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I'm basically sympathetic to your arguments here, but I really don't grasp intuitively why rejecting (ii) utopia is better than a barren rock is so repugnant.
Or, maybe more to the point, the reason to prefer Utopia to a barren rock is because of the preferences of people who actually exist... But in the absence of people to hold such a…
I'm basically sympathetic to your arguments here, but I really don't grasp intuitively why rejecting
(ii) utopia is better than a barren rock
is so repugnant.
Or, maybe more to the point, the reason to prefer Utopia to a barren rock is because of the preferences of people who actually exist... But in the absence of people to hold such a preference, it feels much less nihilistic.
Preferences also seem to me to solve the intrapersonal version of the neutrality paradox: we prefer future moments of value to future non existence because of our preferences, not because of some overriding reason that the former is better than the latter.
I think I can imagine someone who genuinely feels like they have gotten all they want out of life, and is indifferent between continuing to live or dying, and while I might find that alien or unfamiliar, I don't find it _wrong_.
Am I missing something here?
re: utopia, I guess it could partly be an extension of my feeling very glad that the people I love have gotten to exist. If I imagine Amun-Ra offering Cleopatra a massive party if she agrees to subsequently blow up the world, I think it's really important that she answer 'No' to that -- otherwise none of us would get to exist, and that's not a matter of indifference!
Another thought is that it is very literally nihilistic to deny positive value. If utopia is no better than a barren rock, then you're saying utopia has *no value*. That's nihilism! Seems bad to me. I think we should appreciate good lives as something that's genuinely good, not just kinda-pretend-good-while-those-people-are-around-to-complain-about-our-saying-otherwise.
Interesting suggestion, thanks!
I think one major concern with an exclusively preferentist account of the harm of death comes from cases of temporary depression. Suppose a teenager falls into a funk and, for the moment, is truly indifferent about their future. But suppose their depression will in fact pass, and they would have a really happy, flourishing future. I think it's bad for the teenager to die! It deprives them of a valuable future, that would genuinely make their life better.
That said, I'm not committed to the claim that it's *always* better to add more life. Just that it *can* be good. For all I've said, it might be perfectly reasonable for an elderly person to reject further life extension, especially if their additional time would be below average compared to their past life.
Though I guess I do think it would always be irrational to reject above-average additional time. E.g. imagine an elderly person who abandoned their family and lived pretty miserably, and now doesn't care about anything at all. But if they kept living, they would not only meet their grandkids but also form a genuine bond and feel really good about it. In that case, like the temporarily depressed teenager, I think it's important that they not be deprived of the valuable future! I think what's often going on in less well-described cases is that we implicitly imagine an old person with a drab future that wouldn't seem to add any real value to their life, and might even detract from it. And then, sure, there doesn't seem any moral reason to add something that doesn't appear to have any real value.
Thanks for the responses!
I agree with that concern, although I think your example of the depressed teenager has some features that I think muddle the issue a bit. In particular, the fact that their depression is temporary, and can be regarded as a sort of impairment of their thinking and judgement, strike me as important features in shaping my intuition.
Basically, I think the problem is in deciding what counts as a preference, and how to prioritize or decide which preferences to give weight to: we don't want to just count our moment-to-moment preferences, and let them override any other considerations, precisely because my preference at a particular moment may be a poor representation of my preferences overall, or may find me in a moment of poor judgement.
If you show me someone for whom the prospect of a happy future has _never_ motivated them to want to live beyond a certain point, even when they are not depressed, I am less convinced that it is bad for them to stop living at that point.
Same goes for the elderly person meeting their future grandchild: if an elderly person tells me that yes, they know they will be able to form a valuable and meaningful bond with their grandkids, and yes, they know this will give them joy and make their life feel worth living; but still, they don't want to go on living, I find this _strange_ and I would definitely want to make sure we're understanding each other properly and all that, but if they stick to their guns, I'm not sure I feel the intuition that it's _bad_ for them to do this, just really weird.
re: Utopia vs. Barren Rock
"otherwise none of us would get to exist, and that's not a matter of indifference!"
I guess this is where we disagree; it's not a matter of indifference _to us, because we happen to now exist and have interests and preferences_; but 2000 years ago, when we didn't exist and have preferences, I am really not sure I have the same intuition as you--it does feel to me like a matter of indifference.
"Seems bad to me. I think we should appreciate good lives as something that's genuinely good, not just kinda-pretend-good-while-those-people-are-around-to-complain-about-our-saying-otherwise."
I guess maybe I am a little sympathetic to nihilism on this front, though I'm not sure it commits to me to the view that good lives aren't good: I think good lives are good to the people who have them, and to the people who can imagine them in the future; but if there's no one around to have good lives, and no one around to anticipate future good lives, there's no one for whom those lives are good.
This sounds a little close to a person-affecting view, and I know there are problems with those, but at least as a matter of intuition, it really does feel right to me: in a world with no people, it is a matter of indifference whether there will be people in the future.
Anyway, I appreciate the responses, and I really enjoy the blog in general, so thanks!