Quick counterexample to your last claim: suppose Sally flips a coin to decide whether to create a miserable child. Fortunately, the coin directs her not to. But now your view implies that Sally needn't have taken into account the interests of the child who would've been miserable. But this seems wrong. Sally was wrong to flip a coin,…
Quick counterexample to your last claim: suppose Sally flips a coin to decide whether to create a miserable child. Fortunately, the coin directs her not to. But now your view implies that Sally needn't have taken into account the interests of the child who would've been miserable. But this seems wrong. Sally was wrong to flip a coin, and take a 50% risk of causing such suffering. She should have outright (100%) chosen not to have the miserable child, and she should have done it out of concern for that child's interests.
> from an outside view, it seems to me hard to distinguish an opinion on "intrinsic value" from a preference, at least from the point of view of a non-moral-realist.
Yeah, I'm no expert on expressivism, but a couple of possibilities:
(1) The relevant thing might be that it's a special kind of universal higher-order preference: they want *everyone* to have the relevant first-order preference.
(2) Alternatively, it might be that they're in favour of blaming or otherwise morally criticizing people who don't have the relevant first-order preference.
Sorry, I realized overnight that I missed the point that in the example where we don't create the child, the void is ranked against the world the miserable child is born; if we can do a comparison in that case, why not in the other case?
That actually feels pretty convincing to me; I still feel conflicted about this, but I think if I really want to believe that the void isn't worse than Utopia I really do need an explicit person-affecting view, or to have an explicit asymmetry between negative welfare and positive welfare.
Quick counterexample to your last claim: suppose Sally flips a coin to decide whether to create a miserable child. Fortunately, the coin directs her not to. But now your view implies that Sally needn't have taken into account the interests of the child who would've been miserable. But this seems wrong. Sally was wrong to flip a coin, and take a 50% risk of causing such suffering. She should have outright (100%) chosen not to have the miserable child, and she should have done it out of concern for that child's interests.
> from an outside view, it seems to me hard to distinguish an opinion on "intrinsic value" from a preference, at least from the point of view of a non-moral-realist.
Yeah, I'm no expert on expressivism, but a couple of possibilities:
(1) The relevant thing might be that it's a special kind of universal higher-order preference: they want *everyone* to have the relevant first-order preference.
(2) Alternatively, it might be that they're in favour of blaming or otherwise morally criticizing people who don't have the relevant first-order preference.
(There may be other options!)
Sorry, I realized overnight that I missed the point that in the example where we don't create the child, the void is ranked against the world the miserable child is born; if we can do a comparison in that case, why not in the other case?
That actually feels pretty convincing to me; I still feel conflicted about this, but I think if I really want to believe that the void isn't worse than Utopia I really do need an explicit person-affecting view, or to have an explicit asymmetry between negative welfare and positive welfare.