Kaspar Brandner

Karma: 108

Kaspar Brandner 18 Apr 2024 10:49 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: MichaelStJules’s comment on: Repugnance and replacement
You said “Ruling out Z first seems more plausible, as Z negatively affects the present people, even quite strongly so compared to A and A+.” The same argument would support 1 over 2.

Granted, but this example presents just a binary choice, with none of the added complexity of choosing between three options, so we can’t infer much from it.

Then you said “Ruling out A+ is only motivated by an arbitrary-seeming decision to compare just A+ and Z first, merely because they have the same population size (...so what?).” Similarly, I could say “Picking 2 is only motivated by an arbitrary decision to compare contingent people, merely because there’s a minimum number of contingent people across outcomes (… so what?)”

Well, there is a necessary number of “contingent people”, which seems similar to having necessary (identical) people. Since in both cases not creating anyone is not an option. Unlike in Huemer’s three choice case where A is an option.

I think ignoring irrelevant alternatives has some independent appeal.

I think there is a quite straightforward argument why IIA is false. The paradox arises because we seem to have a cycle of binary comparisons: A+ is better than A, Z is better than A+, A is better than Z. The issue here seems to be that this assumes we can just break down a three option comparison into three binary comparisons. Which is arguably false, since it can lead to cycles. And when we want to avoid cycles while keeping binary comparisons, we have to assume we do some of the binary choices “first” and thereby rule out one of the remaining ones, removing the cycle. So we need either a principled way of deciding on the “evaluation order” of the binary comparisons, or reject the assumption that “x compared to y” is necessarily the same as “x compared y, given z”. If the latter removes the cycle, that is.

Another case where IIA leads to an absurd result is preference aggregation. Assume three equally sized groups (1, 2, 3) have these individual preferences:
1. $x ≻ y ≻ z$
2. $y ≻ z ≻ x$
3. $z ≻ x ≻ y$
The obvious and obviously only correct aggregation would be $x \sim y \sim z$ , i.e. indifference between the three options. Which is different from what would happen if you’d take out either one of three options and make it a binary choice, since each binary choice has a majority. So the “irrelevant” alternatives are not actually irrelevant, since they can determine a choice relevant global property like a cycle. So IIA is false, since it would lead to a cycle. This seems not unlike the cycle we get in the repugnant conclusion paradox, although there the solution is arguably not that all three options are equally good.

There are some “more objective” facts about axiology or what we should do that don’t depend on who presently, actually or across all outcomes necessarily exists (or even wide versions of this). What we should do is first constrained by these “more objective” facts. Hence something like step 1.

I don’t see why this would be better than doing other comparisons first. As I said, this is the strategy of solving three choices with binary comparisons, but in a particular order, so that we end up with two total comparisons instead of three, since we rule out one option early. The question is why doing this or that binary comparison first, rather than another one, would be better. If we insist on comparing A and Z first, we would obviously rule out Z first, so we end up only comparing A and A+, while the comparison A+ and Z is never made.

Kaspar Brandner 18 Apr 2024 0:33 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: MichaelStJules’s comment on: Repugnance and replacement
I wouldn’t agree on the first point, because making Desgupta’s step 1 the “step 1” is, as far as I can tell, not justified by any basic principles. Ruling out Z first seems more plausible, as Z negatively affects the present people, even quite strongly so compared to A and A+. Ruling out A+ is only motivated by an arbitrary-seeming decision to compare just A+ and Z first, merely because they have the same population size (...so what?). The fact that non-existence is not involved here (a comparison to A) is just a result of that decision, not of there really existing just two options.

Alternatively there is the regret argument, that we would “realize”, after choosing A+, that we made a mistake, but that intuition seems not based on some strong principle either. (The intuition could also be misleading because we perhaps don’t tend to imagine A+ as locked in).

I agree though that the classification “person-affecting” alone probably doesn’t capture a lot of potential intricacies of various proposals.

Kaspar Brandner 17 Apr 2024 18:29 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: MichaelStJules’s comment on: Repugnance and replacement
In the non-identity problem we have no alternative which doesn’t affect a person, since we don’t compare creating a person with not-creating it, but creating a person vs creating a different person. Not creating one isn’t an option. So we have non-present but necessary persons, or rather: a necessary number of additional persons. Then even person-affecting views should arguably say, if you create one anyway, then a great one is better than a marginally good one.

But in the case of comparing A+ and Z (or variants) the additional people can’t be treated as necessary because A is also an option.

