Hi Jesse and Anthony, thank youââregarding your second point, I think itâs indeed a nonstarter, from a person-centered point of view, to make up a âcounterpartâ for Alice. One might think the same regarding your first point: The assumption that Aliceâs welfare is zero in B-worlds, where she does not exist, is made up. As Mogensen puts it (p. 1027): âWe may believe, for example, that a personâs welfare level is defined in outcomes in which she does not exist, and that it takes a value of zero (Greaves & Cusbert, 2022; Holtug, 2001; Roberts, 2003). This would indeed undermine my argument. However, it is also a position that I find incredible, since I find it incredible that non-existent people have well-defined levels of any measurable quantity, be it height, weight, or welfare, any more than logic has a well-defined temperature.â
If this is right, it immediately gets us out of the worry expressed in your first point: Alice is indeterminate between the options, so that she is bracketed out (i.e., she provides us with no contrastive reason to favor an option rather than another).
However, it seems to me that this cannot be right. Suppose Alice net-suffers terribly in A-worlds. Surely, this gives us a contrastive reason to choose B rather than A, as far as Alice is concerned. Pace Mogensen, I believe we should be able to get to this verdict without assuming that Aliceâs nonexistent welfare is literally zero in B-worlds: In the scenario where Alice exists (we choose A and x-risk is averted), she has a welfare-based perspective on how worlds where she doesnât exist compare/ârank relative to the world where she exists and suffers, and the comparison prefers nonexistence. (In other words, Alice supplies a welfare-based objection against our choosing A, grounded in the welfare-based take she has on our choice in the scenario where she comes into being.)
So, we have an Alice-indexed contrastive reason not to choose A of the following two-dimensional magnitude: (p â [0, 1]; her negative welfare, say â10, or perhaps [-20, 0)). This reason has a determinate direction (favoring B rather than A) but an indeterminate strength. Now suppose that, in choosing A, we also determinately save Mel from malaria, providing her with a +5 welfare benefit, say. Mel thus supplies a contrastive reason of determinate strength favoring A rather than B. The sum of contrastive reasons is now indeterminate, so that either choice is permissible.
This is the correct verdict, I think. Both intuitively and from person-centered âfirst principles,â impartial altruists should not favor either option in this case. What we have here is one moral patient favoring A, another one opposing A, and the balance of their contrastive reasons being unclear. It makes sense, intuitively and theoretically, that either option should be permissible. (On scope-sensitive forms of altruism, this verdict may change depending on the number of people like Alice and the number of people like Mel involved in the case, as one would expect.)
It is important not to lose sight of the fact that overall indeterminacy is not to be avoided tout court. We should avoid it where, and only where, it does not actually obtain from an impartial altruistic point of view. Consider the following variation on the above case. Suppose our uncertainty regarding Alice is deeper: She might also have a net-happy life in A-worlds, who knows. In that case, Alice provides us with no contrastive reason to favor either option; if we âask her,â sheâs fine with either choice (given her welfare stakes and our credences). Assuming that, in choosing A, we determinately save Mel from malaria, impartial altruists should not reach a verdict of overall indeterminacy: Mel is not fine with either choice and should thus determine our overall verdict.
The empirical situation (regarding x-risk, various ways in which human survival may be realized, and s-risk) is, of course, complicated. My post does not address the question of what kinds of cases we happen to be facing in the actual world today. It aims to make a contribution to the prior conceptual, moral, and decision-theoretic questions.
Iâd be curious about how you think about transworld identity and personal identity and to get your take on the following proposal for counterpart relations. I expect that bottom-up bracketing would rarely be action-guiding in practice without counterpart relations, because of huge numbers of contingent moral patients pointing in each direction, and counterpart relations could make some version action-guiding in practice by allowing us to bracket out far more of them.
This is a pretty rough sketch.
One way Iâm thinking of grounding counterpart relations is by looking for measures that naturally generalize our concepts of transworld and personal identity. For example, Alice in A is the same person as Alice in B and her past self because of common causes of the features important to Aliceâs identity, like her memories, psychological dispositions, etc.. Maybe weâd say specifically due to the preservation or inheritance of the physical structures (her brain) responsible for her psychological features from her past selves.
All of this is a matter of degree, because Alice changes over time and could diverge between worlds A and B. Almost all of the particles in her neurons and elsewhere in her body are replaced over time, and which particles make her up will diverge across worlds. In cases of amnesia, brain damage and normal human aging and experience, people can change fairly dramatically in their psychological features. We might say that transworld and personal identity matching are themselves graded. Alice is kind of both the same person and kind of a different person, and more a different person the larger the divergence and the less is inherited.
Then, Alice and Bob, if both human, share more psychological dispositions than Alice and a chicken, and this can be traced back to more recent common causes of their psychological dispositions, i.e. more recent common ancestry between any two humans than between a human and a chicken, passed through genes. This could let us preferentially match counterparts that are more closely related/âtrace more of their genes that account for psychological features back to the same more recent ancestors.
