most person affecting views have big problems with transitivity
That is because I don’t think the person affecting view asks the same question each time (that was the point of Eliezer’s essay). The person-affecting view doesn’t ask “Which society is better, in some abstract sense?” It asks “Does transitioning from one society to the other harm the collective self-interest of the people in the original society?” That’s obviously going to result in intransitivity.
I doubt there is going to be any available synthesis between person affecting and total views that will get out of trouble.....Conversely, we can keep intransitivity and other costly consequences with a mixed (non-lexically prior) view—indeed, we can downwardly dutch book someone by picking our people with care to get pairwise comparisons, eg.
I think I might have been conflating the “person affecting view” with the “prior existence” view. The prior existence view, from what I understand, takes the interests of future people into account, but reserves present people the right to veto their existence if it seriously harms their current interest. So it is immoral for existing people to create someone with low utility and then refuse to help or share with them because it would harm their self-interest, but it is moral [at least in most cases] for them to refuse to create someone whose existence harms their self-interest.
Basically, I find it unacceptable for ethics to conclude something like “It is a net moral good to kill a person destined to live a very worthwhile life and replace them with another person destined to live a slightly more worthwhile life.” This seems obviously immoral to me. It seems obvious that a world where that person is never killed and lives their life is better than one where they were killed and replaced (although one where they were never born and the person with the better life was born instead would obviously be best of all).
On the other hand, as you pointed out before, it seems trivially right to give one existing person a pinprick on the finger in order to create a trillion blissful lives who do not harm existing people in any other way.
I think the best way to reconcile these two intuitions is to develop a pluralist system where prior-existence concerns have much, much, much larger weight than total concerns, but not infinitely large weight. In more concrete terms, it’s wrong to kill someone and replace them with one slightly better off person, but it could be right to kill someone and replace them with a quadrillion people who lead blissful lives.
This doesn’t completely avoid the RC of course. But I think that I can accept that. The thing I found particularly repugnant about the RC is that a RC-type world is the best practicable world, ie, the best possible world that can ever be created given the various constraints its inhabitants face. That’s what I want to avoid, and I think the various pluralist ideas I’ve introduced successfully do so.
You are right to point out that my pluralist ideas do not avoid the RC for a sufficiently huge world. However, I can accept that. As long as an RC world is never the one we should be aiming for I think I can accept it.
That is because I don’t think the person affecting view asks the same question each time (that was the point of Eliezer’s essay). The person-affecting view doesn’t ask “Which society is better, in some abstract sense?” It asks “Does transitioning from one society to the other harm the collective self-interest of the people in the original society?” That’s obviously going to result in intransitivity.
I think I might have been conflating the “person affecting view” with the “prior existence” view. The prior existence view, from what I understand, takes the interests of future people into account, but reserves present people the right to veto their existence if it seriously harms their current interest. So it is immoral for existing people to create someone with low utility and then refuse to help or share with them because it would harm their self-interest, but it is moral [at least in most cases] for them to refuse to create someone whose existence harms their self-interest.
Basically, I find it unacceptable for ethics to conclude something like “It is a net moral good to kill a person destined to live a very worthwhile life and replace them with another person destined to live a slightly more worthwhile life.” This seems obviously immoral to me. It seems obvious that a world where that person is never killed and lives their life is better than one where they were killed and replaced (although one where they were never born and the person with the better life was born instead would obviously be best of all).
On the other hand, as you pointed out before, it seems trivially right to give one existing person a pinprick on the finger in order to create a trillion blissful lives who do not harm existing people in any other way.
I think the best way to reconcile these two intuitions is to develop a pluralist system where prior-existence concerns have much, much, much larger weight than total concerns, but not infinitely large weight. In more concrete terms, it’s wrong to kill someone and replace them with one slightly better off person, but it could be right to kill someone and replace them with a quadrillion people who lead blissful lives.
This doesn’t completely avoid the RC of course. But I think that I can accept that. The thing I found particularly repugnant about the RC is that a RC-type world is the best practicable world, ie, the best possible world that can ever be created given the various constraints its inhabitants face. That’s what I want to avoid, and I think the various pluralist ideas I’ve introduced successfully do so.
You are right to point out that my pluralist ideas do not avoid the RC for a sufficiently huge world. However, I can accept that. As long as an RC world is never the one we should be aiming for I think I can accept it.