I think this is a really interesting observation.
But I don’t think it’s fair to say that average utilitarianism “avoids the repugnant conclusion”.
If the world contains only a million individuals whose lives are worse than not existing (-100 utils each), and you are considering between two options: (i) creating a million new individuals who are very happy (50 utils each) or (ii) creating N new individuals whose lives are barely worth living (x utils each), then for any x, however small, there is some N where (ii) is preferred, even under average utilitarianism.
There are many serious problems with average utilitarianism, not least that it doesn’t remove the repugnant conclusion anyway . So although I think this refutation of solipsistic swamping makes sense and is interesting, I don’t think it increases my credence in average utilitarianism very much.
tobycrisford
From my memory of Reasons+Persons, Parfit does say that common-sense morality being collectively directly self-defeating refutes common-sense morality, but he doesn’t think that consequentialism being indirectly self-defeating refutes consequentialism. This is because it isn’t an aim of consequentialism that people have consequentialist temperaments, or even that they believe in consequentialism, and because any theory will be indirectly self-defeating in some circumstances (the satan thought experiment proves that).
I really like this summary, but just wanted to point this out, because the objections to common-sense morality and consequentialism were conflated in your take-away, while I think Parfit thought they were different. He claimed that his arguments refuted common-sense morality, but I don’t think he made that claim about consequentialism.
Maybe this distinction comes under the category of questions you don’t care about that much though, which is fair enough!
“deciding, based on reason, that Exposure A is certain to have no effect on Outcome X, and then repeatedly running RCTs for the effect of exposure A on Outcome X to obtain a range of p values”
If the p-values have been calculated correctly and you run enough RCTS, then we already know what the outcome of this experiment will be: p<0.05 will occur 5% of the time, p<0.01 will occur 1% of the time, etc for all values of p between 0 and 1.
The other way round is more interesting, it will tell you what the “power” of your test was (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_of_a_test), but that strongly depends on the size of the effect of B on X, as well as the sample size in your study. You’ll probably miss something if you pick a single B and X pair to represent your entire field.
I think the point is that any p-value threshold is arbitrary. The one you should use depends on context. It should depend on how much you care about false positives vs false negatives in that particular case, and on your priors. Also maybe we should just stop using p-values and switch to using likelihood ratios instead. Both of these changes might be useful things to advocate for, but I wouldn’t have thought changing one arbitrary threshold to another arbitrary threshold is likely to be very useful.
This is a very interesting and weird problem. It feels like the solution should have something to do with the computational complexity of the mapping? E.g. is it a mapping that could be calculated in polynomial or exponential time? If the mapping function is as expensive to compute as just simulating the brain in the first place, then the dust hasn’t really done any of the computational work.
Another way of looking at this: if you do take the dust argument seriously, why do you even need the dust at all? The mapping from dust to mental states exists in the space of mathematical functions, but so does the mapping from time straight to mental states, with no dust involved.
I guess the big question here is when does a sentient observer contained inside a mathematical function “exist”? What needs to happen in the physical universe for them to have experiences? That’s a really puzzling and interesting question.
I think this point of view makes a lot of sense, and is the most reasonable way an anti-speciesist can defend not being fully vegan.
But I’d be interested to hear more about what the very strong ‘instrumental’ reasons are for humans not subjugating humans, and why they don’t apply to humans subjugating non-humans?
(Edit: I’m vegan, but my stance on it has softened a bit since being won round by the total utilitarian view)
This is an interesting approach. The idea that we can avoid the repugnant conclusion by saying that B is not better than A, and neither is A better than B, is I think similar to how Parfit himself thought we might be able to avoid the repugnant conclusion: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/theo.12097
He used the term “evaluative imprecision” to describe this. Here’s a quote from the paper:
”Precisely equal is a transitive relation. If X and Y are precisely equally good, and Y and Z are precisely equally good, X and Z must be precisely equally good. But if X and Y are imprecisely equally good, so that neither is worse than the other, these imprecise relations are not transitive. Even if X is not worse than Y, which is not worse than Z, X may be worse than Z.”
It’s easy to see how evaluative imprecision could help us to avoid the repugnant conclusion.
But I don’t think your approach actually achieves what is described in this quote, unless I’m missing something? It only refutes the repugnant conclusion in an extremely weak sense. Although Z is not better than A in your example, it is also not worse than A. That still seems quite repugnant!
Doesn’t your logic explaining that neither A or B are worse than each other also apply to A and Z?
P.S. Thinking about this a bit more, doesn’t this approach fail to give sensible answers to the non-identity problem as well? Almost all decisions we make about the future will change not just the welfare of future people, but which future people exist. That means every decision you could take will reduce real welfare, and so under this approach no decision can be be better than any other, which seems like a problem!