Transworld identity is just a special case of this kind of causal counterpart relation where the common causes of psychological features are especially potent or of a particular kind, e.g. the âsameâ brain, which we can trace through spacetime. The gap between distinct persons is admittedly generally much larger than between the same person across worlds or at different points in time, but if itâs more a difference in degree than kind since both are graded, then this would give us reason to accept or reject both transworld/âpersonal identity and causal counterpart relations together, rather than accept transworld/âpersonal identiy and reject causal counterpart relations.
One potential supporting argument for the generalization from direct inheritance of psychological features to common causes of psychological features for counterpart relations:
While adult Alice inherits some psychological features from her infant self and infant brain, many of her cognitive capacities as an adult â which are plausibly important to her identity â were not directly inherited from her infant self or infant brain (or fetal brain), but were caused in part by general and often region-specific DNA-driven processes to restructure her brain. Furthermore, the vast majority of the particles in her neurons and brain get replaced even if most neurons are preserved, and (Iâd guess) the DNA in those neurons are necessary for ensuring their function even as the particles in them turn over. So, Aliceâs psychological features and identity over time and across worlds come in large part from her DNA. The same has been typically true for conscious biological beings on Earth so far.
The persistent DNA particles over time cause Aliceâs psychological features over time and across worlds. Copies of them from her ancestors cause many of her relativeâs similar psychological features over time and across worlds. What grounds her identity across time and worlds is common causes of her psychological features, but going back up the causal chain, we find common causes of psychological features between moral patients, too, not just within, through copies of the same DNA.[1]
If common causes, like someoneâs DNA, of shared psychological features across worlds are what ground transworld identity, then we should be able to use common causes, like a common ancestorâs DNA from which copies were inherited, of shared psychological features to ground counterpart relations across worlds to generalize transworld identity, too.
We can use other common causes of shared psychological features to ground counterparts more generally. Or even common causes of individualsâ existences across worlds, e.g. if someone is deciding between dog breeders to breed a puppy for them (or buying a puppy from them and creating demand for further puppies), they are causally downstream of each of the possible resulting puppies, and this further common cause supports matching the possible resulting puppies across worlds as counterparts.
I also donât think it would make a difference if all of Aliceâs DNA got replaced by exact copies and none of her particles were preserved over time. Either causal relationships or continuity are doing the work here.
Interesting, thanksââmore later, just one (meta-)comment: Maybe, if huge numbers of individuals are pointing in each direction (i.e., if we are clueful enough to be able to pick out these individuals and assign them a contrastive reason of determinate direction but vague magnitude), it would be a mistake for impartial altruists to reach a determinate overall verdict. In cases where the balance of contrastive person-attributable reasons is vague, it seems inadequate to favor either option. In other words, indeterminacy may not be a problem to âsolveâ in these cases (whether hypothetical or actual); instead, it would be a problem if our theory told us that the situation, in these particular cases, is determinate.
I might be able to share a couple of thoughts on identity and counterpart relations laterââitâs very tricky business, of course. For now, just one more thought on your apparent intuition (?) that, in the cases we are actually/âempirically facing today, we should be able to set far future individuals aside. There might be another, principled way of doing this that may align quite well with the defense of person-centered bottom-up bracketing offered in the post (which justifies its verdicts in terms of each personâs ex ante perspective on our choices). Start with the plausible, widely shared idea that no number of mild, barely noticeable headaches can outweigh unbearable, torture-level suffering, i.e., draw a distinction between âlowerâ and âhigherâ kinds of suffering (and perhaps an analogous distinction between lower and higher kinds of happiness, Ă la John Stuart Mill). Then argue that sufficiently tiny probabilities of higher suffering still fall into the lower prospect category, i.e., can be traded off with headaches. (In other words, come up with a way to avoid the kind of fanaticism at issue here.) Finally, argue that our empirical situation happens to be such that, with our actions today, we can only make sufficiently tiny probability-dents in the fates of individual far future people (as represented by us).
I agree with the meta point, but my reaction is that if this particular theory is practically never action-guiding, Iâll just move onto other theories that could be action-guiding, say via some kind of metanormative bracketing or wager.
I think treating tiny probabilities of severe suffering (or any large difference for an individual) as lower would probably work to often give determinate comparisons, as you suggest. We could get a range of views that set the thresholds between higher and lower in different places and have moral uncertainty over them.
It could go too far or turn on empirical facts that in my view it shouldnât really, although this is pulling in nonidentity/âcounterpart intuitions, so basically question begging.
Generally any moral patients who do not yet exist /â are not yet conceived could be dramatically discounted because each such pre-specified individual is extremely unlikely to exist, based on the huge number of sperm cells in the race to fertilize an egg. The view could practically be a strict person-affecting view like presentism or necessitarianism.
