I know this wasn’t directed at me but I have a few thoughts.
First question: in broad terms, what do you think moral philosophers should infer for psychological studies of this type in general, and from this one in particular? One perspective would be for moral philosophers to update their views towards that of the population—the “500 million Elvis fans can’t be wrong” approach.
I think there are various useful things one can take from this study. A few main ones off the top of my head:
Understanding people’s views allows us to potentially frame things in more appetising ways to people. For example, if we want people to take AI safety seriously and we find they weigh suffering very heavily we can focus on arguments that misaligned AI could cause vast amounts of suffering, rather than that aligned AI could cause vast amounts of happiness. That’s just one possible example.
We can also pinpoint where people may be getting things “wrong” and/or how developed their thinking is on these topics. The paper shows that after some deliberation people moved more towards total views and away from averagist (and indeed away from the “sadistic conclusion”). This implies that people have not thought much about these topics and that education can shift people’s views which may be desirable, especially from the point of view of people looking to increase concern for the far future.
Probably very minor updating towards the general population views. I agree with you that we should discount general population views when they are clearly very silly, but I don’t think we should discount general population views entirely. To expand on this, some views appear to me to rest on intuition more than others and so, if we find that not many people actually hold the necessary intuition, that may reduce our confidence in the view. For example, in my opinion what person-affecting views have going for them is the strong intuition that some people have in a procreation asymmetry/person-affecting restriction. Otherwise I would say person-affecting views encounter lots of issues (non-identity problem, problems related to intransitivity/IIA, incomparability) without much “objective” philosophical justification (I realise the claim that such justification exists is controversial). A view like totalism arguably has more objective philosophical justification beyond just intuition (e.g. simplicity, symmetry, clear parallels in reasoning to fixed population cases) with perhaps one issue, the repugnant conclusion, that many don’t accept to be an issue in the first place. So ultimately if we find people don’t hold the core intuitions of person-affecting views we may find ourselves asking what it really has going for it. I appreciate this is a very controversial bullet point I’ve written here and that you probably won’t agree with it!
With regards to your second question and comment I think you make fair points.
I know this wasn’t directed at me but I have a few thoughts.
I think there are various useful things one can take from this study. A few main ones off the top of my head:
Understanding people’s views allows us to potentially frame things in more appetising ways to people. For example, if we want people to take AI safety seriously and we find they weigh suffering very heavily we can focus on arguments that misaligned AI could cause vast amounts of suffering, rather than that aligned AI could cause vast amounts of happiness. That’s just one possible example.
We can also pinpoint where people may be getting things “wrong” and/or how developed their thinking is on these topics. The paper shows that after some deliberation people moved more towards total views and away from averagist (and indeed away from the “sadistic conclusion”). This implies that people have not thought much about these topics and that education can shift people’s views which may be desirable, especially from the point of view of people looking to increase concern for the far future.
Probably very minor updating towards the general population views. I agree with you that we should discount general population views when they are clearly very silly, but I don’t think we should discount general population views entirely. To expand on this, some views appear to me to rest on intuition more than others and so, if we find that not many people actually hold the necessary intuition, that may reduce our confidence in the view. For example, in my opinion what person-affecting views have going for them is the strong intuition that some people have in a procreation asymmetry/person-affecting restriction. Otherwise I would say person-affecting views encounter lots of issues (non-identity problem, problems related to intransitivity/IIA, incomparability) without much “objective” philosophical justification (I realise the claim that such justification exists is controversial). A view like totalism arguably has more objective philosophical justification beyond just intuition (e.g. simplicity, symmetry, clear parallels in reasoning to fixed population cases) with perhaps one issue, the repugnant conclusion, that many don’t accept to be an issue in the first place. So ultimately if we find people don’t hold the core intuitions of person-affecting views we may find ourselves asking what it really has going for it. I appreciate this is a very controversial bullet point I’ve written here and that you probably won’t agree with it!
With regards to your second question and comment I think you make fair points.