It sounds like I have misunderstood how to apply your methodology. I would like to understand it though. How would it apply to the following case?
Status quo (A): 1 person exists at very high welfare +XPossible new situation (B): Original person has welfare reduced to X − 2 , 1000 people are created with very high welfare +X
Possible new situation (C): Original person has welfare X - , 1000 people are created with small positive welfare .
I’d like to understand how your theory would answer two cases: (1) We get to choose between all of A,B,C. (2) We are forced to choose between (B) and (C), because we know that the world is about to instantaneously transform into one of them.
This is how I had understood your theory to be applied:
Neither (B) nor (C) are better than (A), because an instanataneous change from (A) to (B) or (C) would reduce real welfare (of the one already existing person).
(A) is not better than (B) or (C) because to change (B) or (C) to (A) would cause 1000 people to disappear (which is a lot of negative real welfare).
(B) and (C) are neither better or worse than each other, because an instantaneous change of one to the other would involve the loss of 1000 existing people (negative real welfare) which is only compensated by the creation of imaginary people (positive imaginary welfare). It’s important here that the 1000 people in (B) and (C) are not the same people. This is the non-identity problem.
From your reply it sounds like you’re coming up with a different answer when comparing (B) to (C), because both ways round the 1000 people are always considered imaginary, as they don’t literally exist in the status quo? Is that right?
If so, that still seems like it gives a non-sensical answer in this case, because it would then say that (C) is better than (B) (real welfare is reduced by less), when it seems obvious that (B) is actually better? This is an even worse version of the flaw you’ve already highlighted, because the existing person you’re prioritising over the imaginary people is already at a welfare well above the 0 level.
If I’ve got something wrong and your methodology can explain the intuitively obvious answer that (B) is better than (C), and should be chosen in example (2) (regardless of their comparison to A), then I would be interested to understand how that works.
I understood your rejection of the total ordering on populations, and as I say, this is an idea that others have tried to apply to this problem before.
But the approach others have tried to take is to use the lack of a precise “better than” relation to evade the logic of the repugnant conclusion arguments, while still ultimately concluding that population Z is worse than population A. If you only conclude that Z is not worse than A, and A is not worse than Z (i.e. we should be indifferent about taking actions which transform us from world A to world Z), then a lot of people would still find that repugnant!
Or are you saying that your theory tells us not to transform ourselves to world Z? Because we should only ever do anything that will make things actually better?
If so, how would your approach handle uncertainty? What probability of a world Z should we be willing to risk in order to improve a small amount of real welfare?
And there’s another way in which your approach still contains some form of the repugnant conclusion. If a population stopped dealing in hypotheticals and actually started taking actions, so that these imaginary people became real, then you could imagine a population going through all the steps of the repugnant conclusion argument process, thinking they were making improvements on the status quo each time, and finding themselves ultimately ending up at Z. In fact it can happen in just two steps, if the population of B is made large enough, with small enough welfare.
I find something a bit strange about it being different when happening in reality to when happening in our heads. You could imagine people thinking
“Should we create a large population B at small positive welfare?”
“Sure, it increases positive imaginary welfare and does nothing to real welfare”
“But once we’ve done that, they will then be real, and so then we might want to boost their welfare at the expense of our own. We’ll end up with a huge population of people with lives barely worth living, that seems quite repugnant.”
“It is repugnant, we shouldn’t prioritise imaginary welfare over real welfare. Those people don’t exist.”
“But if we create them they will exist, so then we will end up deciding to move towards world Z. We should take action now to stop ourselves being able to do that in future.”
I find this situation of people being in conflict with their future selves quite strange. It seems irrational to me!
“We minimise our loss of welfare according to the methodology and pick B, the ‘least worst’ option.”
But (B) doesn’t minimise our loss of welfare. In B we have welfare X-2, and in C we have welfare X - , so wouldn’t your methodology tell us to pick (C)? And this is intuitively clearly wrong in this case. It’s telling us not tmake a negligible sacrifice to our welfare now in order to improve the lives of future generations, which is the same problematic conclusion that the non-identity problem gives to certain theories of population ethics.
I’m interested in how your approach would tell us to pick (B), because I still don’t understand that?
I won’t reply to your other comment just to keep the thread in one place from now on (my fault for adding a P.S, so trying to fix the mistake). But in short, yes, I disagree, and I think that these flaws are unfortunately severe and intractable. The ‘forcing’ scenario I imagined is more like the real world than the unforced decisions. For most of us making decisions, the fact that people will exist in the future is inevitable, and we have to think about how we can influence their welfare. We are therefore in a situation like (2), where we are going to move from (A) to either (B) or (C) and we just get to pick which of (B) or (C) it will be. Similarly, figuring out how to incorporate uncertainty is also fundamental, because all real world decisions are made under uncertainty.
