"I’m not aware of any discussions of the issue at the broad level of generality and applicability that I’ve attempted here; but further references would be most welcome!" See "Your death might be the worst thing ever to happen to you (but maybe you shouldn't care)" by Travis Timmerman. His Sick Sally and Naive Ned case gets at the same i…
"I’m not aware of any discussions of the issue at the broad level of generality and applicability that I’ve attempted here; but further references would be most welcome!"
See "Your death might be the worst thing ever to happen to you (but maybe you shouldn't care)" by Travis Timmerman. His Sick Sally and Naive Ned case gets at the same idea. Short version: Sick Sally is inevitably dying of some condition by some particular date. Her friend Naive Ned wants to help her out, so he promises to torture her starting that particular date, if she somehow survives the condition. By promising this, Naive Ned makes Sick Sally's death comparatively good for her instead of comparatively bad for her, since her death allows her to escape his torture. But of course it's completely pointless for Naive Ned to promise to torture her to make her death comparatively good for her. He's not benefitting her at all, because he doesn't change the intrinsic/non-comparative/absolute value outcomes for her. The comparative value of her death doesn't matter. Only the intrinsic/non-comparative/absolute value of her life does.
I wrote about this as well in my BPhil thesis. I call this idea that comparative value doesn't matter in itself the "Axiological Grounding for the No-Difference View." Basically, I claim this assumption is what underlies Parfit's deontic No-Difference View. Coincidentally, today I have been writing a conference abstract on the Axiological Grounding for the No-Difference View! I am close to finishing the abstract but got distracted and then saw this post.
By the way, all this contradicts what you say about death in Value Receptacles. I have some draft of something somewhere in which I refer to your view about death's intrinsic harm in Value Receptacles as a form of opposition to the Axiological Grounding for the No-Difference View which I needed to refute. It sounds like you've come around!
Also relevant is Frances Kamm's discussion of the harm of death in "Creation and Abortion" (which I believe I mentioned to you in an email years ago, in response to Value Receptacles). She also argues that it's not worth preventing short, "experientially adequate" lives from coming into existence even if they quickly die and so are deprived of a lot, because death is not the sort of harm that makes it better to never exist and have nothing (and be deprived of nothing) rather than to briefly exist and have a little bit and be deprived of a lot. If death's harm is the comparative deprivation of good things, it doesn't help anything to fail to create someone so they can avoid deprivation, since this does not increase the amount of absolute goods being enjoyed.
I remain open to the possibility that there might be some slight absolute badness to death (via thwarted preferences and such), but as discussed in an earlier post, we can't give it very much weight. So I now prefer to distinguish killing vs failing to create via appeal to supplemental person-directed reasons that apply only in the former case: https://rychappell.substack.com/p/killing-vs-failing-to-create
Still, as I emphasize in the present post, it isn't worth preventing someone's existence *merely* to ensure that you don't subsequently violate these reasons (i.e. wrongly kill the individuals in question).
Do you recall whether any of those other authors discuss this sort of case? i.e., not just short lives, but specifically whether it would be worth preventing someone's existence in order to prevent them from being *wrongfully killed*?
I think Travis Timmerman took that kind of stance in a talk he gave on Zoom which I believe related to the logic of the larder. If I remember right, his stance was that creating happy animals and killing them for food is wrong, but the practice makes the world better and we should hope it occurs. I think when I asked him more about this, he said that wrongness occurring does not in itself affect the value of worlds. If we are choosing between creating two worlds, and the only difference between them is that one includes wrongness and the other lacks it, we can flip a coin to decide which of the two worlds we create. (I'm not certain he said this in the Q&A for that talk, but I'm pretty sure he has told me something like this at some point.) At the time he said he had no plans to turn this talk into a paper.
This makes me think of Podgorski's "The Diner's Defence: Producers, Consumers, and the Benefits of Existence." In this paper Podgorski argues that people who buy animal products from farms that give animals good lives do nothing wrong because in purchasing the products, they are casually responsible for creating happy animals who will be wrongly killed, but they are not casually responsible for the wrongful killing. So he seems to think it's not wrong to create someone whom we know will be wrongfully killed. I can't remember how directly he addresses that question, but that answer is at least clearly implied.
As for Kamm, I don't know, but I wouldn't be surprised if she thought we should prevent very short lives from popping into existence if the reason these lives would be short is their wrongful killing. However, she made this point about the harm of death in the context of abortion, which does involve killing, so maybe I'm wrong about that.
Here's a relevant passage from "The Diner's Defence":
"The implication of this argument is that it is not wrong for harm-based reasons to cause someone to exist who is then abused by someone else, provided that her life is worth living, and there was no alternative act that would have caused her to exist with a better life. This is the typical position of the diner in relation to the animals that their purchase affects.
