There are some strong assumptions about the metaphysics of persons in these sorts of arguments, which I don't think I share, and make the formulation of the premises confusing. When I read EI, I hear something parallel to this:
"A Lego structure's differential between blue and yellow Lego blocks cannot be compared between an outcome in which the structure exists and one in which it does not."
Which is fine, I guess. I'm not sure whether I ought to treat it as an issue of metaphysics or of linguistic convention. But if we have a goal to increase blue Legos and decrease yellow Legos in the structure space on the dining room table, then our acceptance or rejection of such a premise has no bearing on our ability to compare the situation in which Tommy builds an all-blue structure with the situation in which he goes and watches TV instead: the former is better with respect to our goal.
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.
Why do you start off assuming that you can’t harm someone who doesn’t exist? That is not at all clear, and perhaps not coherent. whenever we cause anything we cause things in the future. If we do something and it causes harm to someone in the future, we harm them. Any other conclusion is not really consistent with modern concepts of space and time.
I was implicitly thinking of existence as timeless. To harm someone, they must (at some time) exist. I agree that they don't have to exist at the time of the harming event.
Here's an old post I wrote as an undergrad, exploring some related issues:
Got it. I mistakenly assumed you distinguished between existing at some point and existing now.
I will add one more comment, though, if you don’t mind responding. It seems possible to agree with both of the following things:
1. You can’t compare harms/benefits to a person between scenario where they exist and a scenario where they don’t exist.
2. Coming into existence can harm/benefit a person.
comparing to a counterfactual is not necessarily the only way to determine if something is good or bad.
If I can claim that my life is good without comparing to a scenario where I don’t exist, I can say coming into existence was good for me because it was a cause of something good.
This doesn’t require that comparisons aren’t valid, only that they aren’t the only valid way of deciding if something is good.
Yes, exactly. My suggestion (following McMahan) is that existence can be a *non-comparative* harm or benefit, depending on whether your life is bad or good for you. (This would be to accept Existence Incomparativism but to reject purely Comparative Analyses of Harm and Benefit.)
Can you say more? I think there's a loose sense in which we can say that a miserable existence is "worse than nothing", but I think that might just be shorthand for talking about how the miserable existence is *bad* for you, whereas non-existence is not. (I guess the tricky question is whether even that counts as a "comparison", in which case I'd agree incomparativism must be false. But there may be a weaker sense of "comparison" in which it is more plausible. I'm generally happy to go along with it, in that case.)
I loved this post, but perhaps I also took it that it sort of provided some form of 'Modus Tollens' (or some amount of disconfirmation) which should at least weaken our confidence on 'Existence Incomparativism'.
From what you now say, am I right to suppose that for you the "Comparative Analysis of Harm and Benefit" is the weakest link or weakest component here?
Maybe! But I'd also hesitate to call that one "obviously false": it's perfectly fine to hold on to *if* one is willing to give up Existence Incomparativism and say that Misery is worse-off than if she didn't exist at all.
So really all that I think is "obvious" is that the conjunction of the two claims must be false, but people could reasonably go either way on which one they give up. (I'm actually tempted to go further and suggest that it's probably just a verbal disagreement in either case: it's not really clear what someone *means* by "worse off" in these contexts, and the two routes I've suggested are different ways of talking in a way that still lets us make the crucial normative claims about Misery's existence. Although they end up using different words in either case, I'm not sure that there's any real difference in the underlying *claims* that one ends up expressing as a result of going one way or the other.)
"imagine watching the “movie reel” of Joy’s potential life unfold before your eyes, and feeling nothing."
I feel for Joy, just like we feel for characters of movies when we engage our imagination. But there's a gap between such feeling during imagination and thinking you have a reason to bring someone (Joy or the movie character) into existence. You conflate that gap. Insults are not arguments.
Can you say more? My thought is that vivid imagination enables us to appropriately expand our moral concern. Someone might initially think they had no positive reasons of aid, and then Singer's Pond case convinces them otherwise: they come to appreciate that it would be a horrific mistake to not care, and to do nothing when they could help the child -- or anyone else in similarly dire straits.
Fictional characters we're not able to do anything for. So there's an unbridgeable gap between caring about them (being disposed to promote their interests insofar as you're able) and action: the "insofar as you're able" condition can never be triggered. But if you learned that a movie was *not* actually fictional, but rather depicted true and ongoing events, you would presumably recognize a pro tanto reason to help the protagonists (insofar as you are able). So I'm not seeing how the analogy helps you.
I'm wondering what you think explains the putative gap in the non-fictional case of a movie reel accurately depicting the life that Joy *really would* have if brought into existence. Caring about her life involves being disposed to promote her interests insofar as you're able. And, as argued in the OP, it promotes her interests to bring her into (happy) existence. If you explicitly think, while watching the movie reel, about how it depicts a *potential* life that could either come to be, or not, depending on your decision, my suggestion is that any well-adjusted moral agent will feel the stakes of the decision (much like in Singer's pond case).