All of our apparently cost-effective animal welfare interventions could only help animals to the lower level, because none of them help already conceived individuals, given the delay between the decision to support an intervention and its actual implementation.
Causing millions more chickens to be factory farmed per year would only reach the lower level for each resulting chicken ex ante.
Plausibly each specific far future moral patient is far far far less likely to exist than any specific chicken in the next 10 years. Each individualâs probability of existing could roughly decrease exponentially with their generation number from the present, at least for biological moral patients. So, there could be thresholds where chickens over the next few years reach higher, but far future moral patients only reach lower. But should the view turn on these particulars?
Hi again, thanksââthatâs indeed what follows for the chickens, on this approach. I donât necessarily want to defend this implication, but on the assumption that sufficiently tiny probabilities of âhigherâ suffering put the respective prospects in the âlowerâ category, itâs less troubling than one might think. Consider another case: A trillion existing people each have the option to participate in a lottery that will cause one person higher suffering and make everybody else happy. They are all asking you to let them participate in the lottery, and would object otherwise (on personal welfare grounds). You point out that one person will certainly end up experiencing higher suffering, and that certain higher suffering cannot be outweighed by non-higher happiness. And yet, that should not dissuade them (on the assumption that a one-in-a-trillion chance of higher suffering is sufficiently small). Hence, if you want to take seriously the welfare-based verdicts of the people affected by your choice, you should arguably run the lottery.
This approach may allow us to discount the reasons supplied by far future individuals sufficiently to place them in the lower categoryââas you say. If we want/âexpect determinate âconsequentialistâ verdicts in favor of saving people from malaria today (or any higher harms), despite long-term cluelessness, this is a welcome result.
However, the implication for the chickens is troubling, and itâs unclear why empirical specifics about the causal origins of moral patients should be so important. What may have gone wrong, in this approach, is that the designators we use (e.g., âthe chicken with DNA xyzâ) are out of line with our moral concern for those we know exist or will exist. To the extent possible, our designators should arguably pick them out.This may recommend switching to an ex post view and respective designators such as âthe chickens who will come into torturous existence given action A.â Or, within a formally ex ante view, it may recommend switching to person-moments as the basic objects of concern: âthe person-moments who will experience higher suffering after the lottery,â in the above case. (The ex ante/âex post distinction is harder to draw than is often assumed.) This would allow us to avoid the troubling implication for the chickens, and avoid having to run the lottery in the above case. Both the person-moments who will suffer after the lottery and the chicken-moments who will come into torturous existence are in the higher category and supply decisive reasons. (As mentioned in another comment, Iâm open to person-moment-centered bottom-up bracketing, which can be justified by exactly parallel arguments and is not âimpersonalâ or âaggregate-first.â)
What about far future individuals? Take a very simple case involving two people or person-moments: the one who will suffer at welfare level â10 if we choose A and x-risk is averted (Alice), and the one who will suffer at â10 if we choose B and x-risk is averted (Bob). Suppose we are clueless about how A and B affect the probability of x-risk being averted. On some sharpenings, the probability is sufficiently low to place Alice and Bob in the lower category. Consequently, it is not the case that they are determinately in the higher category. That may or may not provide a basis for subordinating them to the people we can save from malaria today.
The defense of person(-moment)-centered bottom-up bracketing I give in the post grants Kollin et al.âs background views about how to deal with representors. These entail that, in the above case involving Alice and Bob, the situation is indeterminate (there are sharpenings on which Alice supplies the stronger contrastive reason, and sharpenings on which Bob does). This may âthreatenâ cluelessness in the cases we happen to be facing in the actual world, depending on the number of people like Alice and Bob. (If the people we can save from malaria were numerous enough relative to the Alice- and Bob-like people, the situation would determinately favor saving the people from malaria. Their combined determinate reasons would outweigh the admissible net reason supplied by the Alice- and Bob-like people under every sharpening.) Given Kollin et al.âs unanimity requirementââa single dissenting sharpening is sufficient for indeterminacyââthis is exactly as it should be. Personally, I donât necessarily expect more determinacy than that (see below). But if you do, you should question the unanimity requirement:
You might argue that since Aliceâs and Bobâs reasons are of the same kind (anti-suffering), occur in equal number (1), and have mirror-symmetric magnitudes (pâ[0, 1]; 10), their reasons should balance each other out. If we added Carol at â10 alongside Bob, Carol and Bobâs reasons should be stronger than Aliceâs. If, instead of adding Carol, we put Bob at â20, his reason should also be stronger than Aliceâs. And if we narrowed Bobâs p to [0.5,1], his reason should again become stronger. (Suppose you are offered a choice between p1â[0,1] of serious â10 suffering and an independently varying p2â[0.5,1] of the same â10 suffering, what would you choose? Or suppose you must choose between p1â[0,1] of â10 and independently varying p2â[0,1] of â20? Intuitively, the second prospect is worse in each comparison.)