Kaspar Brandner 17 Apr 2024 10:57 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: MichaelStJules’s comment on: Repugnance and replacement

we’ll have realized it was a mistake to not choose Z over A+ for the people who will then exist, if we had chosen A+.

Let’s replace A with A’ and A+ with A+‘. A’ has welfare level 4 instead of 100, and A+′ has, for the original people, welfare level 200 instead of 101 (for a total of 299). According to your argument we should still rule out A+′ because it’s less fair than Z. Even though the original people get 196 points more welfare in A+′ than in A’. So we end up with A’ and a welfare level of 4. That seems highly incompatible with ethics being about affecting persons.

Kaspar Brandner 16 Apr 2024 18:09 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: MichaelStJules’s comment on: Repugnance and replacement
It seems the relevant question is whether your original argument for A goes through. I think you pretty much agree that ethics requires persons to be affected, right? Then we have to rule out switching to Z from the start: Z would be actively bad for the initial people in S, and not switching to Z would not be bad for the new people in Z, since they don’t exist.

Furthermore, it arguably isn’t unfair when people are created (A+) if the alternative (A) would have been not to create them in the first place.^[1] So choosing A+ wouldn’t be unfair to anyone. A+ would only be unfair if we couldn’t rule out Z. And indeed, it seems in most cases we in fact can’t rule out Z with any degree of certainty for the future, since we don’t have a lot of evidence that “certain kinds of value lock-in” would ensure we stay with A+ for all eternity. So choosing A+ now would mean it is quite likely that we’d have to choose between (continuing) A+ and switching to Z in the future, and switching would be equivalent to fair redistribution, and required by ethics. But this path (S → A+ → Z) would be bad for the people in initial S, and not good for the additional people in S+/Z who at this point do not exist. So we, in S, should choose A.

In other words, if S is current, Z is bad, and A+ is good now (in fact currently a bit better than A), but choosing A+ would quite likely lead us on a path where we are morally forced to switch from A+ to Z in the future. Which would be bad from our current perspective (S). So we should play it safe and choose A now.
1. ↩︎
  Once upon a time there was a group of fleas. They complained about the unfairness of their existence. “We all are so small, while those few dogs enjoy their enormous size! This is exceedingly unfair and therefore highly unethical. Size should have been distributed equally between fleas and dogs.” The dog, which they inhabited, heard them talking and replied: “If it weren’t for us dogs, you fleas wouldn’t exist in the first place. Your existence depended on our existence. We let you live in our fur. The alternative to your tiny nature would not being larger, but your non-existence. To be small is not less fair than to not be at all.”

Kaspar Brandner 15 Apr 2024 10:10 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: MichaelStJules’s comment on: Repugnance and replacement
Your argument seems to be:
1. Wenn restricted to A+ and Z, Z is better than A+ because A+ is unfair.
2. When restricted to A and Z, A is better than Z.
3. Therefore, A is better than A+ and better than Z.
But that doesn’t follow, because in 1 and 2 you did restrict yourself to two options, while there are three options in 3.

Kaspar Brandner 15 Apr 2024 6:12 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: MichaelStJules’s comment on: Repugnance and replacement
X isn’t so much bad because it’s unfair, but because they don’t want to die. After all, fairly killing both people would be even worse.

There are other cases where the situation is clearly unfair. Two people committed the same crime, the first is sentenced to pay $1000, the second is sentenced to death. This is unfair to the people who are about to receive their penalty. Both subjects are still alive, and the outcome could still be changed. But in cases where it is decided whether lives are about to be created, the subjects don’t exist yet, and not creating them can’t be unfair to them.

Kaspar Brandner 14 Apr 2024 19:21 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: MichaelStJules’s comment on: Repugnance and replacement
It makes sense to want to keep existing if you already exist. But believing that it would have been bad, had you never existed in the first place, is a different matter. For whom would it have been bad? Apparently for nobody.

Kaspar Brandner 14 Apr 2024 14:41 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: MichaelStJules’s comment on: Repugnance and replacement

Z already seems more fair than A+ before you decide which comes about; you’re deciding between them ahead of time, not (necessarily just) entering one (whatever that would mean) and then switching.

Z seeming more fair than A+ arguably depends on the assumption that utility in A+ ought to (and therefore could) be redistributed to increase fairness. Which contradicts the assumption of “aggregate whole lifetime welfare”, as this would mean that switching (and increasing fairness) is ruled out from the start.

