Ah, this is great! Thanks so much for doing it. I want to honour this the only way philosophers know how, which is to quibble with some details in an effort to improve it. (I thought a lot about population ethics during my PhD, but I haven’t published anything evaluating the theories).
On your comment that the answers are contradictory or counterintutive or both, I want to add this is very much agreed on in the field. The famous result is Arrhenius (2000), which showed there are a number of assumptions we might want to make about population ethics, but they are mutually inconsistent—you can’t eat your cake and still have it.
Because population ethics is so vexing, it’s very tempting to consider it in light of theories of moral uncertainty. So, rather than thinking you are, or have to be, 100% certain in one view, you recognise that you have credence in multiple views, and then you’d appeal to a theory of moral uncertainty (there are a few options here, which complicates things) to determine what’s appropriate to do in light of your uncertainty. Implicitly, this quiz—along with standard philosophical discourse—assumes a ‘My Favourite Theory’ approach to moral uncertainty (act if you’re certain in theory you think is mostly likely correct). Accounting for (other positions in) moral uncertainty may slightly break the quiz, as there can be more than one justification for picking an answer. Admittedly, this would make the quiz much more fiddly and be harder to implement.
One example is Q4, where you give two identical populations, except there’s a new, miserable person in the second. I’m sympathetic to a person-affecting view (count only sure-to-exist lives) and if I were 100% confident in that I’d say they were exactly as good each other. However, when I account for moral uncertainty, as I give some weight to possible lives, the second population is worse as that miserable life breaks the tie. So, I gave the ‘wrong’ answer if I ignore moral uncertainty, but I gave what I think is the right answer after accounting for it. I’m not sure how your quiz interprets this, but it told me I had a lexical or critical view, which I wouldn’t agree with. Same issue for Q5 and Q10, which are about identical populations except for 1 additional life.
You phrase Q7 and Q8, which are related to the Repugnant Conclusion, as if they are structurally identically. But they are not. Q7 is a same people case, and asks if it’s better to have higher average welfare. Q8 is about going from the A population to the Z population (the classic Repugnant Conclusion challenge), but each step in Q8 you’re adding new people, whereas in Q7 you had the same people. So, wearing my person-affecting hat, I interpret Q7 and Q8 quite differently: I’m happy to have a higher total welfare for the same population (Q7), but I’m inclined not to go to step B in Q8, as that means creating new people (no value) and reducing the welfare of the existing people (negative value). You frame Q8 as “do it again” but I’d argue we’re doing something relevantly different between Q7 and Q8.
Q12 and Q13 are about transitivity. In Q12 you’re looking at 3 worlds where the first is better than the second, and second is better than the third. For Q13 you replace ‘better than’ with ‘exactly as good as’. You give two options in each case (“yes, always”, “no, not always”) but I wanted there to be a third option “it depends on the details”. Specifically, I’m wondering about whether we’ve got the same or different people across the three worlds.
Finally, I agree that accounting for population ethics, and population effects, can substantially influence the priorities in unexpected and arguably repugnant way. You pointed out life-saving and life-averting invertions are in tension. An extension of this is the more(/less) you think the Earth is overpopulated, the less(/more) valuable it is to save lives. Another is that if you think factory farming is bad because of the negative welfare it causes, that should reduce the value of saving lives to some (unknown and perhaps unknowable) extent. Many years ago, I wrote about these in my PhD thesis and subsequently published a paper on the meat eater problem. I confess I find this all weird to think about, which is part of the reason I’ve shifted onto other things since...
On your comment that the answers are contradictory or counterintutive or both, I want to add this is very much agreed on in the field. The famous result is Arrhenius (2000), which showed there are a number of assumptions we might want to make about population ethics, but they are mutually inconsistent—you can’t eat your cake and still have it.