Kollin et al.âs unanimity rule denies this and entails indeterminacy in each of these cases. But some standard, independently axiomatized, and prima facie attractive choice rules entail all of the comparative verdicts just suggested: e.g., minimax regret and non-extremal Hurwicz (see Hayashi 2008, Stoye 2010 and 2011, and Pettigrew 2016). These rules can be applied after the person-centered bottom-up bracketing filter.
If you wish to avoid indeterminacy, this is arguably the way to go. Indeterminacy is not forced by person-centered bottom-up bracketing. It results from combining that architecture with a unanimity rule for sharpenings. Other rules can recover additional action guidance while preserving person-first filtering.
Personally, Iâm quite sympathetic to the unanimity rule. But I have sympathies for it across the board: In section 4 of my post, I argue that itâs unclear why impartial altruists must be scope-sensitive. If you can either (1) save one person or (2) save two other people but not all three, there is no unanimity. The set of factors relevant to the choice contains three members, two of which favor (2) but one of which favors (1). Kollin et al. should, I think, take seriously the view that the situation is indeterminate. Itâs unclear to me why one would strongly favor the unanimity rule for representors while rejecting it outright for sets of persons. Just like each admissible probability-sharpening has an equal âclaimâ to determining our belief, each person has an equal claim to determining our preference. Why âcollapse the informationâ we have in the case of separate persons, but not in the case of separate sharpenings? And if every sharpening must agree before a verdict is epistemically determinate, why is it not the case that every person must agree before a verdict is morally determinate? Why give each separate sharpening veto power, but not each separate person? If anything, I would have thought veto power even more plausible for persons who each have their life on the lineââthe only one they haveââand are insisting to be saved.
Finally, my post briefly discusses Anthonyâs metanormative bracketing. Even if our favorite rule for representors remains the unanimity of sharpenings, metanormative considerations should perhaps warm us up to alternative rules such as minimax regret and Hurwicz (which plausibly deserve non-negligible credence). When the unanimity rule outputs indeterminacy, the other rules will have a preference. On metanormative bottom-up bracketing, the unanimity rule is bracketed out and the others will decide the case.
Hi Impartial, thanks for this reply! Canât speak for Jesse, but I definitely agree with this:
It is important not to lose sight of the fact that overall indeterminacy is not to be avoided tout court. We should avoid it where, and only where, it does not actually obtain from an impartial altruistic point of view.
So, if bracketing (either TD or BU) is entirely non-action-guiding for the reasons Jesse mentions, that doesnât bear on whether bracketing is a good normative theory. But it does bear on your claim at the start of your post: âBottom-up, person-centered bracketing can thus preserve principled impartial action guidanceâ.
Hi againââthanks! Yes, I should have been more precise about what the claim is Iâm trying to argue: that person-centered bottom-up bracketing provides action guiding (determinate) verdicts in just those cases, whether hypothetical or actual, where altruistic action guidance plausibly obtains, and outputs indeterminacy in the other cases. In other words, the claim is that there are no normatively problematic failures of action guidance.
Is this a version of (weak) actualism as a person-affecting theory? In worlds where Alice doesnât exist, she has no properties like welfare to provide us any reasons or welfare-based objections.
Weak actualism, as in the literature (Hare, 2007, Spencer, 2021 section 6), would say to pick among the options that maximize âself-conditional valueâ. An option is permissible only if itâs no worse than any other for the people who (ever) exist in the resulting outcome. In other words, assuming we choose the option A, we compare all the options pairwise on the basis of the reasons provided by the people who would exist given our choice of A,[1] and if A is no worse overall than any other option on these comparisons, then it maximizes self-conditional value.[2]
It sounds similar to what you wrote here, too:
Perhaps, on a person-centered approach to ethics, that is simply true (cf. Boonin 2014 and Pummer 2024): If we choose B, we will have made it the case that (i) no actual person has negative welfare, which they could object to on personal welfare grounds, and (ii) all actual persons have the maximum amount of positive welfare they could have had. (Person p2, once she exists, will have no welfare-based objection to our choosing B: We could not have made her better off. Nor will p1, who will not exist.) On a person-centered approach, we may therefore have maximized peopleâs welfare in the sense that matters.
I also think maximizing self-conditional value as formalized in the literature is the wrong approach for an actualist when deciding between at least 3 options, because itâs myopic, and we should use backward induction on behalf of the people who would exist given an option. This can avoid the repugnant conclusion. I have an unpublished draft based on the idea of backward induction for weak actualism Iâd be happy to share, and I discuss the problem a bit here.
Thanks, Michaelâbriefly for now (Iâm short on time today and this week): I think some actualist views deserve to be taken very seriously, but for the purpose of defending person-centered bottom-up bracketing, I meant to leave open what procreative reasons are supplied by the persons we can bring into existence. E.g., while the framing of welfare-based objections/âregrets suggests an asymmetric view (focused on preventing miserable lives), antiobjections/âgratitudes might give us reasons too (to bring happy lives into existence, or to grant them permitting/âjustifying/âcanceling force). I agree myopia is an issue but think avoiding it is doable. Iâd be interested in reading your draft.
