Thank you for this thoughtful discussion. I've been thinking a lot about this lately. I don't have any settled views or real arguments (unfortunately) on this matter, but one thing I've been thinking of is to consider what happens w/ intergenerational replacement when people in the older generation die. They are as you say not fungible tokens, they leave certain causal traces and they leave certain legacies (e.g., their intentions, policies they put in place, certain final wishes). The current generation can honor those things, or alternatively, they can try to rid themselves of burdensome past things the previous generation installed. Still, this downstream causation creates an asymmetry between the newly-created person (say, the baby in your example) and the people already existing (the aging parents).
In cultures where we feel strong obligations to past generations--e.g. some Indigenous societies, Confucian cultures--those earlier-gen traces can become deeply entrenched and very strong. I find it a separate interesting issue how strong we should weigh those ideas, wishes, values of earlier generations. We can get weighed down by them. On the other hand, it can be valuable (and by doing it, we sort of reassure ourselves there will be a chance we will not be "erased" the moment we die.)
As you say, sometimes the new life we welcome outweighs the value of keeping the old. Not because we are fungible and replaceable, but because (in my naturalistic pic where you can skip rather easily from "is" into "ought") this is just how it is and should be. I draw a lot of comfort walking in a park nearby and seeing dead trees lie there. They used to remove them, now they let them lie and you can see mushrooms grow on them. Ideally, one's legacy is like this: not erased, not fungible, but fertile ground for the future. The future deserves a place and deserves a shot, and should not feel overtly weighed down by the past.
I (no philosophical background) feel that you're touching on something important here with the NECESSARILY socially contextualised existence/value of people.
I disagree with the argument that "you will cease to regret this change once this change has happened" undermines the moral force against making the change in the first place. To use a very extreme example, think of fictional monsters like the Borg or the Cybermen who forcibly transform their victims into more of them. One common argument they use to try to get their victims to submit is that once they have made you into one of them, you will want to be one of them. I do not think this argument is persuasive. It is possible to recognize that some events can change what you value while also having some meta-values about what kinds of changes to your values are desirable and when.
In Parfit's "What Makes your Life Go Best" he discusses a case where someone gives you a drug that you have a strong preference take more of, and a lifetime supply of the drug. Parfit argues, correctly, that doing that does not make your life go better, because you have "global preferences," which are meta-preferences about your life as a whole and what kinds of preferences you will have in the future. Because of these "global preferences" you can regret being addicted to the drug, even though now that you are addicted it is a good thing that you have a lifetime supply. Similarly, you can have global moral meta-values about when it is good or bad to create new "person-directed reasons." (Obviously this metaphor only goes so far. Creating Sally to replace Bob seems less analogous to addicting someone to a drug and more analogous to something like forcing someone to give up a fulfilling romantic relationship or life project and to adopt a different one)
Because of this, I do not think that a hybridist has to commit to a time inconsistent view where their normative standards change depending on whether it is before or after Sally's birth. I think that they can have timeless, impartial meta-values about when it is good, bad, or regrettable to create new "person-directed reasons." This can allow them to timelessly and impartially say that the world where Bob lives is the better one, overall. I do not think this is disrespectful to Sally or that it is saying that Bob counts more than she does. It is saying that the "person-directed reasons" for valuing Bob and Sally are exactly equal, but that there are timeless, impersonal reasons to regret the addition of more "person-directed reasons."
I think it is very important for a moral system to have some kind of "global preferences"/meta-values about what values it is acceptable to add or change. I think lacking these meta-values creates all sorts of problems, like the Mere Addition Paradox, or (more extremely) not being able to explain why the Federation should resist the Borg!
Yeah, I'm not a subjectivist so I'm inclined to respond to Parfit's addiction case by appeal to objective values: "addiction is bad, and creating desires for bad states of affairs is also bad". But Sally's existence isn't bad at all! That seems a very important difference.
It's an interesting suggestion to appeal to the idea that *replacing Bob with Sally* is bad. If you took that as a basic datum, that could indeed support a very robust anti-replacement obligation. But that seems to put the cart before the horse. *Why* is it bad? Isn't that something that needs to be explained, rather than assumed? That was what the appeal to person-directed reasons was supposed to accomplish: give us some normative machinery out of which anti-replacement verdicts naturally emerge, as a *conclusion*.