"This principle, I claim, is plausible even when applied to uncontroversial full-moral-status human beings..."
"I’m not aware of any discussions of the issue at the broad level of generality and applicability that I’ve attempted here; but further references would be most welcome!"
See "Your death might be the worst thing ever to happen to you (but maybe you shouldn't care)" by Travis Timmerman. His Sick Sally and Naive Ned case gets at the same idea. Short version: Sick Sally is inevitably dying of some condition by some particular date. Her friend Naive Ned wants to help her out, so he promises to torture her starting that particular date, if she somehow survives the condition. By promising this, Naive Ned makes Sick Sally's death comparatively good for her instead of comparatively bad for her, since her death allows her to escape his torture. But of course it's completely pointless for Naive Ned to promise to torture her to make her death comparatively good for her. He's not benefitting her at all, because he doesn't change the intrinsic/non-comparative/absolute value outcomes for her. The comparative value of her death doesn't matter. Only the intrinsic/non-comparative/absolute value of her life does.
I wrote about this as well in my BPhil thesis. I call this idea that comparative value doesn't matter in itself the "Axiological Grounding for the No-Difference View." Basically, I claim this assumption is what underlies Parfit's deontic No-Difference View. Coincidentally, today I have been writing a conference abstract on the Axiological Grounding for the No-Difference View! I am close to finishing the abstract but got distracted and then saw this post.
By the way, all this contradicts what you say about death in Value Receptacles. I have some draft of something somewhere in which I refer to your view about death's intrinsic harm in Value Receptacles as a form of opposition to the Axiological Grounding for the No-Difference View which I needed to refute. It sounds like you've come around!
Also relevant is Frances Kamm's discussion of the harm of death in "Creation and Abortion" (which I believe I mentioned to you in an email years ago, in response to Value Receptacles). She also argues that it's not worth preventing short, "experientially adequate" lives from coming into existence even if they quickly die and so are deprived of a lot, because death is not the sort of harm that makes it better to never exist and have nothing (and be deprived of nothing) rather than to briefly exist and have a little bit and be deprived of a lot. If death's harm is the comparative deprivation of good things, it doesn't help anything to fail to create someone so they can avoid deprivation, since this does not increase the amount of absolute goods being enjoyed.
Very cool - thanks for the references!
I remain open to the possibility that there might be some slight absolute badness to death (via thwarted preferences and such), but as discussed in an earlier post, we can't give it very much weight. So I now prefer to distinguish killing vs failing to create via appeal to supplemental person-directed reasons that apply only in the former case: https://rychappell.substack.com/p/killing-vs-failing-to-create
Still, as I emphasize in the present post, it isn't worth preventing someone's existence *merely* to ensure that you don't subsequently violate these reasons (i.e. wrongly kill the individuals in question).
Do you recall whether any of those other authors discuss this sort of case? i.e., not just short lives, but specifically whether it would be worth preventing someone's existence in order to prevent them from being *wrongfully killed*?
I think Travis Timmerman took that kind of stance in a talk he gave on Zoom which I believe related to the logic of the larder. If I remember right, his stance was that creating happy animals and killing them for food is wrong, but the practice makes the world better and we should hope it occurs. I think when I asked him more about this, he said that wrongness occurring does not in itself affect the value of worlds. If we are choosing between creating two worlds, and the only difference between them is that one includes wrongness and the other lacks it, we can flip a coin to decide which of the two worlds we create. (I'm not certain he said this in the Q&A for that talk, but I'm pretty sure he has told me something like this at some point.) At the time he said he had no plans to turn this talk into a paper.
This makes me think of Podgorski's "The Diner's Defence: Producers, Consumers, and the Benefits of Existence." In this paper Podgorski argues that people who buy animal products from farms that give animals good lives do nothing wrong because in purchasing the products, they are casually responsible for creating happy animals who will be wrongly killed, but they are not casually responsible for the wrongful killing. So he seems to think it's not wrong to create someone whom we know will be wrongfully killed. I can't remember how directly he addresses that question, but that answer is at least clearly implied.
As for Kamm, I don't know, but I wouldn't be surprised if she thought we should prevent very short lives from popping into existence if the reason these lives would be short is their wrongful killing. However, she made this point about the harm of death in the context of abortion, which does involve killing, so maybe I'm wrong about that.
Here's a relevant passage from "The Diner's Defence":
"The implication of this argument is that it is not wrong for harm-based reasons to cause someone to exist who is then abused by someone else, provided that her life is worth living, and there was no alternative act that would have caused her to exist with a better life. This is the typical position of the diner in relation to the animals that their purchase affects.
"This principle, I claim, is plausible even when applied to uncontroversial full-moral-status human beings..."
Perfect, thanks! I'll be sure to cite this if I end up expanding this post into a paper.