Yeah, I guess the problem arises from the tie-in with a kind of person-affecting welfarism: we don't just want to arbitrarily increase blue Legos, or happiness for that matter, but rather we want to do things that are *good for people* and avoiding doing things that are *bad for* them.
So the basic point I'm wanting to make in the OP is t…
Yeah, I guess the problem arises from the tie-in with a kind of person-affecting welfarism: we don't just want to arbitrarily increase blue Legos, or happiness for that matter, but rather we want to do things that are *good for people* and avoiding doing things that are *bad for* them.
So the basic point I'm wanting to make in the OP is that even someone who has those kind of person-affecting welfarist commitments should be open to procreative beneficence. They should want to create Joy because her life would be good *for her*, even if (for boring technical reasons) we cannot say that it is "better" for her than the alternative.
But yeah, I agree with your broader methodological point that we shouldn't let metaphysics or linguistics constrain our normative commitments in the way that these bad arguments tend to try to do.
Well, increasing blue Legos would warrant the label "arbitrary", but I don't see how increasing happiness simpliciter would.
I generally agree with your implicational argument contingent upon welfarism being of a person-affecting sort. However, I think welfarism is more coherent as a favoring of positive experience in the universe directly, since persons are more accurately described as constructs of linked experiences than as containers or owners of them.
Are you implicitly assuming that anything normatively fundamental must also be metaphysically fundamental? I think I'd reject that assumption. I have some sympathy for combining a kind of Parfit/Hume constructivism about persons with the normative claim that our moral concerns should be so structured as to treat these person-constructions as what fundamentally matter.
So, I'm pretty sympathetic to the claim (from many non-utilitarians) that it matters how experiences are bundled into lives, and we shouldn't *just* want to tile the universe with happy experiences (or, at any rate, it makes a normative difference if/how these experiences are structured into lives). And I want to be able to show how a form of "utilitarian-esque" welfarist consequentialism is compatible with those concerns.
Yeah, I guess the problem arises from the tie-in with a kind of person-affecting welfarism: we don't just want to arbitrarily increase blue Legos, or happiness for that matter, but rather we want to do things that are *good for people* and avoiding doing things that are *bad for* them.
So the basic point I'm wanting to make in the OP is that even someone who has those kind of person-affecting welfarist commitments should be open to procreative beneficence. They should want to create Joy because her life would be good *for her*, even if (for boring technical reasons) we cannot say that it is "better" for her than the alternative.
But yeah, I agree with your broader methodological point that we shouldn't let metaphysics or linguistics constrain our normative commitments in the way that these bad arguments tend to try to do.
Well, increasing blue Legos would warrant the label "arbitrary", but I don't see how increasing happiness simpliciter would.
I generally agree with your implicational argument contingent upon welfarism being of a person-affecting sort. However, I think welfarism is more coherent as a favoring of positive experience in the universe directly, since persons are more accurately described as constructs of linked experiences than as containers or owners of them.
Are you implicitly assuming that anything normatively fundamental must also be metaphysically fundamental? I think I'd reject that assumption. I have some sympathy for combining a kind of Parfit/Hume constructivism about persons with the normative claim that our moral concerns should be so structured as to treat these person-constructions as what fundamentally matter.
So, I'm pretty sympathetic to the claim (from many non-utilitarians) that it matters how experiences are bundled into lives, and we shouldn't *just* want to tile the universe with happy experiences (or, at any rate, it makes a normative difference if/how these experiences are structured into lives). And I want to be able to show how a form of "utilitarian-esque" welfarist consequentialism is compatible with those concerns.
I suppose I am, yeah. Thanks for the observation; I ought to think more about how I would defend that equation.