.). Moreover, I don’t think most people find the RP much less unacceptable if the initial population merely enjoys very high quality of life versus perfect satisfaction.
I agree there’s some sort intuition that ‘very good’ should be qualitatively better than ‘barely better than nothing’, so one wants to resist being nickel-and-dimed into the latter (cf. critical level util, etc.). I also agree there’s person-affecting intuitions (although there’s natural moves like making the addition of A+ also increase the welfare of those originally in A, etc.)
Okay, I agree that going “from perfect to flawed” isn’t the core of the intuition.
This seems correct to me too.
I mostly wanted to point out that I’m pretty sure that it’s a strawman that the repugnant conclusion primarily targets anti-aggregationist intuitions. I suspect that people would also find the conclusion strange if it involved smaller numbers. When a family decides how many kids they have and they estimate that the average quality of life per person in the family (esp. with a lot of weights on the parents themselves) will be highest if they have two children, most people would find it strange to go for five children if that did best in terms of total welfare.
For what it’s worth, that example is a special case of the Sadistic Conclusion (perhaps the Very Sadistic Conclusion?), which I do mention towards the end of the section “Other theoretical implications”. Given the impossibility theorems, like the one I cite there, claiming negative leaning views generally fare worse with population ethics paradoxes is a judgment call. I have the opposite judgment.
There’s a more repugnant version of the Repugnant Conclusion called the Very Repugnant Conclusion, in which your population A would be worse than a population with just the very bad lives in B, plus a much larger number of lives barely worth living, but still worth living, because their total value can make up for the harms in B and the loss of the value in A. If we’ve rejected the claim that these lives barely worth living do make the outcome better (by accepting the asymmetry or the more general claims I make and from which it follows) or can compensate for the harm in these bad lives, then the judgment from the Very Repugnant Conclusion would look as bad.
Furthermore, if you’re holding to the intuition that A doesn’t get worse as more people are added, then you couldn’t demonstrate the Sadistic Conclusion with your argument in the first place, so while the determination might clash with intuition (a valid response), it seems a bit question-begging to add that it goes wrong in “the direction (as A gets larger and larger, B becomes a better and better alternative).”
However, more importantly, this understanding of wellbeing conflicts with how we normally think about interests (or normative standards, according to Frick), as in Only Actual Interests and No Transfer (in my reply to Paul Christiano): if those lives never had any interest in pleasure and never experienced it, this would be no worse. Why should pleasure be treated so differently from other interests? So, the example would be the same as a large number of lives, each with a single mild thwarted preference (bad), and no other preferences (nothing to make up for the badness of the thwarted preference).
If you represent the value in lives as real numbers, you can reject either Independence/Separability (that what’s better or worse should not depend on the existence and the wellbeing of individuals that are held equal) or Continuity to avoid this problem. How this works for Continuity is more obvious, but for Independence/Separability, see Aggregating Harms — Should We Kill to Avoid Headaches? by Erik Carlson and his example Moderate Trade-off Theory. Basically, you can maximize the following social welfare function, for some fixed r,0<r<1 , with the utilities sorted in increasing (nondecreasing) order, u1≤u2≤⋯≤un (and, with the views I outline here, all of these values would never be positive):
Note that this doesn’t actually avoid the Sadistic Conclusion if we do allow positive utilities, because adding positive utilities close to 0 can decrease the weight given to higher already existing positive utilities in such a way as to make the sum decrease. But it does avoid the version of the Sadistic Conclusion you give if we’re considering adding a very large number of very positive lives vs a smaller number of negative (or very negative) lives to a population which has lives that are much better than the very positive ones we might add. If there is no population you’re adding to, then a population of just negative lives is always worse than one with just positive lives.
(I’m not endorsing this function in particular.)
It isn’t (at least not as Arrhenius defines it). Further, the view you are proposing (and which my example was addressed to) can never endorse a sadistic conclusion in any case. If lives can only range between more or less bad (i.e. fewer or more unsatisfied preferences, but the amount/proportion of satisfied preferences has no moral bearing), the theory is never in a position to recommend adding ‘negative welfare’ lives over ‘positive welfare’ ones, as it denies one can ever add ‘positive welfare’ lives.
