Richard Y Chappell🔸 comments on Population Ethics Without Axiology: A Framework

[Richard Y Chappell🔸]

Interesting approach! A few quick thoughts on some of the background ideas:

[On conditional value:] just like it’s good to keep promises if one makes them, the things that fulfill people’s interests/​goals are good if they (the people) are created.

Note that there’s no value in making-and-keeping promises (even if one makes them), it’s just that once you’ve made a promise, you’d better not mess it up. So, rather than viewing keeping promises as (even conditionally) good, it seems more accurate to merely view breaking promises as bad. If we take this to be an accurate analogy to the value of human lives, I worry that Frick’s view begins to look rather bleak.

The last perspective Heyd discusses, that of “good simpliciter,” is non-existent.

This reminds me of the Geach-Thomson view that ‘good’ is attributive rather than predicative, in a way that is supposed to undermine talk of the value of states of affairs. I think this is a kind of conceptual confusion, which may be cleared up by shifting to the question of whether some possible worlds (or states of affairs) are preferable to others. Is preferability “non-existent”? That sounds like a category error. We do not need some Moorean entity of goodness to judge some outcomes as preferable to others. We just need to think that we have reasons to prefer one outcome over another, and it’s perfectly sensible and coherent to think that the fact that there are happy people in W1 who don’t get to exist in W2 at all is some reason (for any beneficent agent) to prefer W1 over W2.

minimal morality isn’t just a low-demanding version of ambitious morality… In my framework, minimal morality is axiology-independent – it protects everyone’s interests/​goals, not just those of proponents of a particular axiology.

This sounds super-interesting! I’d love to see a more in-depth development and defense of this idea. (For an alternative, “low-demanding version of ambitious morality” approach to minimal morality, see the ‘willpower satisficing’ component of my Deontic Pluralism.)

Just off the top of my head, it isn’t clear to me why we should give greater normative authority to a perspective that isn’t actually guided by the correct ambitious morality. (Maybe moral uncertainty?) If there are low-effort, low-cost ways to make the world vastly better, for example, I’d think that we could reasonably take that to be a minimal requirement of morality and not just an optional extra for the morally ambitious. (What instead sets the ambitious apart, I would think, is their willingness to put in more than the morally required level of effort or sacrifice.)

Of course, any decent ambitious morality will properly take into account everyone’s interests, not just the interests of the proponents of the view. The problem is that people disagree about how to do that appropriately. (And attempts to establish a purely neutral, axiology-independent answer, like public reason liberalism in political philosophy, are notoriously question-begging.)

[Lukas_Gloor]

Thanks for the comments!

(I’ll reply to your points in the opposite order of how you made them.)

I’d love to see a more in-depth development and defense of this idea. [...] Just off the top of my head, it isn’t clear to me why we should give greater normative authority to a perspective that isn’t actually guided by the correct ambitious morality.

Instead of conceptualizing contractualism/​cooperation-morality and consequentialism/​care-morality as “climbing the same mountain from different sides,” I view them as separate perspectives. (I agree the “it’s the same mountain!” view has some appeal, so I acknowledge that I have to say more on why I see them as separate.)

It boils down to my belief that ambitious morality is under-defined. If I thought it was well-specified, I’d see things the same way you do.

Say that two philosophically sophisticated reasoners endorse different specifications of ambitious morality. If minimal morality was a low-demanding version of ambitious morality, they would now also hold two different versions of minimal morality. This would contradict the contractualist intent behind minimal morality – it being fair to everyone.

In my framework, minimal morality is the largest common denominator in any attempts to specify “doing the most moral/​altruistic thing.”

You say:

(And attempts to establish a purely neutral, axiology-independent answer, like public reason liberalism in political philosophy, are notoriously question-begging.)

Maybe my view on this is a bit naive, but I feel like the cluster in concept space around “don’t be a jerk” is quite recognizable (even though it’s fuzzy).

Also, making it a low-demanding morality makes consensus-finding a lot easier. (Minimal morality is easier to agree on precisely because it’s unambitious.)

If there are low-effort, low-cost ways to make the world vastly better, for example, I’d think that we could reasonably take that to be a minimal requirement of morality and not just an optional extra for the morally ambitious. (What instead sets the ambitious apart, I would think, is their willingness to put in more than the morally required level of effort or sacrifice.)

I actually agree with this. See endnote 28 (context: you’re someone with an anti-natalist ambitious morality and you can press a button to bring a paradise-like population into existence where one inhabit will suffer a pinprick at some point):

Some existing people would (presumably) greatly prefer the paradise-population to come into existence, which seems a good enough reason for minimal morality to ask of us to push that button. (Minimal morality is mostly about avoiding causing harm, but there’s no principled reason never to include an obligation to benefit. The categorical action-omission of libertarianism seems too extreme! If all we had to do to further others’ goals were to push a button and accept a pinprick of disvalue on our ambitious morality, we’d be jerks not to press that button.)

On your second point:

Is preferability “non-existent”?

This rephrasing doesn’t change things for me. I’m mainly thrown off by the appearance of these (both “goodness” and “preferability”) being bedrock concepts. (I’m not sure “bedrock concepts are non-existent” is the best way to put it. I just don’t have a place for them in my ontology.)

What I’d be on board with is a moral naturalist account of “preferability” (or even “goodness”) so that something is preferable if philosophically sophisticated reasoners interested in figuring out morality come to agree on some account. (There are some objections to this sort of account, where goodness is tightly linked to expert convergence. First, who counts as an expert seems under-defined. Second, what distinguishes “experts converge because of features of the moral reality” from “experts converge because they happen to all share the same subjective views”? Third, what reasoners consider appealing may change over time, so expert consensus in the 18th century may look different from expert consensus today or in a hundred years. Those objections explain why moral non-naturalists may not be happy with this account. Still, I actually think moral naturalist moral realism is intelligible and a useful concept to have. I.e., I think there are some decent answers we can give to these objections so that the account makes sense. I discuss this some more in an endnote (8) of a different post.) However, while this naturalist “preferability” concept has a well-specified intension in the referencing context, its extension could be empty. (In fact, I have argued in previous posts that we can somewhat confidently conclude that its extension is empty. This view informs my framework here.)

(I plan to reply to your thoughts on promise-making analogy later in a separate comment.)

[Lukas_Gloor]

On Frick’s promise-making analogy:

I see the analogy as saying less about the value of a happy life and more about the responsibility creators have towards promoting someone’s well-being. If you’re right that “it seems more accurate to merely view breaking promises as bad” (instead of also viewing it as good to keep promises), this could just mean “we merely view incompetent or careless parenting as bad” (instead of also viewing competent and caring parenting as good).

I guess you could still object that, in the analogy, we should consider competent and caring parenting to be good (it’s good to promote the child’s well-being; caring and competent parenting does this). So, maybe we can distinguish between meeting one’s responsibilities and making the world better better for others. Good parenting is both, so there’s one sense in which it’s “just” doing what you have a responsibility to do (and there’s not really much praise in it from this perspective, since you’d be a jerk to do it any different) and another sense in which it’s good because it’s making the world better for the child that now exists.

In any case, while Frick takes the promise-making analogy to argue for a procreation asymmetry in all contexts, my framework only has it as a default for minimal morality, so it can be overwritten by anyone who adopts a totalist ambitious morality (based on the typical arguments and appeals for this view).