One might always just *refuse* to acknowledge the reasons revealed by our moral emotions: an egoist could respond to Singer that they "feel" for drowning child "during imagination", but there's a "gap" between that and "thinking they have a reason" to *do* anything to save the child's life. They might accuse Singer of "conflating that gap." (They might even accuse Singer of "insulting" them for observing that it would seem monstrous to just watch the child drown.) They can say all these things. But they aren't good or convincing things to say. Moral emotions can be normatively revealing. If you want to block the path that they reveal, you need something more than a mere assertion that you refuse to travel it.
1. Misery is harmed by existence, such that we have reason not to create her.
2. The best explanation of (1) is that there are non-comparative harms and benefits: having a life of negative welfare is bad for one, and a life of positive welfare is good for one, when the alternative is non-existence.
3. We have reasons of beneficence to do what is good for a subject, and to avert what is bad for a subject.
So
4. We have reasons of beneficence to create good lives like Joy's.
The alternative suggestion that there are non-comparative harms but no analogous non-comparative benefits is utterly ad hoc and unprincipled.
I'm not sure what it means to say that "The experiences of Joy lack in intuitiveness": do you mean that they aren't intuitively *good*?
Given deprivationism about the harm of death, denying that positive experiences are good would seem to leave you unable to explain why death is ever bad.
Since neither Misery nor Joy's life was precisely specified, there doesn't seem much basis for intuitive comparison. I can imagine pairings that go either way. In general, I think harms (and bad lives) are such that they can be more than compensated by sufficient benefits (and good lives). I'm glad that humanity exists, for example.
Hey Richard, I created my substack again. I deleted my substack because of my OCD and anxiety issues. But I just thought I love and really really enjoy commenting and writing stuff sometimes. So, here I am. Anyways, again an excellent post! I think, I now firmly believe that Hedonistic Act Utilitarianism (Bentham, Sidgewick, Rosenqvist, Sinhababu, Hewitt Rawlette, not Mill) is true.
I think, the impersonal good is also necessarily "good for". So, bringing joy into existence is good because it maximizes pleasure and pleasure is the impersonal good and this means that it is necessarily good for joy. So, pleasure is good for joy precisely because pleasure is good simpliciter or pleasure just is good full stop. And all beings should have highest possible level of pleasure.
I think, pleasure fundamentalism is a respectable view.
I deeply love this - “The core precept of utilitarianism is that we should make the world the best place we can. That means that, as far as it is within our power, we should bring about a world in which every individual has the highest possible level of well-being.” — Peter Singer
I share your point of view and have for quite some time. However, there are a lot of formidable challenges to it. Engaging with those challenges will take many lifetimes.
Nonexistent persons cannot give consent. So we should treat them the same way we treat other entities that cannot consent: children, invalids, animals. Children have parents (natural or adoptive) or guardians. Invalids have next of kin or persons with power of attorney. Animals have owners.
In the case of unborn children, it seems unremarkable to have their prospective parents speak for them. Perhaps prospective parents are biased, but they pay for their errors. If the child suffers, so do the parents. Why should we take any other person's evaluation as more valid?
Doesn’t existence incomparativism rely on ethics being affecting when we should just be comparing worlds instead. Like what’s the argument against making right/wrong distinctions on the basis of basis of the world the comes from the action instead of how it affects someone?
I'm sympathetic to the idea that ethics *should* be person-affecting in a broad sense. At the very least, I hope to show that even those who start from a perspective (broadly) along those lines can (and should!) still adopt a future-inclusive conception of beneficence.
There is logical space for a view that existence would not be worse for Misery but we should not create Misery. This is Ralf Bader’s view (who tries to defend the asymmetry) but also John Broome’s view (who does not). So it’s a bit misleading to end the Misery example by asking “Should you press the button?” when what you seem mostly interested in are existential harms/benefits.
To clarify: I'm not so much interested in the comparative "worse for" claim, but just the person-affecting welfarist question of whether it is *bad for* Misery (non-comparatively, as per McMahan).
I do think that would be crazy to deny. Though, for sure, there's logical space to hold that you should not press the button but that this is for reasons unrelated to beneficence/non-maleficence. There's logical space to make any number of clearly false claims (and some philosophers do make them!).
To believe both that pressing a button to prevent Joy's existence would be morally wrong, and that pressing a button to create Joy's existence would not be morally right, it seems like one would have to assign massive moral significance to the polarity by which a finger physically contacting a button toggles exactly the same two world states. Which is bonkers.
There are some strong assumptions about the metaphysics of persons in these sorts of arguments, which I don't think I share, and make the formulation of the premises confusing. When I read EI, I hear something parallel to this:
"A Lego structure's differential between blue and yellow Lego blocks cannot be compared between an outcome in which the structure exists and one in which it does not."