Although we might commonsensically say people in A, or A+ in the repugnant conclusion (or ‘A’ in my example) have positive welfare, your view urges us that this is mistaken, and we should take them to be ‘-something relatively small’ versus tormented lives which are ‘- a lot’: it would still be better for those in any of the ‘A cases’ had they not come into existence at all.
Where we put the ‘zero level’ doesn’t affect the engine of the repugnant conclusion I identify: if we can ‘add up’ lots of small positive increments (whether we are above or below the zero level), this can outweigh a smaller number of much larger negative shifts. In the (very/) repugnant conclusion, a vast multitude of ‘slightly better than nothing’ lives can outweigh very large negative shifts to a smaller population (either to slightly better than nothing, or, in the very repugnant case, to something much worse). In mine, avoiding a vast multitude of ‘slightly worse than nothing’ lives can be worth making a smaller group have ‘much worse than nothing’ lives.
As you say, you can drop separability, continuity (etc.) to avoid the conclusion of my example, but these are resources available for (say) a classical utilitarian to adopt to avoid the (very/) repugnant conclusion too (naturally, these options also bear substantial costs). In other words, I’m claiming that although this axiology avoids the (v/) repugnant conclusion, if it accepts continuity etc. it makes similarly counter-intuitive recommendations, and if it rejects them it faces parallel challenges to a theory which accepts positive utility lives which does the same.
Why I say it fares ‘even worse’ is that most intuit ‘an hour of boredom and (say) a millenia of a wonderfully happy life’ is much better, and not slightly worse, than nothing at all. Thus although it seems costly (for parallel reasons for the repugnant conclusion) to accept any number of tormented lives could be preferable than some vastly larger number of lives that (e.g.) pop into existence to briefly experience mild discomfort/preference dissatisfaction before ceasing to exist again, it seems even worse that the theory to be indifferent to that each of these lives are now long ones which, apart from this moment of brief preference dissatisfaction experience unalloyed joy/preference fulfilment, etc.
Ok.
Most also intuit that the (Very) Repugnant Conclusion is wrong, and probably that people are not mere vessels or receptacles for value (which isn’t avoided by classical utilitarians by giving up continuity or independence/separability), too. Why is the objection you raise stronger? There are various objections to all theories of population ethics; claiming some are worse than others is a personal judgment call, and you seem to be denying the possibility that many will find the objections to other views even more compelling without argument.
I claim we can do better than simply noting ‘all theories have intuitive costs, so which poison you pick is a judgement call’. In particular, I’m claiming that the ‘only thwarted preferences count’ poses extra intuitive costs: that for any intuitive population ethics counter-example C we can confront a ‘symmetric’ theory with, we can dissect the underlying engine that drives the intuitive cost, find it is orthogonal to the ‘only thwarted preferences count’ disagreement, and thus construct a parallel C* to the ‘only thwarted preferences count’ view which uses the same engine and is similarly counterintuitive, and often a C** which is even more counter-intuitive as it turns the screws to exploit the facial counter-intuitiveness of ‘only thwarted preferences count’ view. I.e.
Alice: Only counting thwarted preferences looks counter-intuitive (e.g. we generally take very happy lives as ‘better than nothing’, etc.) classical utilitarianism looks better.
Bob: Fair enough, these things look counter-intuitive, but theories are counter-intuitive. Classical utilitarianism leads to the very repugnant conclusion (C) in population ethics, after all, whilst mine does not.
Alice: Not so fast. Your view avoids the very repugnant conclusion, but if you share the same commitments re. continuity etc., these lead your view to imply the similarly repugnant conclusion (and motivated by factors shared between our views) that any n lives tormented are preferable to some much larger m of lives which suffer some mild dissatisfaction (C*).
