Echoing what Max says, I think this paper comes from the assumption that a lot of population ethics is just off down the wrong track of trying to craft theories in a somewhat ad hoc manner that avoid the repugnant conclusion. It is difficult to think of how else these people could try and make this point given that making the same points that others have made before, in some cases several decades ago, would not be publishable because they are not novel. This strikes me as something of a (frustrated?) last resort to try and make the discipline acknowledge that there might be a problem in the way it has been going for thirty years.
I suppose one alternative would have been to publish this on a philosophy blog, but then it would necessarily have got less reach than getting it in a top journal.
Although unusual in philosophy, the practice is widespread in science. Scientists will often write in short letters criticising published articles that are light on substantive argument but reiterate a view among some prominent researchers.
Finally, I think it is useful to have more surveys of what different researchers in a field believe, and this is one such instance of that—it tells us that several of the world’s best moral philosophers are willing to accept this thing that everyone else seems to think is insane.
Thank you for your comments, Max and John. They inclined me to be quite a bit more favourable to the paper. I still have mixed feelings: while I respect the urge the move a stale conversation on, I don’t think the authors provide new object-level reasons to do so. They do provide a raw (implicit?) appeal for others, as their peers, to update in their direction, but I’m sceptical that’s what philosophy should involve.
while I respect the urge the move a stale conversation on, I don’t think the authors provide new object-level reasons to do so.
If adequate object-level reasons were already provided for something, but a field hasn’t updated on those reasons, then what should a field do?
Two ideas that come to mind:
Summarize and/or signal-boost the existing reasons.
Write a paper speculating about why, psychologically or sociologically, the field hasn’t updated enough, in the hope that this will cause the field to reflect on its mistakes and change.
The Utilitas paper falls in the first category. (It does summarize / signal-boost past psychological accounts of why people have put too much weight on anti-repugnant-conclusion intuitions; but it doesn’t offer new explanations of why people didn’t update on those past psychological accounts and other arguments.)
Regardless of the merits of the second category, I’m not keen on the idea of getting rid of the first category, because I think one of the bigger reasons the world’s institutions are failing today, and one of the bigger reasons science is dysfunctional, is an over-emphasis on advancing-the-frontiers-of-knowledge over summarizing-and-synthesizing-what’s-known within science and academia.
Echoing what Max says, I think this paper comes from the assumption that a lot of population ethics is just off down the wrong track of trying to craft theories in a somewhat ad hoc manner that avoid the repugnant conclusion. It is difficult to think of how else these people could try and make this point given that making the same points that others have made before, in some cases several decades ago, would not be publishable because they are not novel. This strikes me as something of a (frustrated?) last resort to try and make the discipline acknowledge that there might be a problem in the way it has been going for thirty years.
I suppose one alternative would have been to publish this on a philosophy blog, but then it would necessarily have got less reach than getting it in a top journal.
Although unusual in philosophy, the practice is widespread in science. Scientists will often write in short letters criticising published articles that are light on substantive argument but reiterate a view among some prominent researchers.
Finally, I think it is useful to have more surveys of what different researchers in a field believe, and this is one such instance of that—it tells us that several of the world’s best moral philosophers are willing to accept this thing that everyone else seems to think is insane.
Thank you for your comments, Max and John. They inclined me to be quite a bit more favourable to the paper. I still have mixed feelings: while I respect the urge the move a stale conversation on, I don’t think the authors provide new object-level reasons to do so. They do provide a raw (implicit?) appeal for others, as their peers, to update in their direction, but I’m sceptical that’s what philosophy should involve.
If adequate object-level reasons were already provided for something, but a field hasn’t updated on those reasons, then what should a field do?
Two ideas that come to mind:
Summarize and/or signal-boost the existing reasons.
Write a paper speculating about why, psychologically or sociologically, the field hasn’t updated enough, in the hope that this will cause the field to reflect on its mistakes and change.
The Utilitas paper falls in the first category. (It does summarize / signal-boost past psychological accounts of why people have put too much weight on anti-repugnant-conclusion intuitions; but it doesn’t offer new explanations of why people didn’t update on those past psychological accounts and other arguments.)
Regardless of the merits of the second category, I’m not keen on the idea of getting rid of the first category, because I think one of the bigger reasons the world’s institutions are failing today, and one of the bigger reasons science is dysfunctional, is an over-emphasis on advancing-the-frontiers-of-knowledge over summarizing-and-synthesizing-what’s-known within science and academia.
Cf. Holden Karnofsky’s account of science.