The utilitarian parent: “I care primarily about doing what’s best for humanity at large, but I wouldn’t want to neglect my children to such a strong degree that all defensible notions of how to be a decent parent state that I fucked up.”
I wonder if we don’t mind people privileging their own children because:
People love their kids too damn much and it just doesn’t seem realistic for people to neglect their children to help others.
A world in which it is normalised to neglect your children to “focus on humanity” is probably a bad world by utilitarian lights. A world full of child neglect just doesn’t seem like it would produce productive individuals who can make the world great. So even on an impartial view we wouldn’t want to promote child neglect.
Neither of these points are relevant in the case of privileging existing-and-sure-to-exist people/beings vs possible people/beings:
We don’t have some intense biologically-driven urge to help present people. For example, most people don’t seem to care all that much that a lot of present people are dying from malaria. So focusing on helping possible people/beings seems at least feasible.
We can’t use the argument that it is better from an impartial view to focus on existing-and-sure-to-exist people/beings because of the classic ‘future could be super-long’ argument.
And when you say that a person with totalist/strong longtermist life goals also chooses between two separate values (what their totalist axiology says versus existing people), I’m not entirely sure that’s true. Again, massive neglect of existing people just doesn’t seem like it would work out well for the long term—existing people are the ones that can make the future great! So even pure strong longtermists will want some decent investment into present people.
We can’t use the argument that it is better from an impartial view to focus on existing-and-sure-to-exist people/beings because of the classic ‘future could be super-long’ argument.
I’d say the two are tied contenders for “what’s best from an impartial view.”
I believe the impartial view is under-defined for cases of population ethics, and both of these views are defensible options in the sense that some morally-motivated people would continue to endorse them even after reflection in an idealized reflection procedure.
For fixed population contexts, the “impartial stance” is arguably better defined and we want equal considering of [existing] interests, which gives us some form of preference utilitarianism. However, once we go beyond the fixed population context, I think it’s just not clear how to expand those principles, and Narveson’s slogan isn’t necessarily a worse justification than “the future could be super-long/big.”
I wonder if we don’t mind people privileging their own children because:
People love their kids too damn much and it just doesn’t seem realistic for people to neglect their children to help others.
A world in which it is normalised to neglect your children to “focus on humanity” is probably a bad world by utilitarian lights. A world full of child neglect just doesn’t seem like it would produce productive individuals who can make the world great. So even on an impartial view we wouldn’t want to promote child neglect.
Neither of these points are relevant in the case of privileging existing-and-sure-to-exist people/beings vs possible people/beings:
We don’t have some intense biologically-driven urge to help present people. For example, most people don’t seem to care all that much that a lot of present people are dying from malaria. So focusing on helping possible people/beings seems at least feasible.
We can’t use the argument that it is better from an impartial view to focus on existing-and-sure-to-exist people/beings because of the classic ‘future could be super-long’ argument.
And when you say that a person with totalist/strong longtermist life goals also chooses between two separate values (what their totalist axiology says versus existing people), I’m not entirely sure that’s true. Again, massive neglect of existing people just doesn’t seem like it would work out well for the long term—existing people are the ones that can make the future great! So even pure strong longtermists will want some decent investment into present people.
I’d say the two are tied contenders for “what’s best from an impartial view.”
I believe the impartial view is under-defined for cases of population ethics, and both of these views are defensible options in the sense that some morally-motivated people would continue to endorse them even after reflection in an idealized reflection procedure.
For fixed population contexts, the “impartial stance” is arguably better defined and we want equal considering of [existing] interests, which gives us some form of preference utilitarianism. However, once we go beyond the fixed population context, I think it’s just not clear how to expand those principles, and Narveson’s slogan isn’t necessarily a worse justification than “the future could be super-long/big.”