My puzzlement about population ethics is why we should give any serious weight at all to our evolved moral intuitions, when we’re thinking about long-term global-scale population issues.
Our moral intuitions about human welfare, reproduction, inequality, redistribution, intergenerational justice, etc. all evolved in Pleistocene tribal conditions, to address various specific adaptive challenges in mate choice, parenting, reciprocity, kinship, group competition, etc. We rarely had to think beyond the scale of 100 to 1,000 people, are rarely beyond two or three generations.
And insofar as those moral intuitions were domain-specific, adapted to solve different kinds of problems that have their own adaptive tradeoffs and game-theoretic challenges, there’s no reason whatsoever to expect those moral intuitions to be logically consistent with each other. (Indeed, the inner conflict we often feel about moral issues testifies to this domain-specificity.)
So, I’m just baffled about why moral philosophers who appreciate the small-scale evolutionary origins of our moral intuitions would expect those intuitions to ‘feel happy’ with any logically consistent population ethics principles that can scale up to billions of people across thousands of generations.
My puzzlement about population ethics is why we should give any serious weight at all to our evolved moral intuitions, when we’re thinking about long-term global-scale population issues.
Our moral intuitions about human welfare, reproduction, inequality, redistribution, intergenerational justice, etc. all evolved in Pleistocene tribal conditions, to address various specific adaptive challenges in mate choice, parenting, reciprocity, kinship, group competition, etc. We rarely had to think beyond the scale of 100 to 1,000 people, are rarely beyond two or three generations.
And insofar as those moral intuitions were domain-specific, adapted to solve different kinds of problems that have their own adaptive tradeoffs and game-theoretic challenges, there’s no reason whatsoever to expect those moral intuitions to be logically consistent with each other. (Indeed, the inner conflict we often feel about moral issues testifies to this domain-specificity.)
So, I’m just baffled about why moral philosophers who appreciate the small-scale evolutionary origins of our moral intuitions would expect those intuitions to ‘feel happy’ with any logically consistent population ethics principles that can scale up to billions of people across thousands of generations.