Hi Toby––thanks, it’s a good question. If you expected your broken glass to badly hurt a person tomorrow, I suppose you wouldn’t feel clueless about the net effect on the person’s lifetime wellbeing. If so, why feel clueless if the nasty injury occurs later? If injuries from broken glass in the ground are still happening in that future society, it can’t have changed that much. (Otherwise, why assume that the broken glass would cause harm, rather than nothing or a benefit, in the first place?)
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.
I should also say, though, that not leaving the glass in the ground seems quite overdetermined by the reasons we have. E.g., deontological reasons not to actively cause serious foreseeable harm to a person (or violate their right to bodily integrity), and reasons not to risk doing so, provide a pretty clear verdict here. (Such reasons are relevant when it comes to actively causing the existence of future people, too.) You can’t cut a person without their consent and then (over)compensate them for it.
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?
I don’t think I agree that her welfare based answer is obviously ‘no’. If I put myself in her shoes, I think I would choose not to be cut by the glass.
I am considering whether something should happen that will:
Cause me a nasty injury with broken glass.
Have some other larger impact on my welfare that I am clueless about the sign of.
Why is it incoherent for me to say:
“The part of the effect that I am not clueless about is very bad, so I prefer that it does not happen.”
..?
It is not clear to me why this is wrong. I admit it is also not clear that this reasoning is coherent.This is a confusing thing to reason about. But I think claiming I can have no welfare based reason for preferring one outcome here needs more justification, it should not just be asserted (is this not ultimately the kind of question that this whole essay competition is about?)
If I was in this situation, I think I would choose not to be cut by the glass, for welfare based reasons. If this choice meant that someone else missed out on a tasty snack, I would not mind a theory that told me it was indeterminate whether my choice was still the best one. But if a theory tells me that giving the other person the snack is the strictly better choice, then this feels wrong.
I don’t think I agree that her welfare based answer is obviously ‘no’. If I put myself in her shoes, I think I would choose not to be cut by the glass.
I think Impartial was assuming that she should be clueless about the effect on her long-term well-being for similar reasons why we should be clueless about the impact of our actions on the long-term future (premise which we assume if we’re considering bracketing in the first place)[1]. You can always find many reasons why the nasty cut would actually have good overall consequences (e.g., teaches her not to walk barefoot and she avoids potential future far nastier cuts), and our best guess on what reasons for and against sum up to does not seem truth-tracking. I struggle to see how one could defend that we know the nasty cut will overall harm her while holding that we should suspend judgment on the sign of any action A vs B on the overall future.
I think the real potential problem, though, is what you raise in this other comment: why should the units be “lifelong persons” rather than, say, person-moments? (See also this related thread started by Jesse.) Arguably, the reason why you would choose not to be cut by the glass if you were her, is because you are bracketing in near-term you (who is clearly harmed) and bracketing out longer-term you (where you’re clueless). And, indeed, I curently fail to see how this move is any less warranted than what Impartial proposes, and the two moves are incompatible/contradictory.
Hi both, thanks––yes, I agree this might justify Toby’s intuition: Person-moments, or “points of view” that a person occupies (cf. Pettigrew’s lecture 6 here), might be the appropriate basic objects of moral concern. I am sympathetic to some of the arguments for this view (e.g., drawing on the apparent existence of intrapersonal moral demands). It might also help us avoid the cluelessness problem potentially posed by prudential longtermism: Take the snack now, bracket your far future “selves.”
So my response is this: I think we should first try and see how far we can get with persons as the basic objects of altruistic concern, for a variety of reasons. But feel free to insert “person-moment” or “point of view occupied by a person” where my post says “person”; you’ll get person-moment-centered bottom-up bracketing, or personal-point-of-view-centered bottom-up bracketing, based on exactly parallel arguments. Importantly, the shift to person-moments or points of view does not render the theory “impersonal” or “aggregate-first.” It just makes the individual, separate persons we are concerned with smaller.
feel free to insert “person-moment” or “point of view occupied by a person” where my post says “person”; you’ll get person-moment-centered bottom-up bracketing, or personal-point-of-view-centered bottom-up bracketing, based on exactly parallel arguments.
I’ve actually been confused about why Kollin et al. (2025) and Clifton (2025) never even mentioned something like “person-moments” as potential “locations of value”. After a quick look, it seems they’ve been considered in infinite ethics, and I didn’t find any argument for why they’re clearly not suited as serious candidates.
Maybe any way of individuating person-moments was considered too arbitrary, or there’s some reason, that does not come to mind rn, why bracketing over those would fail to provide action guidance?
there’s some reason, that does not come to mind rn, why bracketing over those would fail to provide action guidance?
The worry is very similar to the worry about bracketing on persons: identity of person-moments is super fragile.
Let’s say I donate to AMF. There are some far-future person-moments for which I am clueful that donating to AMF seriously harms them, because these person-moments only exist in the possible worlds corresponding to [insert far-future backfire risk here]. And we can say the same substituting in “benefits” for “harms”. We then end up a maximal bracket-set on which the donation is good, and one on which the donation is bad.
(If this needs more unpacking, I’m happy to do that!)
When you suppose here that consequentialist bracketing implies neartermism, are you conditioning on space-time region bracketing? (Which is arguably more action-guiding than any form of person-based bracketing?)
Hi Anthony, thanks––unpacking the worry and making it precise would be helpful, yes (especially as it applies to bottom-up bracketing). Perhaps my discussion with Michael can help locate potential disagreements. I just added a few thoughts.