(As another judge of the competition: Seconded!)
Hi Jesse and Anthony, thank youââregarding your second point, I think itâs indeed a nonstarter, from a person-centered point of view, to make up a âcounterpartâ for Alice. One might think the same regarding your first point: The assumption that Aliceâs welfare is zero in B-worlds, where she does not exist, is made up. As Mogensen puts it (p. 1027): âWe may believe, for example, that a personâs welfare level is defined in outcomes in which she does not exist, and that it takes a value of zero (Greaves & Cusbert, 2022; Holtug, 2001; Roberts, 2003). This would indeed undermine my argument. However, it is also a position that I find incredible, since I find it incredible that non-existent people have well-defined levels of any measurable quantity, be it height, weight, or welfare, any more than logic has a well-defined temperature.â
If this is right, it immediately gets us out of the worry expressed in your first point: Alice is indeterminate between the options, so that she is bracketed out (i.e., she provides us with no contrastive reason to favor an option rather than another).
However, it seems to me that this cannot be right. Suppose Alice net-suffers terribly in A-worlds. Surely, this gives us a contrastive reason to choose B rather than A, as far as Alice is concerned. Pace Mogensen, I believe we should be able to get to this verdict without assuming that Aliceâs nonexistent welfare is literally zero in B-worlds: In the scenario where Alice exists (we choose A and x-risk is averted), she has a welfare-based perspective on how worlds where she doesnât exist compare/ârank relative to the world where she exists and suffers, and the comparison prefers nonexistence. (In other words, Alice supplies a welfare-based objection against our choosing A, grounded in the welfare-based take she has on our choice in the scenario where she comes into being.)
So, we have an Alice-indexed contrastive reason not to choose A of the following two-dimensional magnitude: (p â [0, 1]; her negative welfare, say â10, or perhaps [-20, 0)). This reason has a determinate direction (favoring B rather than A) but an indeterminate strength. Now suppose that, in choosing A, we also determinately save Mel from malaria, providing her with a +5 welfare benefit, say. Mel thus supplies a contrastive reason of determinate strength favoring A rather than B. The sum of contrastive reasons is now indeterminate, so that either choice is permissible.
This is the correct verdict, I think. Both intuitively and from person-centered âfirst principles,â impartial altruists should not favor either option in this case. What we have here is one moral patient favoring A, another one opposing A, and the balance of their contrastive reasons being unclear. It makes sense, intuitively and theoretically, that either option should be permissible. (On scope-sensitive forms of altruism, this verdict may change depending on the number of people like Alice and the number of people like Mel involved in the case, as one would expect.)
It is important not to lose sight of the fact that overall indeterminacy is not to be avoided tout court. We should avoid it where, and only where, it does not actually obtain from an impartial altruistic point of view. Consider the following variation on the above case. Suppose our uncertainty regarding Alice is deeper: She might also have a net-happy life in A-worlds, who knows. In that case, Alice provides us with no contrastive reason to favor either option; if we âask her,â sheâs fine with either choice (given her welfare stakes and our credences). Assuming that, in choosing A, we determinately save Mel from malaria, impartial altruists should not reach a verdict of overall indeterminacy: Mel is not fine with either choice and should thus determine our overall verdict.
The empirical situation (regarding x-risk, various ways in which human survival may be realized, and s-risk) is, of course, complicated. My post does not address the question of what kinds of cases we happen to be facing in the actual world today. It aims to make a contribution to the prior conceptual, moral, and decision-theoretic questions.
Iâd be curious about how you think about transworld identity and personal identity and to get your take on the following proposal for counterpart relations. I expect that bottom-up bracketing would rarely be action-guiding in practice without counterpart relations, because of huge numbers of contingent moral patients pointing in each direction, and counterpart relations could make some version action-guiding in practice by allowing us to bracket out far more of them.
This is a pretty rough sketch.
One way Iâm thinking of grounding counterpart relations is by looking for measures that naturally generalize our concepts of transworld and personal identity. For example, Alice in A is the same person as Alice in B and her past self because of common causes of the features important to Aliceâs identity, like her memories, psychological dispositions, etc.. Maybe weâd say specifically due to the preservation or inheritance of the physical structures (her brain) responsible for her psychological features from her past selves.
All of this is a matter of degree, because Alice changes over time and could diverge between worlds A and B. Almost all of the particles in her neurons and elsewhere in her body are replaced over time, and which particles make her up will diverge across worlds. In cases of amnesia, brain damage and normal human aging and experience, people can change fairly dramatically in their psychological features. We might say that transworld and personal identity matching are themselves graded. Alice is kind of both the same person and kind of a different person, and more a different person the larger the divergence and the less is inherited.