Furthermore, your view is indifferent to how (commonsensically) happy the m people are, so (for example) 10^100 tormented lives are better than TREE(9) lives which are perfectly blissful, but for a 1 in TREE(3) chance [to emphasise, this chance is much smaller than P(0.0 …[write a zero on every plank length in the observable universe]...1)] of suffering an hour of boredom once in their life. (C**)
Bob can adapt his account to avoid this conclusion (e.g. dropping continuity), but Alice can adapt her account in a parallel fashion to avoid the very repugnant conclusion too. Similarly, ‘value receptacle’-style critiques seem a red herring, as even if they are decisive for preference views over hedonic ones in general, they do not rule between ‘only thwarted preferences count’ and ‘satisfied preferences count too’ in particular.
I don’t think the cases between asymmetric and symmetric views will necessarily turn out to be so … symmetric (:P), since, to start, they each have different requirements to satisfy to earn the names asymmetric and symmetric, and how bad a conclusion will look can depend on whether we’re dealing with negative or positive utilities or both. To be called symmetric, it should still satisfy Mere Addition, right?
Dropping continuity looks bad for everyone, in my view, so I won’t argue further on that one.
However, what are the most plausible symmetric theories which avoid the Very Repugnant Conclusion and are still continuous? To be symmetric, it should still accept Mere Addition, right? Arrhenius has an impossibility theorem for the VRC. It seems to me the only plausible option is to give up General Non-Extreme Priority. Does such a symmetric theory exist, without also violating Non-Elitism (like Sider’s Geometrism does)?
EDIT: I think I’ve thought of such a social welfare function. Do Geometrism or Moderate Trade-off Theory for the negative utilities (or whatever an asymmetric view might have done to prioritize the worst off), and then add the term σ(∑imax{0,ui}) for the rest, where σ is strictly continuous, increasing and bounded above.
Why are value receptacle objections stronger for preferences vs hedonism than for thwarted only vs satisfied too?
If it’s sometimes better to create new individuals than to help existing ones, then we are, at least in part, reduced to receptacles, because creating value by creating individuals instead of helping individuals puts value before individuals. It should matter that you have your preferences satisfied because you matter, but as value receptacles, it seems we’re just saying that it matters that there are more satisfied preferences. You might object that I’m saying that it matters that there are fewer satisfied preferences, but this is a consequence, not where I’m starting from; I start by rejecting the treatment of interest holders as value receptacles, through Only Actual Interests (and No Transfer).
Is it good to give someone a new preference just so that it can be satisfied, even at the cost of the preferences they would have had otherwise? How is convincing someone to really want a hotdog and then giving them one doing them a service if they had no desire for one in the first place (and it would satisfy no other interests of theirs)? Is it better for them even in the case where they don’t sacrifice other interests? Rather than doing what people want or we think they would want anyway, we would make them want things and do those for them instead. If preference satisfaction always counts in itself, then we’re paternalists. If it doesn’t always count but sometimes does, then we should look for other reasons, which is exactly what Only Actual Interests claims.
Of course, there’s the symmetric question: does preference thwarting (to whatever degree) always count against the existence of those preferences, and if it doesn’t, should we look for other reasons, too? I don’t find either answer implausible. For example, is a child worse off for having big but unrealistic dreams? I don’t think so, necessarily, but we might be able to explain this by referring to their other interests: dreaming big promotes optimism and wellbeing and prevents boredom, preventing the thwarting of more important interests. When we imagine the child dreaming vs not dreaming, we have not made all else equal. Could the same be true of not quite fully satisfied interests? I don’t rule out the possibility that the existence and satisfaction of some interests can promote the satisfaction of other interests. But if, they don’t get anything else out of their unsatisfied preferences, it’s not implausible that this would actually be worse, as a rule, if we have reasonable explanations for when it wouldn’t be worse.
My very tentative view is that we’re sufficiently clueless about the probability distribution of possible outcomes from “Risks posed by artificial intelligence” and other x-risks, that the ratio between [the value one places on creating a happy person] and [the value one places on helping a person who is created without intervention] should have little influence on the prioritization of avoiding existential catastrophes.
I would guess that extinction would have more permanent and farther reaching effects than the other outcomes in existential catastrophes, especially if the population were expected to grow otherwise, so with a symmetric view, extinction could look much worse than the rest of the distribution (conditioning on extinction, and conditioning on existential risk not causing extinction).