For example, the argument in these paragraphs mentions “fairness” and “regret”, which only seems to make sense insofar things could be changed:

However, I suspect we should pick A instead. With Z available, A+ seems too unfair to the contingent people and too partial to the necessary/present people. Once the contingent people exist, Z would have been better than A+. And if Z is still an option at that point, we’d switch to it. So, anticipating this reasoning, whether or not we can later make the extra people better off later, I suspect we should rule out A+ first, and then select A over Z.

I can imagine myself as one of the original necessary people in A. If we picked A+, I’d judge that to be too selfish of us and too unkind to the extra people relative to the much fairer Z. All of us together, with the extra people, would collectively judge Z to have been better. From my impartial perspective, I would then regret the choice of A+. On the other hand, if we (the original necessary people) collectively decide to stick with A to avoid Z and the unkindness of A+ relative to Z, it’s no one else’s business. We only hurt ourselves relative to A+. The extra people won’t be around to have any claims.

“Once the contingent people exist, Z would have been better than A+.”—This arguably means “Switching from A+ to Z is good” which assumes that switching from A+ to Z would be possible.

The quoted argument for A seems correct to me, but the “unfairness” consideration requires that switching is possible. Otherwise one could simply deny that the concept of unfairness is applicable to A+. It would be like saying it’s unfair to fish that they can’t fly.

Kaspar Brandner 14 Apr 2024 14:06 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: MichaelStJules’s comment on: Repugnance and replacement
Switching from A to Z means that A is current when the decision to switch or not switch is made. So the additional people in Z don’t exist and are not impacted if the switch isn’t made. Even if Z is current, people in Z can still evaluate whether switching from A to Z is good (= would have been good), since this just means “assuming A is current, is it good to switch to Z?”. Even if Z is in fact current, the people in Z can still agree that, if A had been current, a switch to Z should not have been made. Intuitions to the contrary seem to mistake “I should not have existed” for “I should not exist”. The former can be true while the latter is false.

Kaspar Brandner 13 Apr 2024 8:17 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: MichaelStJules’s comment on: Repugnance and replacement
But it doesn’t seem to matter whether X or Y (or neither) is actually current, everyone should be able to agree whether, e.g., “switching from X to Y is bad” is true or not. The switch choices always hypothetically assume that the first world (in this case X) is current, because that’s where the potential choice to switch is made.

Kaspar Brandner 13 Apr 2024 8:10 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: MichaelStJules’s comment on: Repugnance and replacement
Okay, having an initial start world (call it S), that is assumed to be current, makes it possible to treat the other worlds (futures) as choices. So S has 1 million people, but how much utility points do they have each? Something like 10? Then A and A+ would be an improvement for them, and Z would be worse (for them).

I don’t intend for you to be able to switch from A+ or Z to A by killing people. A is defined so that the extra people never exist. It’s the way things could turn out. Creating extra people and then killing them would be a different future.

But if we can’t switch worlds in the future that does seem like an unrealistic restriction? Future people have just as much control over their future as we have over ours. Not being able to switch worlds in the future (change the future of the future) would mean we couldn’t, once we were at A+, switch from A+ to a more “fair” future (like Z). Since not-can implies not-ought, there would then be no basis in calling A+ unfair, insofar “unfair” means that we ought to switch to a more fair future.

The fairness consideration assumes utility can be redistributed, like money. Otherwise utility would presumably be some inherent property of the brains of people, and it wouldn’t be unfair to anyone to not having been born with a different brain (assuming brains can’t be altered).

Kaspar Brandner 12 Apr 2024 20:49 UTC
5 points
1 ∶ 1
on: Repugnance and replacement
This is an interesting overview, as far as I can tell. Only it is hard to understand for someone who isn’t already familiar with population ethics. For example:

Suppose you have to choose between the following 3 outcomes

It seems clear, e.g. from decision theory, that we can only ever “choose” between actions, never between outcomes. But A, A+, and Z are outcomes (world states), not actions. Apparently the only possible actions in this example would be intentionally moving between world states in time, i.e. “switching”.

Then we would have three decision situations with three possible choice options each:
- A is current
  - Switch from A to A+
  - Switch from A to Z
  - Stay in A (do nothing)
- A+ is current
  - Switch from A+ to A
  - Switch from A+ to Z
  - Stay in A+ (do nothing)
- Z is current
  - Switch from Z to A
  - Switch from Z to A+
  - Stay in Z (do nothing)
This changes things a lot. For example, it could both be bad to switch from current A to Z (because it would affect the current people [i.e. people in A] negatively) and to switch from current Z to A (because we would have to kill a lot of current people [i.e. people in Z] in order to “switch” to A). In that case it wouldn’t make sense to say that A is simply better, worse, or equivalent to Z. What would we even mean by that?