Then, Alice and Bob, if both human, share more psychological dispositions than Alice and a chicken, and this can be traced back to more recent common causes of their psychological dispositions, i.e. more recent common ancestry between any two humans than between a human and a chicken, passed through genes. This could let us preferentially match counterparts that are more closely related/âtrace more of their genes that account for psychological features back to the same more recent ancestors.
Transworld identity is just a special case of this kind of causal counterpart relation where the common causes of psychological features are especially potent or of a particular kind, e.g. the âsameâ brain, which we can trace through spacetime. The gap between distinct persons is admittedly generally much larger than between the same person across worlds or at different points in time, but if itâs more a difference in degree than kind since both are graded, then this would give us reason to accept or reject both transworld/âpersonal identity and causal counterpart relations together, rather than accept transworld/âpersonal identiy and reject causal counterpart relations.
One potential supporting argument for the generalization from direct inheritance of psychological features to common causes of psychological features for counterpart relations:
While adult Alice inherits some psychological features from her infant self and infant brain, many of her cognitive capacities as an adult â which are plausibly important to her identity â were not directly inherited from her infant self or infant brain (or fetal brain), but were caused in part by general and often region-specific DNA-driven processes to restructure her brain. Furthermore, the vast majority of the particles in her neurons and brain get replaced even if most neurons are preserved, and (Iâd guess) the DNA in those neurons are necessary for ensuring their function even as the particles in them turn over. So, Aliceâs psychological features and identity over time and across worlds come in large part from her DNA. The same has been typically true for conscious biological beings on Earth so far.
The persistent DNA particles over time cause Aliceâs psychological features over time and across worlds. Copies of them from her ancestors cause many of her relativeâs similar psychological features over time and across worlds. What grounds her identity across time and worlds is common causes of her psychological features, but going back up the causal chain, we find common causes of psychological features between moral patients, too, not just within, through copies of the same DNA.[1]
If common causes, like someoneâs DNA, of shared psychological features across worlds are what ground transworld identity, then we should be able to use common causes, like a common ancestorâs DNA from which copies were inherited, of shared psychological features to ground counterpart relations across worlds to generalize transworld identity, too.
We can use other common causes of shared psychological features to ground counterparts more generally. Or even common causes of individualsâ existences across worlds, e.g. if someone is deciding between dog breeders to breed a puppy for them (or buying a puppy from them and creating demand for further puppies), they are causally downstream of each of the possible resulting puppies, and this further common cause supports matching the possible resulting puppies across worlds as counterparts.
I also donât think it would make a difference if all of Aliceâs DNA got replaced by exact copies and none of her particles were preserved over time. Either causal relationships or continuity are doing the work here.
Interesting, thanksââmore later, just one (meta-)comment: Maybe, if huge numbers of individuals are pointing in each direction (i.e., if we are clueful enough to be able to pick out these individuals and assign them a contrastive reason of determinate direction but vague magnitude), it would be a mistake for impartial altruists to reach a determinate overall verdict. In cases where the balance of contrastive person-attributable reasons is vague, it seems inadequate to favor either option. In other words, indeterminacy may not be a problem to âsolveâ in these cases (whether hypothetical or actual); instead, it would be a problem if our theory told us that the situation, in these particular cases, is determinate.
I might be able to share a couple of thoughts on identity and counterpart relations laterââitâs very tricky business, of course. For now, just one more thought on your apparent intuition (?) that, in the cases we are actually/âempirically facing today, we should be able to set far future individuals aside. There might be another, principled way of doing this that may align quite well with the defense of person-centered bottom-up bracketing offered in the post (which justifies its verdicts in terms of each personâs ex ante perspective on our choices). Start with the plausible, widely shared idea that no number of mild, barely noticeable headaches can outweigh unbearable, torture-level suffering, i.e., draw a distinction between âlowerâ and âhigherâ kinds of suffering (and perhaps an analogous distinction between lower and higher kinds of happiness, Ă la John Stuart Mill). Then argue that sufficiently tiny probabilities of higher suffering still fall into the lower prospect category, i.e., can be traded off with headaches. (In other words, come up with a way to avoid the kind of fanaticism at issue here.) Finally, argue that our empirical situation happens to be such that, with our actions today, we can only make sufficiently tiny probability-dents in the fates of individual far future people (as represented by us).
I agree with the meta point, but my reaction is that if this particular theory is practically never action-guiding, Iâll just move onto other theories that could be action-guiding, say via some kind of metanormative bracketing or wager.
I think treating tiny probabilities of severe suffering (or any large difference for an individual) as lower would probably work to often give determinate comparisons, as you suggest. We could get a range of views that set the thresholds between higher and lower in different places and have moral uncertainty over them.
It could go too far or turn on empirical facts that in my view it shouldnât really, although this is pulling in nonidentity/âcounterpart intuitions, so basically question begging.