You can assert that you consider the 1000 people in (B) and (C) to be identical, for the purposes of applying your theory. That does avoid the non-identity problem in this case. But the fact is that they are not the same people. They have different hopes, dreams, personalities, memories, genders, etc.
By treating these different people as equivalent, your theory has become more impersonal. This means you can no longer appeal to one of the main arguments you gave to support it: that your recommendations always align with the answer you’d get if you asked the people in the population whether they’d like to move from one situation to the other. The people in (B) would not want to move to (C), and vice versa, because that would mean they no longer exist. But your theory now gives a strong recommendation for one over the other anyway.
There are also technical problems with how you’d actually apply this logic to more complicated situations where the number of future people differs. Suppose that 1000 extra people are created in (B), but 2000 extra people are created in (C), with varying levels of welfare. How do you apply your theory then? You now need 1000 of the 2000 people in (C) to be considered ‘effectively real’, to continue avoiding non-identity problem like conclusions, but which 1000? How do you pick? Different choices of the way you decide to pick will give you very different answers, and again your theory is becoming more impersonal, and losing more of its initial intuitive appeal.
Another problem is what to do under uncertainty. What if instead of a forced choice between (B) and (C), the choice is between:
0.1% chance of (A), 99.9% chance of (B)
0.1000001% chance of (A), 99.9% chance of (C).
Intuitively, the recommendations here should not be very different to the original example. The first choice should still be strongly preferred. But are the 1000 people still considered ‘effectively real’ in your theory, in order to allow you to reach that conclusion? Why? They’re not guaranteed to exist, and actually, your real preferred option, (A), is more likely to happen with the second choice.
Maybe it’s possible to resolve all these complications, but I think you’re still a long way from that at the moment. And I think the theory will look a lot less intuitively appealing once you’re finished.
I’d be interested to read what the final form of the theory looks like if you do accomplish this, although I still don’t think I’m going to be convinced by a theory which will lead you to be predictably in conflict with your future self, even if you and your future self both follow the theory. I can see how that property can let you evade the repugnant conclusion logic while still sort of being transitive. But I think that property is just as undesirable to me as non-transitiveness would be.
Where would unintended consequences fit into this?
E.g. if someone says:
“This plan would cause X, which is good. (Co) X would not occur without this plan, (I) We will be able to carry out the plan by doing Y, (L) the plan will cause X to occur, and (S) X is morally good.”
And I reply:
“This plan will also cause Z, which is morally bad, and outweights the benefit of X”
Which of the 4 categories of claim am I attacking? Is it ‘implementation’?
- 10 May 2022 19:23 UTC; 2 points) 's comment on The COILS Framework for Decision Analysis: A Shortened Intro+Pitch by (
“I would say exactly the same for this. If these people are being freshly created, then I don’t see the harm in treating them as identical.”
I think you missed my point. How can 1,000 people be identical to 2,000 people? Let me give a more concrete example. Suppose again we have 3 possible outcomes:
(A) (Status quo): 1 person exists at high welfare +X
(B): Original person has welfare reduced to X − 2, 1000 new people are created at welfare +X
(C): Original person has welfare reduced only to X - , 2000 new people are created, 1000 at welfare , and 1000 at welfare X + .
And you are forced to choose between (B) and (C).
How do you pick? I think you want to say 1000 of the potential new people are “effectively real”, but which 1000 are “effectively real” in scenario (C)? Is it the 1000 at welfare ? Is it the 1000 at welfare X+? Is it some mix of the two?
If you take the first route, (B) is strongly preferred, but if you take the second, then (C) would be preferred. There’s ambiguity here which needs to be sorted out.
“Then, supposedly no one is effectively real. But actually, I’m not sure this is a problem. More thinking will be required here to see whether I am right or wrong.”
Thank you for finding and expressing my objection for me! This does seem like a fairly major problem to me.
“Sorry, but this is quite incorrect. The people in (C) would want to move to (B).”
No, they wouldn’t, because the people in (B) are different to the people in (C). You can assert that you treat them the same, but you can’t assert that they are the same. The (B) scenario with different people and the (B) scenario with the same people are both distinct, possible, outcomes, and your theory needs to handle them both. It can give the same answer to both, that’s fine, but part of the set up of my hypothetical scenario is that the people are different.
“Isn’t the very idea of reducing people to their welfare impersonal?”
