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-construction…
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.
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.