I guess the two alternatives that seem salient to me are (i) something like HMV combined with pairing individuals via cross-world identity, or (ii) something like HMV combined with pairing individuals who currently exist (at the time of the act) via cross-world identity, and not pairing individuals who don’t currently exist. (I take it (ii) is the kind of view you had in mind.)
If we adopt (ii), then we can say that all of W1-W3 are permissible in the above case (since all of the individuals in question don’t currently exist, and so don’t get paired with anyone). But this kind of person-affecting view has some other consequences that might make one squeamish. For example, suppose you have a choice between three options:
Option 1: Don’t have a child.
Option 2: Have a child, and give them a great life.
Option 3: Have a child, and give them a life barely worth living.
(Suppose, somewhat unrealistically, that our choice won’t bear on anyone else’s well-being.)
According to (ii), all three options are permissible. That entails that option 3 is permissible — it’s permissible to have a child and give them a life barely worth living, even though you could have (at no cost to yourself or anyone else) given that very same person a great life. YMMV, but I find that hard to square with person-affecting intuitions!
Thanks for the write up and interesting commentary Arden.
I had one question about the worry in the Addendum that Michelle Hutchinson raised, and the thought that “This seems like a reason why the counterpart relation really runs him into trouble compared to other [person-affecting] views. On other such views, bringing into existence happy people seems basically always fine, whereas due to the counterparts in this case it basically never is.”
I take this to be the kind of extinction case Michelle has in mind (where for simplicity I’m bracketing currently existing people and assuming they’ll have the same level of wellbeing in every outcome). Suppose you have a choice between three options:
W1-Inegalitarian Future
a(1): +1; a(2): +2; a(3): +3
W2-Egalitarian Future
b(1): +2; b(2): +2; b(3): +2
W3-Unpopulated Future
—
Since both W1 and W2 will yield harm while W3 won’t, it looks like W3 will come out obligatory.
I can see why one might worry about this. But I wasn’t sure how counterpart relations were playing an interesting role here. Suppose we reject counterpart theory, and adopt HMV and cross-world identity (where a(1)=b(1), a(2)=b(2), and a(3)=b(3)). Then won’t we get precisely the same verdicts (i.e., that W3 is obligatory)?