Not necessarily. So called “person affecting” theories say that an act can only be wrong if it makes things worse for someone. That’s an example of a theory based on welfare which is not impersonal. Your intuitive justification for your theory seemed to have a similar flavour to this, but if we want to avoid the non-identity problem, we need to reject this appealing sounding principle. It is possible to make things worse even though there is no one who it is worse for. Your ‘effectively real’ modification does this, I just think it reduces the intuitive appeal of the argument you gave.
I’ve never understood the bayesian logic of the anthropic shadow argument. I actually posted a question about this on the EA forum before, and didn’t get a good answer. I’d appreciate it if someone could help me figure out what I’m missing. When I write down the causal diagram for this situation, I can’t see how an anthropic shadow effect could be possible.
Section 2 of the linked paper shows that the probability of a catastrophic event having occurred in some time frame in the past given that we exist now: P(B_2|E), is smaller than its actual probability of occurring in that time frame, P. The two get more and more different the less likely we are to survive the catastrophic event (they call our probability of survival Q). It’s easy to understand why that is true. It is more likely that we would exist now if the event did not occur than if it did occur. In the extreme case where we are certain to be wiped out by the event, then P(B_2|E) = 0.
This means that if you re-ran the history of the world thousands of times, the ones with observers around at our time would have fewer catastrophic events in their past, on average, than is suggested by P. I am completely happy with this.
But the paper then leaps from this observation to the conclusion that our naive estimate of the frequency of catastrophic events (i.e. our estimate of P) must be biased downwards. This is the point where I lose the chain of reasoning. Here is why.
What we care about here is not P(B_2|E). What we care about is our estimate of P itself. We would ideally like to calculate the posterior distribution of P, given both B_1,2 (the occurrence/non-occurrence of the event in the past), and our existence, E. The causal diagram here looks like this:
P → B_2 → E
This diagram means: P influences B_2 (the catastrophic event occurring), which influences E (our existence). But P does not influence E except through B_2.
*This means if we condition on B_2, the fact we exist now should have no further impact on our estimate of P*
To sum up my confusion: The distribution of (P|B_2,E) should be equivalent to the distribution of (P|B_2). I.e., there is no anthropic shadow effect.
In my original EA forum question I took the messy anthropics out of it and imagined flipping a biased coin hundreds of times and painting a blue tile red with probability 1-Q (extinction) if we ever get a head. If we looked at the results of this experiment, we could estimate the bias of the coin by simply counting the number of heads. The colour of the tile is irrelevant. And we should go with the naive estimate, even though it is again true that people who see a blue tile will have fewer heads on average than is suggested by the bias of the coin.
What this observation about the tile frequencies misses is that the tile is more likely to be blue when the probability of heads is smaller (or we are more likely to exist if P is smaller), and we should take that into account too.
Overall it seems like our naive estimate of P based on the frequency of the catastrophic event in our past is totally fine when all things are considered.
I’m struggling at the moment to see why the anthropic case should be different to the coin case.
Thanks for your reply!
If 100 people do the experiment, the ones who end up with a blue tile will, on average, have fewer heads than they should, for exactly the same reason that most observers will live after comparitively fewer catastrophic events.
But in the coin case that still does not mean that seeing a blue tile should make you revise your naive estimate upwards. The naive estimate is still, in bayesian terms, the correct one.
I don’t understand why the anthropic case is different.
In the tile case, the observers who see a blue tile are underestimating on average. If you see a blue tile, you then know that you belong to that group, who are underestimating on average. But that still should not change your estimate. That’s weird and unintuitive, but true in the coin/tile case (unless I’ve got the maths badly wrong somewhere).
I get that there is a difference in the anthropic case. If you kill everyone with a red tile, then you’re right, the observers on average will be biased, because it’s only the observers with a blue tile who are left, and their estimates were biased to begin with. But what I don’t understand is, why is finding out that you are alive any different to finding out that your tile is blue? Shouldn’t the update be the same?
I can see that is a difference between the two cases. What I’m struggling to understand is why that leads to a different answer.
My understanding of the steps of the anthropic shadow argument (possibly flawed or incomplete) is something like this:
You are an observer → We should expect observers to underestimate the frequency of catastrophic events on average, if they use the frequency of catastrophic events in their past → You should revise your estimate of the frequency of catastrophic events upwards
But in the coin/tile case you could make an exactly analogous argument:
You see a blue tile → We should expect people who see a blue tile to underestimate the frequency of heads on average, if they use the frequency of heads in their past → You should revise your estimate of the frequency of heads upwards.
