I think the person-affecting view shouldn’t be dismissed so quickly. For example, when we talk about poverty-alleviation or health interventions in EA, we talk about how that’s good because it makes actual people better off. Similarly, when something is bad, we point to people for whom it’s bad, e.g. those who suffer as a consequence of an action. Saving a life isn’t consequentially equivalent to creating one, because the conterfactuals are different: in the former, a life would’ve been nonconsensually terminated, which is bad for that person, but in the latter, there’s no one for whom it would be bad. Nor does the person-affecting view endorse human extinction, though it evaluates it less negatively than total utilitarianism does.
So even if, from a total or average utilitarian view, it would be better if you were eventually replaced by new lives, they wouldn’t miss out on anything if they weren’t created, so they shouldn’t count for anything if deciding not to create them, but those who already exist would count either way.
Interesting points. I agree that the arguments against non-person-affecting views are rather compelling, but still find arguments against person-affecting views even more persuasive. Person-affecting views can easily endorse extinction if it’s going to occur when almost everyone currently alive has died anyway—for example, if there is a meteorite 150 years away from destroying the earth and we could easily avert it but would need to raise taxes by 1% to do so, I think most person-affecting views would say to let it hit (assuming it’s a secret meteorite, etc).
There’s also a second way in which they endorse extinction. Almost nobody can stomach the claim that it’s morally neural to create people who you know will be tortured for their whole lives; therefore, person-affecting views often end up endorsing an asymmetry where it’s bad to create people with net-negative lives but neutral to create people with net-positive lives. But unless you predict an incredibly utopian future, that’s an argument for human extinction right now—since there will otherwise be enough net-negative people in the future to outweigh the interests of everyone currently alive.
I agree that it’s weird to think of saving a life as equivalent to creating one, but can we actually defend saving a life as being more important in general? Most basic case: either you can save a 20 year old who will live another 60 years, or else have a child who will live 60 years total. You say that the former is better because it avoids nonconsensual termination. But it doesn’t! The 20 year old still dies eventually… Of course, in the latter case you have two nonconsensual deaths not one, but there’s an easy fix for that: just raise the child so it’s won’t be scared of death! I know that sounds stupid but it’s sort of what I was getting at when I claimed that some arguments about death are circular: they only apply to people who already think that death is bad. In fact it seems like most people are pretty comfortable with the thought of dying, so raising the child that way wouldn’t even be unusual. Under that view, the only reason that death is morally bad is the fact we don’t consent to it, and so convincing people not to fear death is just as good for the world as actually making them immortal.
I think the person-affecting view shouldn’t be dismissed so quickly. For example, when we talk about poverty-alleviation or health interventions in EA, we talk about how that’s good because it makes actual people better off. Similarly, when something is bad, we point to people for whom it’s bad, e.g. those who suffer as a consequence of an action. Saving a life isn’t consequentially equivalent to creating one, because the conterfactuals are different: in the former, a life would’ve been nonconsensually terminated, which is bad for that person, but in the latter, there’s no one for whom it would be bad. Nor does the person-affecting view endorse human extinction, though it evaluates it less negatively than total utilitarianism does.
So even if, from a total or average utilitarian view, it would be better if you were eventually replaced by new lives, they wouldn’t miss out on anything if they weren’t created, so they shouldn’t count for anything if deciding not to create them, but those who already exist would count either way.
Interesting points. I agree that the arguments against non-person-affecting views are rather compelling, but still find arguments against person-affecting views even more persuasive. Person-affecting views can easily endorse extinction if it’s going to occur when almost everyone currently alive has died anyway—for example, if there is a meteorite 150 years away from destroying the earth and we could easily avert it but would need to raise taxes by 1% to do so, I think most person-affecting views would say to let it hit (assuming it’s a secret meteorite, etc).
There’s also a second way in which they endorse extinction. Almost nobody can stomach the claim that it’s morally neural to create people who you know will be tortured for their whole lives; therefore, person-affecting views often end up endorsing an asymmetry where it’s bad to create people with net-negative lives but neutral to create people with net-positive lives. But unless you predict an incredibly utopian future, that’s an argument for human extinction right now—since there will otherwise be enough net-negative people in the future to outweigh the interests of everyone currently alive.
I agree that it’s weird to think of saving a life as equivalent to creating one, but can we actually defend saving a life as being more important in general? Most basic case: either you can save a 20 year old who will live another 60 years, or else have a child who will live 60 years total. You say that the former is better because it avoids nonconsensual termination. But it doesn’t! The 20 year old still dies eventually… Of course, in the latter case you have two nonconsensual deaths not one, but there’s an easy fix for that: just raise the child so it’s won’t be scared of death! I know that sounds stupid but it’s sort of what I was getting at when I claimed that some arguments about death are circular: they only apply to people who already think that death is bad. In fact it seems like most people are pretty comfortable with the thought of dying, so raising the child that way wouldn’t even be unusual. Under that view, the only reason that death is morally bad is the fact we don’t consent to it, and so convincing people not to fear death is just as good for the world as actually making them immortal.