I can sort of get behind that reasoning on a thought experiment level, but it’s harder to put to practice. Avoiding the more artificial scenarios where there’s a mass extinction followed by a deliberate repopulation of the world with new people, the transition to any future state would be a gradual process that always involves actual, living people as intermediaries—who, being living, should (IMO) be accordingly valued.
That, and in my mind the privilegedness of existing versus non-existing lives arises not only from the fact that existing lives have greater value, but from the fact that non-existing lives have zero value; and multiplying that with whatever will still leave zero. The value of those lives would only become realized when their existence did, at which point we’d still be left with the same problem of resource allocation: if we went for a more situation B-ish solution at some past point in time, the people of our chosen future would have less resources per person to enjoy their lives with. In this case, too, it seems correct to plan for situation A.
Hmm. I hadn’t looked at it from the angle of the implications of reversing the “murder is bad” maxim. Thanks.
It doesn’t feel very satisfying, though. The questions of whether to add new people or not and whether to subtract existing people or not seem like two entirely different things; trying to address both of them with one ethical recipe about the number of worthwhile lives being lead doesn’t seem justified
I agree. My intuition is that, when calculating average wellbeing, you include dead people, and you include whomever is going to end up existing in the future, but not potential people who will never exist unless you take action. So killing someone lowers average wellbeing, but failing to create someone does not. A person who manages to live as long as they possibly can with good quality of life dies with a big positive contribution to average wellbeing, a person who dies prematurely has a much lower contribution and is a permanent black mark on our collective moral records. A person who never exists, however, isn’t factored into the equation.
Of course, taken by itself this might imply the Problem of the Ecstatic Psychopath. But, as I state in my main post, average wellbeing isn’t the only value, though it is an important one. Total wellbeing (having lots of people who contribute fun and other positive values to the world) is important too, sometimes it may be worth risking someone lowering the average if they increase the total..
Avoiding the more artificial scenarios where there’s a mass extinction followed by a deliberate repopulation of the world with new people, the transition to any future state would be a gradual process that always involves actual, living people as intermediaries—who, being living, should (IMO) be accordingly valued.
The quandary we have seems to be that it seems like we have a duty to make sure people who don’t exist yet, but will in the future, will have satisfied preferences, but also think that we have no duty to satisfy the hypothetical preferences of hypothetical people by creating them.
I’ve concluded that the primary reason this seems like a quandary is that we are trying to apply the Person-Affecting Principle to situations where it doesn’t work. The Person Affecting Principle states, in short that an event is only good or bad if it makes things better or worse for some specific person. This works fine in situations where the population doesn’t grow. However, in instances where it does, it gives insane-seeming results.
The classic example is this: imagine a plan to store nuclear waste in one of two places. In one place it’ll keep forever, in another it will leak and kill everyone in the area in 500 years. However, due to the Butterfly Effect, what plan you pick will result in different people meeting, mating, and having children, so the future generations in the alternate storage scenarios will be composed of different individuals. So the choices aren’t better or worse for any specific person, because they change what people will end up existing. According to the PAP neither scenario is better or worse.
I’ve concluded that this can be resolved by replaced the Person Affecting Principle with the World Creating Principle. The World Creating principle states that an event is good or bad if it creates a world which has lower (average utility)+(total utility)+(equality utility)+(other relevant complex values) for the world it creates, whomever the inhabitants end up being. So storing the nuclear waste permanently is a good thing, all other things being equal.
The Person Affecting Principle is a special case of the World Creating Principle, in the same way Newtonian physics is a special case of General Relativity. It’s the World Creating Principle applied in special cases where there is no potential for population growth.
I might expand this thinking into a post at some point.
Interesting… Thanks for weighing in!
I can sort of get behind that reasoning on a thought experiment level, but it’s harder to put to practice. Avoiding the more artificial scenarios where there’s a mass extinction followed by a deliberate repopulation of the world with new people, the transition to any future state would be a gradual process that always involves actual, living people as intermediaries—who, being living, should (IMO) be accordingly valued.
That, and in my mind the privilegedness of existing versus non-existing lives arises not only from the fact that existing lives have greater value, but from the fact that non-existing lives have zero value; and multiplying that with whatever will still leave zero. The value of those lives would only become realized when their existence did, at which point we’d still be left with the same problem of resource allocation: if we went for a more situation B-ish solution at some past point in time, the people of our chosen future would have less resources per person to enjoy their lives with. In this case, too, it seems correct to plan for situation A.
Gastogh says:
I agree. My intuition is that, when calculating average wellbeing, you include dead people, and you include whomever is going to end up existing in the future, but not potential people who will never exist unless you take action. So killing someone lowers average wellbeing, but failing to create someone does not. A person who manages to live as long as they possibly can with good quality of life dies with a big positive contribution to average wellbeing, a person who dies prematurely has a much lower contribution and is a permanent black mark on our collective moral records. A person who never exists, however, isn’t factored into the equation.
Of course, taken by itself this might imply the Problem of the Ecstatic Psychopath. But, as I state in my main post, average wellbeing isn’t the only value, though it is an important one. Total wellbeing (having lots of people who contribute fun and other positive values to the world) is important too, sometimes it may be worth risking someone lowering the average if they increase the total..
The quandary we have seems to be that it seems like we have a duty to make sure people who don’t exist yet, but will in the future, will have satisfied preferences, but also think that we have no duty to satisfy the hypothetical preferences of hypothetical people by creating them.
I’ve concluded that the primary reason this seems like a quandary is that we are trying to apply the Person-Affecting Principle to situations where it doesn’t work. The Person Affecting Principle states, in short that an event is only good or bad if it makes things better or worse for some specific person. This works fine in situations where the population doesn’t grow. However, in instances where it does, it gives insane-seeming results.
The classic example is this: imagine a plan to store nuclear waste in one of two places. In one place it’ll keep forever, in another it will leak and kill everyone in the area in 500 years. However, due to the Butterfly Effect, what plan you pick will result in different people meeting, mating, and having children, so the future generations in the alternate storage scenarios will be composed of different individuals. So the choices aren’t better or worse for any specific person, because they change what people will end up existing. According to the PAP neither scenario is better or worse.
I’ve concluded that this can be resolved by replaced the Person Affecting Principle with the World Creating Principle. The World Creating principle states that an event is good or bad if it creates a world which has lower (average utility)+(total utility)+(equality utility)+(other relevant complex values) for the world it creates, whomever the inhabitants end up being. So storing the nuclear waste permanently is a good thing, all other things being equal.
The Person Affecting Principle is a special case of the World Creating Principle, in the same way Newtonian physics is a special case of General Relativity. It’s the World Creating Principle applied in special cases where there is no potential for population growth.
I might expand this thinking into a post at some point.