Arguably we can only say a world state X is “better” than a world state Y iff both
1. switching from X to Y is bad and
2. switching from Y to X is good.
This is because “X is better than Y” implies “Y is worse than X”, while the goodness of switching between outcomes doesn’t necessarily have this property. It can’t be represented with >, <, =, it’s not an order relation.

Kaspar Brandner 1 Feb 2024 12:30 UTC
3 points
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in reply to: MichaelStJules’s comment on: Is anyone here a philosopher or economist working on the interpersonal comparison problem?
We can treat being indifferent between outcomes $p$ and $\neg p$ as implying utility (degree of desire) zero: $U (p) = U (\neg p) = 0$ . This is also a provable consequence of Jeffrey’s utility theory where we assume that tautologies have utility zero. Then, insofar preferences can be observed (reports, choice behavior), we can compare the “sign” of desires. If you prefer outcome $q$ to outcome $p$ , and $U (p) = 0$ , then $U (q) > 0$ . That is, you desire $q$ to a positive degree. Then we can compare desires between different people based on sign (positive, neutral, negative). This rules out utility functions being equivalent under addition of arbitrary constants. It is not the case that for arbitrary constants $b$ , $U * = U + b$ .

Moreover, humans are neurophysiologically similar to each other. Which makes it plausible that similar behavior indicates similar desires for different people. E.g. similar reactions to equal pain stimuli indicating similar aversion to pain, desire for drinking water after 24 hours without water being similar, etc. If we accept that some desires are likely similar for certain situations, we can use them for interpersonal comparisons. E.g. Alice desires $x$ as much as Bob, Alice desires $y$ two times as much as $x$ , Bob desires $y$ four times much as $x$ , so Bob desires $y$ two times as much as Alice. This rules out equivalence under multiplication with arbitrary positive constants $a$ , i.e. it isn’t the case that $U * = a \times U$ .

The interpersonal comparison problem is similar to the problem of other minds: The fact that other people a structurally similar to us suggests, by inference to the best explanation, that they also have inner lives. The same line of reasoning makes it unlikely for there to be large differences (utility monsters) in desires with similar observable physiological correlates (behavior, brain activity).

Kaspar Brandner 31 Jan 2023 23:29 UTC
1 point
1 ∶ 0
in reply to: Arturo Macias’s comment on: Wokism, rethinking priorities and the Bostrom case
Well, at least you got some recognition elsewhere.

Kaspar Brandner 28 Jan 2023 13:54 UTC
0 points
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on: Wokism, rethinking priorities and the Bostrom case

The separation between value and fact, between “will” and “representation” is one of the most essential epistemological facts. Reality is what it is, and our assessment of it does not alter it. Statements of fact have truth value, not moral value. No descriptive belief can ever be “good” or “bad.” The black-white IQ gap is precisely the canonical example of this principle: its existence and its causes (whatever they may be) are objective facts, and no one can be morally judged for their sincere opinions about this part of reality. Or rather, of course one must morally judge and roundly condemn anyone who alters their descriptive beliefs about reality for political convenience. This is exactly what is called “motivated thought”.

This is exceptionally well-put.

The fact that this post was so heavily down-voted without any substantial counterarguments is a bad sign for the Forum. The post wasn’t even long or hard to read. Apparently many people here like to engage more in “mob voting”, the virtual equivalent to shouting down, than in making arguments about the things they disagree with.

Kaspar Brandner 16 Jan 2023 10:57 UTC
10 points
2 ∶ 2
in reply to: Bob Jacobs 🔸’s comment on: CEA statement on Nick Bostrom’s email

And with good reason, out of the billions of possible correlations to talk about this is one of the very few that will help racists.

Strong disagree here. See the quote of the paper I posted below.

Kaspar Brandner 15 Jan 2023 16:48 UTC
16 points
6 ∶ 0
in reply to: Bob Jacobs 🔸’s comment on: CEA statement on Nick Bostrom’s email
Writing on such topics does the opposite of favoring your academic career. It is rather a form of career suicide, since you will likely get cancelled and ostracized. The topic is extremely taboo, as we can see with the reaction to Bostrom’s old email. He didn’t even support hereditarianism about IQ gaps, he just said they exist, which even environmentalists accept!