Generally any moral patients who do not yet exist /â are not yet conceived could be dramatically discounted because each such pre-specified individual is extremely unlikely to exist, based on the huge number of sperm cells in the race to fertilize an egg. The view could practically be a strict person-affecting view like presentism or necessitarianism.
All of our apparently cost-effective animal welfare interventions could only help animals to the lower level, because none of them help already conceived individuals, given the delay between the decision to support an intervention and its actual implementation.
Causing millions more chickens to be factory farmed per year would only reach the lower level for each resulting chicken ex ante.
Plausibly each specific far future moral patient is far far far less likely to exist than any specific chicken in the next 10 years. Each individualâs probability of existing could roughly decrease exponentially with their generation number from the present, at least for biological moral patients. So, there could be thresholds where chickens over the next few years reach higher, but far future moral patients only reach lower. But should the view turn on these particulars?
Hi again, thanksââthatâs indeed what follows for the chickens, on this approach. I donât necessarily want to defend this implication, but on the assumption that sufficiently tiny probabilities of âhigherâ suffering put the respective prospects in the âlowerâ category, itâs less troubling than one might think. Consider another case: A trillion existing people each have the option to participate in a lottery that will cause one person higher suffering and make everybody else happy. They are all asking you to let them participate in the lottery, and would object otherwise (on personal welfare grounds). You point out that one person will certainly end up experiencing higher suffering, and that certain higher suffering cannot be outweighed by non-higher happiness. And yet, that should not dissuade them (on the assumption that a one-in-a-trillion chance of higher suffering is sufficiently small). Hence, if you want to take seriously the welfare-based verdicts of the people affected by your choice, you should arguably run the lottery.
This approach may allow us to discount the reasons supplied by far future individuals sufficiently to place them in the lower categoryââas you say. If we want/âexpect determinate âconsequentialistâ verdicts in favor of saving people from malaria today (or any higher harms), despite long-term cluelessness, this is a welcome result.
However, the implication for the chickens is troubling, and itâs unclear why empirical specifics about the causal origins of moral patients should be so important. What may have gone wrong, in this approach, is that the designators we use (e.g., âthe chicken with DNA xyzâ) are out of line with our moral concern for those we know exist or will exist. To the extent possible, our designators should arguably pick them out. This may recommend switching to an ex post view and respective designators such as âthe chickens who will come into torturous existence given action A.â Or, within a formally ex ante view, it may recommend switching to person-moments as the basic objects of concern: âthe person-moments who will experience higher suffering after the lottery,â in the above case. (The ex ante/âex post distinction is harder to draw than is often assumed.) This would allow us to avoid the troubling implication for the chickens, and avoid having to run the lottery in the above case. Both the person-moments who will suffer after the lottery and the chicken-moments who will come into torturous existence are in the higher category and supply decisive reasons. (As mentioned in another comment, Iâm open to person-moment-centered bottom-up bracketing, which can be justified by exactly parallel arguments and is not âimpersonalâ or âaggregate-first.â)
What about far future individuals? Take a very simple case involving two people or person-moments: the one who will suffer at welfare level â10 if we choose A and x-risk is averted (Alice), and the one who will suffer at â10 if we choose B and x-risk is averted (Bob). Suppose we are clueless about how A and B affect the probability of x-risk being averted. On some sharpenings, the probability is sufficiently low to place Alice and Bob in the lower category. Consequently, it is not the case that they are determinately in the higher category. That may or may not provide a basis for subordinating them to the people we can save from malaria today.
The defense of person(-moment)-centered bottom-up bracketing I give in the post grants Kollin et al.âs background views about how to deal with representors. These entail that, in the above case involving Alice and Bob, the situation is indeterminate (there are sharpenings on which Alice supplies the stronger contrastive reason, and sharpenings on which Bob does). This may âthreatenâ cluelessness in the cases we happen to be facing in the actual world, depending on the number of people like Alice and Bob. (If the people we can save from malaria were numerous enough relative to the Alice- and Bob-like people, the situation would determinately favor saving the people from malaria. Their combined determinate reasons would outweigh the admissible net reason supplied by the Alice- and Bob-like people under every sharpening.) Given Kollin et al.âs unanimity requirementââa single dissenting sharpening is sufficient for indeterminacyââthis is exactly as it should be. Personally, I donât necessarily expect more determinacy than that (see below). But if you do, you should question the unanimity requirement:
You might argue that since Aliceâs and Bobâs reasons are of the same kind (anti-suffering), occur in equal number (1), and have mirror-symmetric magnitudes (pâ[0, 1]; 10), their reasons should balance each other out. If we added Carol at â10 alongside Bob, Carol and Bobâs reasons should be stronger than Aliceâs. If, instead of adding Carol, we put Bob at â20, his reason should also be stronger than Aliceâs. And if we narrowed Bobâs p to [0.5,1], his reason should again become stronger. (Suppose you are offered a choice between p1â[0,1] of serious â10 suffering and an independently varying p2â[0.5,1] of the same â10 suffering, what would you choose? Or suppose you must choose between p1â[0,1] of â10 and independently varying p2â[0,1] of â20? Intuitively, the second prospect is worse in each comparison.)