I was originally going to cite Arrhenius because I was under the mistaken impression that he wrote in the 1950s or 60s and Parfit drew inspiration from him. But while making the quiz I realized it was the other way around. As I understand, Arrhenius’ impossibility proof is qualitatively the same thing as what Parfit laid out in Reasons and Persons, the difference being that Parfit only gave an informal proof and Arrhenius made it mathematically rigorous. I haven’t read either original source but that’s my understanding.
Because population ethics is so vexing, it’s very tempting to consider it in light of theories of moral uncertainty. [...]
The quiz doesn’t allow for moral uncertainty. The honest reason why not is that I didn’t think to do that, but thinking about it now, it sounds really hard because it creates a combinatorial explosion of outcomes. On Q4 for example, you could also answer “uncertain between K is better and they are equal” or “uncertain between K is better and they are incomparable” or “uncertain between all three”, or if you want to get even more specific, “pretty sure K is better but maybe they’re incomparable”, …
I wanted to make the quiz as comprehensive as possible while still being reasonably short. In particular I didn’t want to claim an answer was contradictory when actually it wasn’t, and I spent a lot of time looking for ways philosophers have proposed resolutions to seemingly-contradictory sets of answers. (Including hours spent faithfully representing views that so far ~zero quiz-takers have endorsed.) One thing I explicitly didn’t cover is the difference between preferred acts vs. preferred outcomes, because it would add an amount of complexity disproportionate to its usefulness. Moral uncertainty is another issue like that, I think.
You phrase Q7 and Q8, which are related to the Repugnant Conclusion, as if they are structurally identically. But they are not.
Q6 (comparing A and A+) does add new people. The move from A to B is first asked in terms of moving from A to A+ (Q6) and then A+ to B (Q7), and then you can chain those two moves down to Z, which is what Q8 is asking about. As I understand it, this is identical to Parfit’s construction of the mere addition paradox. The step where you add new people is in Q6, not in Q7, so the “do it again” is a reference to doing the Q6 step again. (And also doing the Q7 step again, but sounds like you are taking issue with the adding-new-people part.)
Possible that I’m still missing something here, please tell me if I am.
You give two options in each case (“yes, always”, “no, not always”) but I wanted there to be a third option “it depends on the details”.
If it depends on the details, then wouldn’t the answer be “no, not always”?
Ah, this is great! Thanks so much for doing it. I want to honour this the only way philosophers know how, which is to quibble with some details in an effort to improve it. (I thought a lot about population ethics during my PhD, but I haven’t published anything evaluating the theories).
On your comment that the answers are contradictory or counterintutive or both, I want to add this is very much agreed on in the field. The famous result is Arrhenius (2000), which showed there are a number of assumptions we might want to make about population ethics, but they are mutually inconsistent—you can’t eat your cake and still have it.
Because population ethics is so vexing, it’s very tempting to consider it in light of theories of moral uncertainty. So, rather than thinking you are, or have to be, 100% certain in one view, you recognise that you have credence in multiple views, and then you’d appeal to a theory of moral uncertainty (there are a few options here, which complicates things) to determine what’s appropriate to do in light of your uncertainty. Implicitly, this quiz—along with standard philosophical discourse—assumes a ‘My Favourite Theory’ approach to moral uncertainty (act if you’re certain in theory you think is mostly likely correct). Accounting for (other positions in) moral uncertainty may slightly break the quiz, as there can be more than one justification for picking an answer. Admittedly, this would make the quiz much more fiddly and be harder to implement.
One example is Q4, where you give two identical populations, except there’s a new, miserable person in the second. I’m sympathetic to a person-affecting view (count only sure-to-exist lives) and if I were 100% confident in that I’d say they were exactly as good each other. However, when I account for moral uncertainty, as I give some weight to possible lives, the second population is worse as that miserable life breaks the tie. So, I gave the ‘wrong’ answer if I ignore moral uncertainty, but I gave what I think is the right answer after accounting for it. I’m not sure how your quiz interprets this, but it told me I had a lexical or critical view, which I wouldn’t agree with. Same issue for Q5 and Q10, which are about identical populations except for 1 additional life.