But in the coin/tile case, this argument is wrong, even though it appears intuitively plausible. If you do the full bayesian analysis, that argument leads you to the wrong answer. Why should we trust the argument of identical structure in the anthropic case?
Thank you for your comment! I agree with you that the difference between the bird’s-eye view and the worm’s eye view is very important, and certainly has the potential to explain why the extinction case is not the same as the blue/green sky case. It is this distinction that I was referring to in the post when asking whether the ‘anthropicness’ of the extinction case could explain why the two arguments should be treated differently.
But I’m not sure I agree that you are handling the worm’s-eye case in the correct way. I could be wrong, but I think the explanation you have outlined in your comment is effectively equivalent to my ‘Possible Solution #1’, in the post. That is, because it is impossible to observe non-existence, we should treat existence as a certainty, and condition on it.
My problem with this solution is as I explained in that section of the post. I think the strongest objection comes from considering the anthropic explanation of fine tuning. Do you agree with the following statement?:
”The fine tuning of the cosmological constants for the existence of life is (Bayesian) evidence of a multiverse.”My impression is that this statement is generally accepted by people who engage in anthropic reasoning, but you can’t explain it if you treat existence as a certainty. If existence is never surprising, then the fine tuning of cosmological constants for life cannot be evidence for anything.
There is also the Russian roulette thought experiment, which I think hits home that you should be able to consider the unlikeliness of your existence and make inferences based on it.
I think that’s a good summary of where our disagreement lies. I think that your “sample worlds until the sky turns out blue” methodology for generating a sample is very different to the existence/non-existence case, especially if there is actually only one world! If there are many worlds, it’s more similar, and this is why I think anthropic shadow has more of a chance of working in that case (that was my ‘Possible Solution #2’).
I find it very interesting that your intuition on the Russian roulette is the other way round to mine. So if there are two guns, one with 1/1000 probability of firing, and one with 999/1000 probability of firing, and you pick one at random and it doesn’t fire, you think that you have no information about which gun you picked? Because you’d be dead otherwise?
I agree that we don’t get very far by just stating our different intuitions, so let me try to convince you of my point of view a different way:
Suppose that you really do have no information after firing a gun once and surviving. Then, if told to play the game again, you should be indifferent between sticking with the same gun, or switching to the different gun. Lets say you settle on the switching strategy (maybe I offer you some trivial incentive to do so). I, on the other hand, would strongly favour sticking with the same gun. This is because I think I have extremely strong evidence that the gun I picked is the less risky one, if I have survived once.
Now lets take a birds-eye view, and imagine an outside observer watching the game, betting on which one of us is more likely to survive through two rounds. Obviously they would favour me over you. My odds of survival are approximately 50% (it more or less just depends on whether I pick the safe gun first or not). Your odds of survival are approximately 1 in 1000 (you are guaranteed to have one shot with the dangerous gun).
This doesn’t prove that your approach to formulating probabilities is wrong, but if ultimately we are interested in using probabilities to inform our decisions, I think this suggests that my approach is better.
On the fine tuning, if it is different, I would like to understand why. I’d love to know what the general procedure we’re supposed to use is to analyse anthropic problems. At the moment I struggle to see how it could both include the anthropic shadow effect, and also have the fine tuning of cosmological constants be taken as evidence for a multiverse.
This is a beautiful thought experiment, and a really interesting argument. I wonder if saying that it shows an incompatibility between moral realism and time discounting is too strong though? Maybe it only shows an incompatibility between time discounting and consequentialism?
Under non-consequentialist moral theories, it is possible for different moral agents to be given conflicting aims. For example, some people believe that we have a special obligation towards our own families. Suppose that in your example, Anna and Christoph are moving towards their respective siblings, and we neglect relativistic effects. In that case, both Anna and Christoph might agree that it is right for Anna to take the carrot, and that it is also right for Christoph to take the carrot, even though these aims conflict. This is not inconsistent with moral realism.
Similarly, in the relativistic case, we could imagine believing in the moral rule that “everyone should be concerned with utility in their own inertial frame”, together with some time discounting principle. Both Anna and Christoph would believe in the true statements “Anna should take the carrot” and “Christoph should take the carrot”. They would acknowledge that their aims conflict, but that is not inconsistent with moral realism.
I think the analogy here is quite strong, because you could imagine a time discounter defending their point of view by saying we have stronger obligations to those closer to us in time, in the same way that we might have stronger obligations towards those closer to us in space, or genetically.
On the other hand, when you consider General Relativity, there are no global inertial frames, so it’s interesting to imagine how a steelmanned time discounter would adapt the “everyone should be concerned with utility in their own inertial frame” principle to be consistent with General Relativity. Maybe anything they try would have some weird consequences.