Award explanation: I’m awarding this comment from Jim although I could have awarded many of his others—he’s bringing loads of value in his comments this week, de-confusing conversations and responding to posts with helpful clarifying questions. Thanks Jim!
Hi Toby––thanks, it’s a good question. If you expected your broken glass to badly hurt a person tomorrow, I suppose you wouldn’t feel clueless about the net effect on the person’s lifetime wellbeing. If so, why feel clueless if the nasty injury occurs later? If injuries from broken glass in the ground are still happening in that future society, it can’t have changed that much. (Otherwise, why assume that the broken glass would cause harm, rather than nothing or a benefit, in the first place?)
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.
I should also say, though, that not leaving the glass in the ground seems quite overdetermined by the reasons we have. E.g., deontological reasons not to actively cause serious foreseeable harm to a person (or violate their right to bodily integrity), and reasons not to risk doing so, provide a pretty clear verdict here. (Such reasons are relevant when it comes to actively causing the existence of future people, too.) You can’t cut a person without their consent and then (over)compensate them for it.
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?
Thanks for the reply!
I don’t think I agree that her welfare based answer is obviously ‘no’. If I put myself in her shoes, I think I would choose not to be cut by the glass.
I am considering whether something should happen that will:
Cause me a nasty injury with broken glass.
Have some other larger impact on my welfare that I am clueless about the sign of.
Why is it incoherent for me to say:
“The part of the effect that I am not clueless about is very bad, so I prefer that it does not happen.”
..?
It is not clear to me why this is wrong. I admit it is also not clear that this reasoning is coherent. This is a confusing thing to reason about. But I think claiming I can have no welfare based reason for preferring one outcome here needs more justification, it should not just be asserted (is this not ultimately the kind of question that this whole essay competition is about?)
If I was in this situation, I think I would choose not to be cut by the glass, for welfare based reasons. If this choice meant that someone else missed out on a tasty snack, I would not mind a theory that told me it was indeterminate whether my choice was still the best one. But if a theory tells me that giving the other person the snack is the strictly better choice, then this feels wrong.
I think Impartial was assuming that she should be clueless about the effect on her long-term well-being for similar reasons why we should be clueless about the impact of our actions on the long-term future (premise which we assume if we’re considering bracketing in the first place)[1]. You can always find many reasons why the nasty cut would actually have good overall consequences (e.g., teaches her not to walk barefoot and she avoids potential future far nastier cuts), and our best guess on what reasons for and against sum up to does not seem truth-tracking. I struggle to see how one could defend that we know the nasty cut will overall harm her while holding that we should suspend judgment on the sign of any action A vs B on the overall future.
I think the real potential problem, though, is what you raise in this other comment: why should the units be “lifelong persons” rather than, say, person-moments? (See also this related thread started by Jesse.) Arguably, the reason why you would choose not to be cut by the glass if you were her, is because you are bracketing in near-term you (who is clearly harmed) and bracketing out longer-term you (where you’re clueless). And, indeed, I curently fail to see how this move is any less warranted than what Impartial proposes, and the two moves are incompatible/contradictory.
If I refuse to work with this premise, then I should just do what I think is overall good and don’t need bracketing. Problem solved.
Hi both, thanks––yes, I agree this might justify Toby’s intuition: Person-moments, or “points of view” that a person occupies (cf. Pettigrew’s lecture 6 here), might be the appropriate basic objects of moral concern. I am sympathetic to some of the arguments for this view (e.g., drawing on the apparent existence of intrapersonal moral demands). It might also help us avoid the cluelessness problem potentially posed by prudential longtermism: Take the snack now, bracket your far future “selves.”
So my response is this: I think we should first try and see how far we can get with persons as the basic objects of altruistic concern, for a variety of reasons. But feel free to insert “person-moment” or “point of view occupied by a person” where my post says “person”; you’ll get person-moment-centered bottom-up bracketing, or personal-point-of-view-centered bottom-up bracketing, based on exactly parallel arguments. Importantly, the shift to person-moments or points of view does not render the theory “impersonal” or “aggregate-first.” It just makes the individual, separate persons we are concerned with smaller.
I’ve actually been confused about why Kollin et al. (2025) and Clifton (2025) never even mentioned something like “person-moments” as potential “locations of value”. After a quick look, it seems they’ve been considered in infinite ethics, and I didn’t find any argument for why they’re clearly not suited as serious candidates.
Maybe any way of individuating person-moments was considered too arbitrary, or there’s some reason, that does not come to mind rn, why bracketing over those would fail to provide action guidance?
The worry is very similar to the worry about bracketing on persons: identity of person-moments is super fragile.
Let’s say I donate to AMF. There are some far-future person-moments for which I am clueful that donating to AMF seriously harms them, because these person-moments only exist in the possible worlds corresponding to [insert far-future backfire risk here]. And we can say the same substituting in “benefits” for “harms”. We then end up a maximal bracket-set on which the donation is good, and one on which the donation is bad.
(If this needs more unpacking, I’m happy to do that!)
When you suppose here that consequentialist bracketing implies neartermism, are you conditioning on space-time region bracketing? (Which is arguably more action-guiding than any form of person-based bracketing?)
Yeah, spacetime bracketing or some more formally nebulous form of bracketing along the lines here.
Hi Anthony, thanks––unpacking the worry and making it precise would be helpful, yes (especially as it applies to bottom-up bracketing). Perhaps my discussion with Michael can help locate potential disagreements. I just added a few thoughts.
Award explanation: I’m awarding this comment from Jim although I could have awarded many of his others—he’s bringing loads of value in his comments this week, de-confusing conversations and responding to posts with helpful clarifying questions. Thanks Jim!