But suppose we are clueless about the net effect on the injured person’s lifetime wellbeing. In that case, if we “ask” the person (from our ex ante perspective, given our imprecise credences) whether she prefers that we remove the glass rather than leaving it in the ground, her welfare-based answer is “no.” Consequently, it would seem adequate to bracket her out and bracket you in (from a “consequentialist” point of view). The person supplies no contrastive reason favoring either option; you do.
Just to check: then we should also bracket me out in the snack case, right? I presumably don’t know that eating the tasty snack determinately improves my lifetime welfare overall. So your version of bracketing wouldn’t actually recommend #1, as Toby assumed. It would remain silent in the decision situation he depicted.
To be action-guiding, person-based bracketing requires “knowing” the net effect on the lifetime well-being of at least one (lifetime) person, right?
I think we can just add that I am confident effect 3 will not become relevant until after I am dead. I didn’t explicitly state that assumption, but that was what I had in mind. Then we get the problematic conclusion I was worried about I think?
This also raises another interesting question though, which is how bracketing interacts with personal identity being fuzzy. If bracketing cares about aggregating the effects on one ‘person’ then how do we deal with situations involving branching personal identity? I would have thought you would have to frame it in terms of ‘person moments’, rather than ‘persons’, in order to be coherent?
Just to check: then we should also bracket me out in the snack case, right? I presumably don’t know that eating the tasty snack determinately improves my lifetime welfare overall. So your version of bracketing wouldn’t actually recommend #1, as Toby assumed. It would remain silent in the decision situation he depicted.
To be action-guiding, person-based bracketing requires “knowing” the net effect on the lifetime well-being of at least one (lifetime) person, right?
Interesting!
I think we can just add that I am confident effect 3 will not become relevant until after I am dead. I didn’t explicitly state that assumption, but that was what I had in mind. Then we get the problematic conclusion I was worried about I think?
This also raises another interesting question though, which is how bracketing interacts with personal identity being fuzzy. If bracketing cares about aggregating the effects on one ‘person’ then how do we deal with situations involving branching personal identity? I would have thought you would have to frame it in terms of ‘person moments’, rather than ‘persons’, in order to be coherent?