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 directl…
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.
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.