Kaspar Brandner 14 Jan 2023 22:09 UTC
12 points
6 ∶ 2
in reply to: Bob Jacobs 🔸’s comment on: CEA statement on Nick Bostrom’s email
I don’t fault you for not reading it all, but it is a good resource for looking up specific topics. (I have summarized a few of the points here.) And I don’t think IQ is a flawed measure, since it is an important predictor for many measures of life success. Average national IQ is also fairly strongly correlated with measures of national welfare such as per Capita GDP.

To be clear, I’m not saying studying this question is more important than anything else, just that research on it should not be suppressed, whatever the truth may be. This point was perhaps best put in the conclusion of this great paper on the topic:

The strategy – advocated by some influential scholars – of stigmatizing, suppressing, or downplaying evidence in favor of hereditarianism about group differences has been tried and has not worked. Research on this topic has been done and the results are widely available. Major psychology journals continue to publish work that deals openly with group differences (though researchers still debate about the relative contribution of genes and environment, and the question has not been settled definitively). Any measures that would be effective in preventing further work, such as those advocated by Kourany (2016), would have to be so severe that they would only attract even more attention to the findings they aimed to suppress. Science will carry on, and these questions will be answered. We should prepare in advance for the possibility that the genes underlying intelligence differences will not be distributed identically among ethnic groups. Failure to do this will only create a vacuum for “cranks rather than scientists” to opine on the nature and consequences of group differences (Anomaly, 2017, p. 293). Reich (2018) warns that if scientists “willfully abstain from laying out a rational framework for discussing human differences, [they] will leave a vacuum that will be filled by pseudoscience” (p. 258).

This paper has argued that the usual utilitarian reasons given for restricting intelligence research are not convincing and, in fact, there are strong reasons, both utilitarian and non-utilitarian, to favor free inquiry. For philosophers specifically, there is an additional consideration. For decades, the contribution of philosophers to this debate has consisted mostly in providing alternative explanations for evidence seeming to support hereditarianism about race differences (see Sesardic, 2000, 2005), and advocating various kinds of restriction and censorship (see Cofnas, 2016). This may be because hereditarianism is controversial, and philosophers are strongly disincentivized from pursuing lines of argument that lead to truly controversial conclusions. Testifying to how serious this problem is, Jeff McMahan, Francesca Minerva, and Peter Singer recently founded the Journal of Controversial Ideas, which will allow scholars to publish pseudonymously. Singer (2017) commented that “it’s unfortunate that such a journal should ever be considered necessary to enable controversial ideas to be published, but perhaps we have got to the point where it is.” It is not clear what kind of controversial ideas Singer had in mind, and the journal has not yet released its first issue, but it is hard to find a more controversial idea than hereditarianism about race differences in intelligence.

There is a danger for the philosophical community in putting our credibility on the line over the claim that race differences are entirely environmental. If work on genetics and neuroscience within the next decade produces convincing evidence that differences in measured intelligence among groups have a significant genetic component, there will be no way to conceal this information. The hereditarian explanation will have to be accepted, and people will know that philosophers were on the wrong side of the issue both scientifically and morally: scientifically, because we are supposed to be careful, disinterested commentators on scientific controversies, not activists supporting only the politically popular side; morally, because we did not help lay the groundwork for responding in a moral way to these facts that we should have known might be coming.

Kaspar Brandner 14 Jan 2023 20:29 UTC
2 points
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on: Zero Utils: why utility wants to be additive
Most of these problems only occur when you are a foundationalist about preferences. If you consider degrees of desire (from negative to positive infinity) as basic, and “utilities” representing those desires, preferences are just an emergent phenomenon of an agent desiring some outcome more than another.

The interpersonal comparison problem is then mostly one of calibrating a “utility scale”. Such a scale needs two points: one for $u = 0$ and one for some $u \neq 0$ (e.g. 1).

The zero point is already very elegantly handled in Richard Jeffrey’s utility theory: If we axiomatically assume an algebra of propositions/events, excluding the contradictory proposition, with an probability and utility function defined over it, and assume that tautologies have utility zero (or indeed all probability one events), as they are “satisfied desires”, it is provable that indifference between a proposition $X$ and its negation $\neg X$ (i.e. $u (X) = u (\neg X)$ ) implies that $X$ and $\neg X$ also have utility zero. At which point we have defined an interpersonally comparable zero point—if people are measurably indifferent between getting and not getting something, they assign utility zero to it.

We could then go on to define as, e.g., utility “1” something which all humans—with psychological or neurophysiological plausibility—enjoy approximately the same. For example, drinking a glass of water after not drinking anything for 12 hours. If then someone says they desire something three times as much as said glass of water, we know they desire it more than someone else who desires something only two times as much as the glass of water.