Thought experiments like these are why I regard personal identity, and any moral theories that depend on it, as non-starters (including versions of prioritarianism that consider lifetime wellbeing collectively). I think it’s best to think either in terms of empty individualism or open individualism. Empty individualism tends to favor suffering-focused views because any given moment of unbearable suffering can’t be compensated by other moments of pleasure even within what we normally call the same individual, because the pleasure is actually experienced by a different individual. Open individualism tends to undercut suffering-focused intuitions by saying that torturing one person for the happiness of a billion others is no different than one person experiencing pain for later pleasure.
As others have pointed out before, it is legitimate to try to salvage some ethical concern for personal identity despite the paradoxes. By analogy, the idea of consciousness has many paradoxes, but I still try to salvage it for my ethical reasoning. Neither personal identity nor consciousness “actually exists” in any deep ontological sense, but we can still care about them. It’s just that I happen not to care ethically about personal identity.
Thought experiments like these are why I regard personal identity, and any moral theories that depend on it, as non-starters (including versions of prioritarianism that consider lifetime wellbeing collectively). I think it’s best to think either in terms of empty individualism or open individualism. Empty individualism tends to favor suffering-focused views because any given moment of unbearable suffering can’t be compensated by other moments of pleasure even within what we normally call the same individual, because the pleasure is actually experienced by a different individual. Open individualism tends to undercut suffering-focused intuitions by saying that torturing one person for the happiness of a billion others is no different than one person experiencing pain for later pleasure.
As others have pointed out before, it is legitimate to try to salvage some ethical concern for personal identity despite the paradoxes. By analogy, the idea of consciousness has many paradoxes, but I still try to salvage it for my ethical reasoning. Neither personal identity nor consciousness “actually exists” in any deep ontological sense, but we can still care about them. It’s just that I happen not to care ethically about personal identity.