To bang a drum: while I appreciate the effort to communicate utilitarianism to a wider world, the bit on population ethics seemed, for my tastes, too much of an opinionated ‘Trojan horse’ to lead the reader to the author’s (or authors’) practical priorities. As I’ve moaned elsewhere on this Forum, I like Introductions to be introductions, not plugs.
+1, the dismissive tone of the following passage especially left a bad taste in my mouth:
After all, when thinking about what makes some possible universe good, the most obvious answer is that it contains a predominance of awesome, flourishing lives. How could that not be better than a barren rock? Any view that denies this verdict is arguably too nihilistic and divorced from humane values to be worth taking seriously.
It should be pretty clear to someone who has studied alternatives to total symmetric utilitarianism—not all of which are averagist or person-affecting views! - that some of these alternatives are thoroughly motivated by “humane,” rather than “nihilistic,” intuitions.
I see where you’re coming from, but if this is true:
For all these reasons, utilitarians are largely united in rejecting person-affecting views, even as they continue to debate which impersonal theory provides the best way forward.
then part of me thinks that the population ethics section did in fact need to pay adequate attention to the potential drawbacks of person-affecting views and make it clear why utilitarians tend to think impersonal theories are preferable, which was always going to come across somewhat biased.
Ultimately whilst the section is an intro to population ethics, it is part of a site that is supposed to be an intro to utilitarianism, so the section has to be written within that context.
To bang a drum: while I appreciate the effort to communicate utilitarianism to a wider world, the bit on population ethics seemed, for my tastes, too much of an opinionated ‘Trojan horse’ to lead the reader to the author’s (or authors’) practical priorities. As I’ve moaned elsewhere on this Forum, I like Introductions to be introductions, not plugs.
+1, the dismissive tone of the following passage especially left a bad taste in my mouth:
It should be pretty clear to someone who has studied alternatives to total symmetric utilitarianism—not all of which are averagist or person-affecting views! - that some of these alternatives are thoroughly motivated by “humane,” rather than “nihilistic,” intuitions.
I see where you’re coming from, but if this is true:
then part of me thinks that the population ethics section did in fact need to pay adequate attention to the potential drawbacks of person-affecting views and make it clear why utilitarians tend to think impersonal theories are preferable, which was always going to come across somewhat biased.
Ultimately whilst the section is an intro to population ethics, it is part of a site that is supposed to be an intro to utilitarianism, so the section has to be written within that context.