Which is fine, I guess. I'm not sure whether I ought to treat it as an issue of metaphysics or of linguistic convention. But if we have a goal to increase blue Legos and decrease yellow Legos in the structure space on the dining room table, then our acceptance or rejection of such a premise has no bearing on our ability to compare the situation in which Tommy builds an all-blue structure with the situation in which he goes and watches TV instead: the former is better with respect to our goal.
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.
Why do you start off assuming that you can’t harm someone who doesn’t exist? That is not at all clear, and perhaps not coherent. whenever we cause anything we cause things in the future. If we do something and it causes harm to someone in the future, we harm them. Any other conclusion is not really consistent with modern concepts of space and time.
I was implicitly thinking of existence as timeless. To harm someone, they must (at some time) exist. I agree that they don't have to exist at the time of the harming event.
Here's an old post I wrote as an undergrad, exploring some related issues:
https://www.philosophyetc.net/2006/07/temporal-acrobatics-of-harm.html
Got it. I mistakenly assumed you distinguished between existing at some point and existing now.
I will add one more comment, though, if you don’t mind responding. It seems possible to agree with both of the following things:
1. You can’t compare harms/benefits to a person between scenario where they exist and a scenario where they don’t exist.
2. Coming into existence can harm/benefit a person.
comparing to a counterfactual is not necessarily the only way to determine if something is good or bad.
If I can claim that my life is good without comparing to a scenario where I don’t exist, I can say coming into existence was good for me because it was a cause of something good.
This doesn’t require that comparisons aren’t valid, only that they aren’t the only valid way of deciding if something is good.
Yes, exactly. My suggestion (following McMahan) is that existence can be a *non-comparative* harm or benefit, depending on whether your life is bad or good for you. (This would be to accept Existence Incomparativism but to reject purely Comparative Analyses of Harm and Benefit.)
Existence Incomparativism seems obviously false.
Can you say more? I think there's a loose sense in which we can say that a miserable existence is "worse than nothing", but I think that might just be shorthand for talking about how the miserable existence is *bad* for you, whereas non-existence is not. (I guess the tricky question is whether even that counts as a "comparison", in which case I'd agree incomparativism must be false. But there may be a weaker sense of "comparison" in which it is more plausible. I'm generally happy to go along with it, in that case.)
I loved this post, but perhaps I also took it that it sort of provided some form of 'Modus Tollens' (or some amount of disconfirmation) which should at least weaken our confidence on 'Existence Incomparativism'.
From what you now say, am I right to suppose that for you the "Comparative Analysis of Harm and Benefit" is the weakest link or weakest component here?
Maybe! But I'd also hesitate to call that one "obviously false": it's perfectly fine to hold on to *if* one is willing to give up Existence Incomparativism and say that Misery is worse-off than if she didn't exist at all.
So really all that I think is "obvious" is that the conjunction of the two claims must be false, but people could reasonably go either way on which one they give up. (I'm actually tempted to go further and suggest that it's probably just a verbal disagreement in either case: it's not really clear what someone *means* by "worse off" in these contexts, and the two routes I've suggested are different ways of talking in a way that still lets us make the crucial normative claims about Misery's existence. Although they end up using different words in either case, I'm not sure that there's any real difference in the underlying *claims* that one ends up expressing as a result of going one way or the other.)
"imagine watching the “movie reel” of Joy’s potential life unfold before your eyes, and feeling nothing."
I feel for Joy, just like we feel for characters of movies when we engage our imagination. But there's a gap between such feeling during imagination and thinking you have a reason to bring someone (Joy or the movie character) into existence. You conflate that gap. Insults are not arguments.
Can you say more? My thought is that vivid imagination enables us to appropriately expand our moral concern. Someone might initially think they had no positive reasons of aid, and then Singer's Pond case convinces them otherwise: they come to appreciate that it would be a horrific mistake to not care, and to do nothing when they could help the child -- or anyone else in similarly dire straits.
Fictional characters we're not able to do anything for. So there's an unbridgeable gap between caring about them (being disposed to promote their interests insofar as you're able) and action: the "insofar as you're able" condition can never be triggered. But if you learned that a movie was *not* actually fictional, but rather depicted true and ongoing events, you would presumably recognize a pro tanto reason to help the protagonists (insofar as you are able). So I'm not seeing how the analogy helps you.
I'm wondering what you think explains the putative gap in the non-fictional case of a movie reel accurately depicting the life that Joy *really would* have if brought into existence. Caring about her life involves being disposed to promote her interests insofar as you're able. And, as argued in the OP, it promotes her interests to bring her into (happy) existence. If you explicitly think, while watching the movie reel, about how it depicts a *potential* life that could either come to be, or not, depending on your decision, my suggestion is that any well-adjusted moral agent will feel the stakes of the decision (much like in Singer's pond case).
