Once someone is alive, on the other hand, we’re obliged to take care of them in a way that we wouldn’t be obliged to create them in the first place
that seems like quite a big sacrifice to make in order to resolve Parfit’s repugnant conclusion; you have abandoned consequentialism in a really big way.
You can get off parfit’s conclusion by just rejecting aggregative consequentialism.
Think of the goal being stated in terms of world-histories rather than world-states. It makes more sense this way. Then, you can say that your preference for world-histories where a person is created (leading to the state of the world X) is different than for world-histories where a person is killed (starting from a different state, but leading to the same state X).
I meant it in a hypothetical way. I don’t actually like state-consequentialism—trivially, human experiences are only meaningful as a section of the history of the universe.
Eliezer said:
that seems like quite a big sacrifice to make in order to resolve Parfit’s repugnant conclusion; you have abandoned consequentialism in a really big way.
You can get off parfit’s conclusion by just rejecting aggregative consequentialism.
Think of the goal being stated in terms of world-histories rather than world-states. It makes more sense this way. Then, you can say that your preference for world-histories where a person is created (leading to the state of the world X) is different than for world-histories where a person is killed (starting from a different state, but leading to the same state X).
Sure, you can be a histories-preferer, and also a consequentialist. In fact you have preferences over histories anyway, really.
Hmm… Then, in what sense can you mean the top-level comment while keeping this in mind?
I meant it in a hypothetical way. I don’t actually like state-consequentialism—trivially, human experiences are only meaningful as a section of the history of the universe.