and seemingly very common in the general population
So consider the wording in the post:
bringing a miserable life into the world has negative value while bringing a happy life into the world does not have positive value — except potentially through its instrumental effects and positive roles
If we do a survey of 100 Americans on Positly, with that exact wording, what percentage of randomly chosen people do you think would agree? I happen to respect Positly, but I am open to other survey methodologies.
I was intuitively thinking 5% tops, but the fact that you disagree strongly takes me aback a little bit.
Note that I think you were mostly thinking about philosophers, whereas I was mostly thinking about the general population.
I’m surprised you’d have such a low threshold—I would have thought noise, misreading the question, trolling, misclicks etc. alone would push above that level.
It might also be worth distinguishing stronger and weaker asymmetries in population ethics. Caviola et al.’s main study indicates that laypeople on average endorse at least a weak axiological asymmetry (which becomes increasingly strong as the populations under consideration become larger), and the pilot study suggests that people in certain situations (e.g. when considering foreign worlds) tend to endorse a rather strong one, cf. the 100-to-1 ratio.
Wow, I’d have said 30-65% for my 50% confidence interval, and <5% is only about 5-10% of my probability mass. But maybe we’re envisioning this survey very differently.
We found that people do not endorse the so-called intuition of neutrality according to which creating new people with lives worth living is morally neutral. In Studies 2a-b, participants considered a world containing an additional happy person better and a world containing an additional unhappy person worse.
Moreover, we also found that people’s judgments about the positive value of adding a new happy person and the negative value of adding a new unhappy person were symmetrical. That is, their judgments did not reflect the so-called asymmetry—according to which adding a new unhappy person is bad but adding a new happy person is neutral.
The study design is quite different from Nuno’s, though. No doubt the study design matters.
In 2a, it looks like they didn’t explicitly get subjects to try to control for impacts on other people in their question like Nuno did, and (I’m not sure if this matters) they assumed the extra person would be added to a world of a million neutral life people. They just asked, for each of adding a neutral life, adding a bad life and adding a good life:
In terms of its overall value, how much better or worse would this world (containing this additional person) be compared to before?
2b was pretty similar, but used either an empty world or world of a billion neutral life people.
I wonder if the reason for adding the happy person to the empty world is not welfarist, though, e.g. maybe people really dislike empty worlds, value life in itself or think empty worlds lack beauty or something. EDIT: Indeed, it seemed some people preferred to add an unhappy life than not, basically no one preferred not to add a happy life and people tended to prefer adding a neutral life than not, based on figure 5 (an answer of 4 means “equally good”, above means better and below means worse). Maybe another explanation compatible with welfarist symmetry is that if there’s at least one life, good or bad, they expect good lives eventually, and for them to outweigh the bad.
Also, does the question actually answer whether anyone in particular holds the asymmetry, or are they just averaging responses across people? You could have some people who actually give greater weight to adding a happy life to an empty world than adding a miserable life to an empty world (which seems to be the case, based on Figure 5), along with people holding the standard asymmetry or weaker versions, and they could roughly cancel out in aggregate to support symmetry.
Words cannot express how much I appreciate your presence Nuno.
Sorry for being off-topic but I just can’t help myself. This is comment is such a perfect example of the attitude that made me fall in with this community.
So consider the wording in the post:
If we do a survey of 100 Americans on Positly, with that exact wording, what percentage of randomly chosen people do you think would agree? I happen to respect Positly, but I am open to other survey methodologies.
I was intuitively thinking 5% tops, but the fact that you disagree strongly takes me aback a little bit.
Note that I think you were mostly thinking about philosophers, whereas I was mostly thinking about the general population.
I’m surprised you’d have such a low threshold—I would have thought noise, misreading the question, trolling, misclicks etc. alone would push above that level.
You can imagine survey designs which would filter trolls &c, but you right I should have been slightly higher based on that.
It might also be worth distinguishing stronger and weaker asymmetries in population ethics. Caviola et al.’s main study indicates that laypeople on average endorse at least a weak axiological asymmetry (which becomes increasingly strong as the populations under consideration become larger), and the pilot study suggests that people in certain situations (e.g. when considering foreign worlds) tend to endorse a rather strong one, cf. the 100-to-1 ratio.
Makes sense.
Wow, I’d have said 30-65% for my 50% confidence interval, and <5% is only about 5-10% of my probability mass. But maybe we’re envisioning this survey very differently.
Did a test run with 58 participants (I got two attempted repeats):
So you were right, and I’m super surprised here.
There is a paper by Lucius Caviola et al of relevance:
The study design is quite different from Nuno’s, though. No doubt the study design matters.
In 2a, it looks like they didn’t explicitly get subjects to try to control for impacts on other people in their question like Nuno did, and (I’m not sure if this matters) they assumed the extra person would be added to a world of a million neutral life people. They just asked, for each of adding a neutral life, adding a bad life and adding a good life:
2b was pretty similar, but used either an empty world or world of a billion neutral life people.
2b involves an empty world—where there can’t be an effect on other people—and replicates 2a afaict.
Fair, my mistake.
I wonder if the reason for adding the happy person to the empty world is not welfarist, though, e.g. maybe people really dislike empty worlds, value life in itself or think empty worlds lack beauty or something. EDIT: Indeed, it seemed some people preferred to add an unhappy life than not, basically no one preferred not to add a happy life and people tended to prefer adding a neutral life than not, based on figure 5 (an answer of 4 means “equally good”, above means better and below means worse). Maybe another explanation compatible with welfarist symmetry is that if there’s at least one life, good or bad, they expect good lives eventually, and for them to outweigh the bad.
Also, does the question actually answer whether anyone in particular holds the asymmetry, or are they just averaging responses across people? You could have some people who actually give greater weight to adding a happy life to an empty world than adding a miserable life to an empty world (which seems to be the case, based on Figure 5), along with people holding the standard asymmetry or weaker versions, and they could roughly cancel out in aggregate to support symmetry.
Words cannot express how much I appreciate your presence Nuno.
Sorry for being off-topic but I just can’t help myself. This is comment is such a perfect example of the attitude that made me fall in with this community.