One might always just *refuse* to acknowledge the reasons revealed by our moral emotions: an egoist could respond to Singer that they "feel" for drowning child "during imagination", but there's a "gap" between that and "thinking they have a reason" to *do* anything to save the child's life. They might accuse Singer of "conflating that gap." (They might even accuse Singer of "insulting" them for observing that it would seem monstrous to just watch the child drown.) They can say all these things. But they aren't good or convincing things to say. Moral emotions can be normatively revealing. If you want to block the path that they reveal, you need something more than a mere assertion that you refuse to travel it.
Ha, oops, seems I misremembered my own post :-)
But here's a straightforward argument:
1. Misery is harmed by existence, such that we have reason not to create her.
2. The best explanation of (1) is that there are non-comparative harms and benefits: having a life of negative welfare is bad for one, and a life of positive welfare is good for one, when the alternative is non-existence.
3. We have reasons of beneficence to do what is good for a subject, and to avert what is bad for a subject.
So
4. We have reasons of beneficence to create good lives like Joy's.
The alternative suggestion that there are non-comparative harms but no analogous non-comparative benefits is utterly ad hoc and unprincipled.
I'm not sure what it means to say that "The experiences of Joy lack in intuitiveness": do you mean that they aren't intuitively *good*?
Given deprivationism about the harm of death, denying that positive experiences are good would seem to leave you unable to explain why death is ever bad.
Since neither Misery nor Joy's life was precisely specified, there doesn't seem much basis for intuitive comparison. I can imagine pairings that go either way. In general, I think harms (and bad lives) are such that they can be more than compensated by sufficient benefits (and good lives). I'm glad that humanity exists, for example.
Hey Richard, I created my substack again. I deleted my substack because of my OCD and anxiety issues. But I just thought I love and really really enjoy commenting and writing stuff sometimes. So, here I am. Anyways, again an excellent post! I think, I now firmly believe that Hedonistic Act Utilitarianism (Bentham, Sidgewick, Rosenqvist, Sinhababu, Hewitt Rawlette, not Mill) is true.
https://philpapers.org/archive/ROSHAU.pdf
I think, the impersonal good is also necessarily "good for". So, bringing joy into existence is good because it maximizes pleasure and pleasure is the impersonal good and this means that it is necessarily good for joy. So, pleasure is good for joy precisely because pleasure is good simpliciter or pleasure just is good full stop. And all beings should have highest possible level of pleasure.
I think, pleasure fundamentalism is a respectable view.
I deeply love this - “The core precept of utilitarianism is that we should make the world the best place we can. That means that, as far as it is within our power, we should bring about a world in which every individual has the highest possible level of well-being.” — Peter Singer
I share your point of view and have for quite some time. However, there are a lot of formidable challenges to it. Engaging with those challenges will take many lifetimes.
Nonexistent persons cannot give consent. So we should treat them the same way we treat other entities that cannot consent: children, invalids, animals. Children have parents (natural or adoptive) or guardians. Invalids have next of kin or persons with power of attorney. Animals have owners.
In the case of unborn children, it seems unremarkable to have their prospective parents speak for them. Perhaps prospective parents are biased, but they pay for their errors. If the child suffers, so do the parents. Why should we take any other person's evaluation as more valid?
Doesn’t existence incomparativism rely on ethics being affecting when we should just be comparing worlds instead. Like what’s the argument against making right/wrong distinctions on the basis of basis of the world the comes from the action instead of how it affects someone?
I'm sympathetic to the idea that ethics *should* be person-affecting in a broad sense. At the very least, I hope to show that even those who start from a perspective (broadly) along those lines can (and should!) still adopt a future-inclusive conception of beneficence.
See also my (related) response to J. Goard: https://rychappell.substack.com/p/the-profoundest-error-in-population/comment/50925681
There is logical space for a view that existence would not be worse for Misery but we should not create Misery. This is Ralf Bader’s view (who tries to defend the asymmetry) but also John Broome’s view (who does not). So it’s a bit misleading to end the Misery example by asking “Should you press the button?” when what you seem mostly interested in are existential harms/benefits.
To clarify: I'm not so much interested in the comparative "worse for" claim, but just the person-affecting welfarist question of whether it is *bad for* Misery (non-comparatively, as per McMahan).
I do think that would be crazy to deny. Though, for sure, there's logical space to hold that you should not press the button but that this is for reasons unrelated to beneficence/non-maleficence. There's logical space to make any number of clearly false claims (and some philosophers do make them!).
To believe both that pressing a button to prevent Joy's existence would be morally wrong, and that pressing a button to create Joy's existence would not be morally right, it seems like one would have to assign massive moral significance to the polarity by which a finger physically contacting a button toggles exactly the same two world states. Which is bonkers.