Kollin et al.âs unanimity rule denies this and entails indeterminacy in each of these cases. But some standard, independently axiomatized, and prima facie attractive choice rules entail all of the comparative verdicts just suggested: e.g., minimax regret and non-extremal Hurwicz (see Hayashi 2008, Stoye 2010 and 2011, and Pettigrew 2016). These rules can be applied after the person-centered bottom-up bracketing filter.
If you wish to avoid indeterminacy, this is arguably the way to go. Indeterminacy is not forced by person-centered bottom-up bracketing. It results from combining that architecture with a unanimity rule for sharpenings. Other rules can recover additional action guidance while preserving person-first filtering.
Personally, Iâm quite sympathetic to the unanimity rule. But I have sympathies for it across the board: In section 4 of my post, I argue that itâs unclear why impartial altruists must be scope-sensitive. If you can either (1) save one person or (2) save two other people but not all three, there is no unanimity. The set of factors relevant to the choice contains three members, two of which favor (2) but one of which favors (1). Kollin et al. should, I think, take seriously the view that the situation is indeterminate. Itâs unclear to me why one would strongly favor the unanimity rule for representors while rejecting it outright for sets of persons. Just like each admissible probability-sharpening has an equal âclaimâ to determining our belief, each person has an equal claim to determining our preference. Why âcollapse the informationâ we have in the case of separate persons, but not in the case of separate sharpenings? And if every sharpening must agree before a verdict is epistemically determinate, why is it not the case that every person must agree before a verdict is morally determinate? Why give each separate sharpening veto power, but not each separate person? If anything, I would have thought veto power even more plausible for persons who each have their life on the lineââthe only one they haveââand are insisting to be saved.
Finally, my post briefly discusses Anthonyâs metanormative bracketing. Even if our favorite rule for representors remains the unanimity of sharpenings, metanormative considerations should perhaps warm us up to alternative rules such as minimax regret and Hurwicz (which plausibly deserve non-negligible credence). When the unanimity rule outputs indeterminacy, the other rules will have a preference. On metanormative bottom-up bracketing, the unanimity rule is bracketed out and the others will decide the case.
Hi Impartial, thanks for this reply! Canât speak for Jesse, but I definitely agree with this:
So, if bracketing (either TD or BU) is entirely non-action-guiding for the reasons Jesse mentions, that doesnât bear on whether bracketing is a good normative theory. But it does bear on your claim at the start of your post: âBottom-up, person-centered bracketing can thus preserve principled impartial action guidanceâ.
Hi againââthanks! Yes, I should have been more precise about what the claim is Iâm trying to argue: that person-centered bottom-up bracketing provides action guiding (determinate) verdicts in just those cases, whether hypothetical or actual, where altruistic action guidance plausibly obtains, and outputs indeterminacy in the other cases. In other words, the claim is that there are no normatively problematic failures of action guidance.
Is this a version of (weak) actualism as a person-affecting theory? In worlds where Alice doesnât exist, she has no properties like welfare to provide us any reasons or welfare-based objections.
Weak actualism, as in the literature (Hare, 2007, Spencer, 2021 section 6), would say to pick among the options that maximize âself-conditional valueâ. An option is permissible only if itâs no worse than any other for the people who (ever) exist in the resulting outcome. In other words, assuming we choose the option A, we compare all the options pairwise on the basis of the reasons provided by the people who would exist given our choice of A,[1] and if A is no worse overall than any other option on these comparisons, then it maximizes self-conditional value.[2]
It sounds similar to what you wrote here, too:
Weighing the reasons by the probability that those reasons exist at all, say.
Weak actualism doesnât need to say that all options that maximize self-conditional value are permissible. There are some cases where we can plausibly recommend choices between them.
I also think maximizing self-conditional value as formalized in the literature is the wrong approach for an actualist when deciding between at least 3 options, because itâs myopic, and we should use backward induction on behalf of the people who would exist given an option. This can avoid the repugnant conclusion. I have an unpublished draft based on the idea of backward induction for weak actualism Iâd be happy to share, and I discuss the problem a bit here.
Thanks, Michaelâbriefly for now (Iâm short on time today and this week): I think some actualist views deserve to be taken very seriously, but for the purpose of defending person-centered bottom-up bracketing, I meant to leave open what procreative reasons are supplied by the persons we can bring into existence. E.g., while the framing of welfare-based objections/âregrets suggests an asymmetric view (focused on preventing miserable lives), antiobjections/âgratitudes might give us reasons too (to bring happy lives into existence, or to grant them permitting/âjustifying/âcanceling force). I agree myopia is an issue but think avoiding it is doable. Iâd be interested in reading your draft.
Hereâs the draft!