Iâd guess this is pretty illustrative of differences in how we think about person-affecting views, and why I think violations of âthe independence of irrelevant alternativesâ and âLosers Can Dislodge Winnersâ are not a big deal:
Narrow views imply that in the choice between 1 and 2, you can choose either. But why in the world would adding 3, which is itself impermissible to take, affect that?
Run through the reasoning on the narrow view with and without 3 available and compare them. The differences in reasoning, ultimately following from narrow person-affecting intuitions, are why. So, the narrow person-affecting intuitions explain why this happens. Youâre asking as if thereâs no reason, or no good reason. But if you were sufficiently sympathetic to narrow person-affecting intuitions, then youâd have good reasons: those narrow person-affecting affecting intuitions and how you reason with them.
(Not that you referred directly to âthe independence of irrelevant alternativesâ here, but violation of it is a common complaint against person-affecting views, so I want to respond to that directly here.) 3 is not an âirrelevantâ alternative, because when itâs available, we see exactly how itâs relevant when it shows up in the reasoning that leads us to 2. I think âthe independence of irrelevant alternativesâ has a misleading name.
Adding some other choice youâre not allowed to take to an option set shouldnât make you no longer allowed to choose a previously permissible option. This would be like if you had two permissible options: saving a child at personal risk, or doing nothing, and then after being offered an extra impermissible option (shooting a different child), it was no longer permissible to do nothing. WTF?
And then this to me seems disanalogous, because you donât provide any reason at all for how the third option would change the logic. We have reasons in the earlier hypothetical.
Iâd guess this is pretty illustrative of differences in how we think about person-affecting views, and why I think violations of âthe independence of irrelevant alternativesâ and âLosers Can Dislodge Winnersâ are not a big deal:
Run through the reasoning on the narrow view with and without 3 available and compare them. The differences in reasoning, ultimately following from narrow person-affecting intuitions, are why. So, the narrow person-affecting intuitions explain why this happens. Youâre asking as if thereâs no reason, or no good reason. But if you were sufficiently sympathetic to narrow person-affecting intuitions, then youâd have good reasons: those narrow person-affecting affecting intuitions and how you reason with them.
(Not that you referred directly to âthe independence of irrelevant alternativesâ here, but violation of it is a common complaint against person-affecting views, so I want to respond to that directly here.) 3 is not an âirrelevantâ alternative, because when itâs available, we see exactly how itâs relevant when it shows up in the reasoning that leads us to 2. I think âthe independence of irrelevant alternativesâ has a misleading name.
And then this to me seems disanalogous, because you donât provide any reason at all for how the third option would change the logic. We have reasons in the earlier hypothetical.