You phrase Q7 and Q8, which are related to the Repugnant Conclusion, as if they are structurally identically. But they are not. Q7 is a same people case, and asks if it’s better to have higher average welfare. Q8 is about going from the A population to the Z population (the classic Repugnant Conclusion challenge), but each step in Q8 you’re adding new people, whereas in Q7 you had the same people. So, wearing my person-affecting hat, I interpret Q7 and Q8 quite differently: I’m happy to have a higher total welfare for the same population (Q7), but I’m inclined not to go to step B in Q8, as that means creating new people (no value) and reducing the welfare of the existing people (negative value). You frame Q8 as “do it again” but I’d argue we’re doing something relevantly different between Q7 and Q8.
Q12 and Q13 are about transitivity. In Q12 you’re looking at 3 worlds where the first is better than the second, and second is better than the third. For Q13 you replace ‘better than’ with ‘exactly as good as’. You give two options in each case (“yes, always”, “no, not always”) but I wanted there to be a third option “it depends on the details”. Specifically, I’m wondering about whether we’ve got the same or different people across the three worlds.
Finally, I agree that accounting for population ethics, and population effects, can substantially influence the priorities in unexpected and arguably repugnant way. You pointed out life-saving and life-averting invertions are in tension. An extension of this is the more(/less) you think the Earth is overpopulated, the less(/more) valuable it is to save lives. Another is that if you think factory farming is bad because of the negative welfare it causes, that should reduce the value of saving lives to some (unknown and perhaps unknowable) extent. Many years ago, I wrote about these in my PhD thesis and subsequently published a paper on the meat eater problem. I confess I find this all weird to think about, which is part of the reason I’ve shifted onto other things since...
Thanks again for creating it!
Thanks for the comments! I feel honored :P
Miscellaneous responses:
I was originally going to cite Arrhenius because I was under the mistaken impression that he wrote in the 1950s or 60s and Parfit drew inspiration from him. But while making the quiz I realized it was the other way around. As I understand, Arrhenius’ impossibility proof is qualitatively the same thing as what Parfit laid out in Reasons and Persons, the difference being that Parfit only gave an informal proof and Arrhenius made it mathematically rigorous. I haven’t read either original source but that’s my understanding.
The quiz doesn’t allow for moral uncertainty. The honest reason why not is that I didn’t think to do that, but thinking about it now, it sounds really hard because it creates a combinatorial explosion of outcomes. On Q4 for example, you could also answer “uncertain between K is better and they are equal” or “uncertain between K is better and they are incomparable” or “uncertain between all three”, or if you want to get even more specific, “pretty sure K is better but maybe they’re incomparable”, …
I wanted to make the quiz as comprehensive as possible while still being reasonably short. In particular I didn’t want to claim an answer was contradictory when actually it wasn’t, and I spent a lot of time looking for ways philosophers have proposed resolutions to seemingly-contradictory sets of answers. (Including hours spent faithfully representing views that so far ~zero quiz-takers have endorsed.) One thing I explicitly didn’t cover is the difference between preferred acts vs. preferred outcomes, because it would add an amount of complexity disproportionate to its usefulness. Moral uncertainty is another issue like that, I think.
Q6 (comparing A and A+) does add new people. The move from A to B is first asked in terms of moving from A to A+ (Q6) and then A+ to B (Q7), and then you can chain those two moves down to Z, which is what Q8 is asking about. As I understand it, this is identical to Parfit’s construction of the mere addition paradox. The step where you add new people is in Q6, not in Q7, so the “do it again” is a reference to doing the Q6 step again. (And also doing the Q7 step again, but sounds like you are taking issue with the adding-new-people part.)
Possible that I’m still missing something here, please tell me if I am.
If it depends on the details, then wouldn’t the answer be “no, not always”?