It's easy enough to replace Parfit's drug example with something genuinely good. For example, imagine someone deeply in love is given a drug that makes them fall out of love and then fall deeply in love with someone else. Or imagine an author writing a beloved book series with many fans that has to stop writing it because of some rights conflict with their publisher, and then they go on to start a new series that gains many fans. I think someone can rightfully have "global preferences" they not lose the original good, even if the new one is as good in many ways. (I think you once described your non-subjectivist views as an "objective menu," I am essentially arguing that forcing someone to stop eating their original "menu" item and order again is often bad, or at least not without cost).
I do think that "person-directed reasons" provide a normative reason against replacement, what I am trying to push back against is the idea that once the replacement has happened there is no longer a normative reason to regret it. I am not trying to propose a new, assumed moral principle against replacement, I am trying to describe what it even means to have "person-directed reasons" and how they are structured. I think that a neccessary part of valuing something is having meta-rules about how values change and are added. I don't think that what Parfit described as "global preferences" are a set of extra preferences above more down-to-Earth preferences, I think they are more like meta-rules about what it even means to value things and have wellbeing (regardless of whether that wellbeing comes from subjective sources or from picking from an objective menu).
I think in order to have values, be they personal or moral, you need to have these meta-values about how they change. Otherwise you get absurd arguments like how we should try not to value anything because once you don't value anything you won't care that you don't value it. I see the preceding sentence as one end of a spectrum. Further up that spectrum is the idea of replacement, where you have gone far enough down the spectrum to not value specific people, but not so far down it that you have stopped valuing human flourishing in general. The arguments against replacement I am making are not made up just to reject replacement, they are a part of our value architecture to stop us from sliding further and further down that spectrum.
Yeah, I definitely feel the force of anti-replacement concerns, even within the scope of the objectively valuable. But I think they are clearest *pre*-replacement: given my current attachments, I wouldn't want to undergo a relationship-swap, even if it involved rewiring my brain to love my new partner just as much. I think that's just part of what it is to have genuine attachments (see also G.A. Cohen on "cherishing" values: https://www.philosophyetc.net/2008/05/question-of-conservatism-is-value.html ).
The trickier question is whether the reasons for opposition persist even post-replacement. It's not so clear that they do. We do not have to (overall) regret that we grew out of our childhood desire to be a firefighter, for example. We may reasonably be glad that a past relationship ended, so as to make possible the one we value now. And so on. It seems like there can be a genuine conflict of normative perspectives across time, in these sorts of cases. I'm not sure that this can really be avoided.
An advantage of objective value here is that it at least blocks the more extreme problematic arguments, "like how we should try not to value anything because once you don't value anything you won't care that you don't value it." That sort of reasoning presupposes an extreme form of subjectivism. A more objective account of well-being can easily avoid that extreme end of the "spectrum" (as you put it). Objectivist views may (at worst) offer *retrospective* approval of the replacement of one objective good with another. That doesn't seem *so* problematic to me; partly, I guess, because I don't see what systematic principles would avoid this without having even more absurd implications (e.g. that we all must deeply regret not marrying our first crush).
These are absolutely fascinating questions. They seem important.
I find them difficult to think about because all thought experiments are vague and artificial. One cannot simply replace Bob with Sally. Bob has irreplaceable knowledge and memories. He has relationships that cannot be recreated. Between Sally and Bob, there are so many aspects that are incomparable.
Consider a child who finds a rock. It's gonna be their favorite rock for some time, and woe to the adult who tries to replace it because "it's just a rock" ;-)
Interesting. Not sure I'm accepting of the (obvious) example of "an infertile couple might reasonable prefer to have children than to extend their elderly parents’ lives by an extra decade (if we imagine a genie offering them this forced choice)." What about extending the lives of their parents for all of their (the infertile couple's) lives vs. having (at this point unknown) children? That's a better thought experiment, I think. Not so obvious a choice in that case. Also, not sure what the cause-effect relationship is between Bob and Sally? Bob must die for Sally to be born?
I agree there are many non-obvious cases! I'm not claiming that replacement is always preferable. To push back against the *absolutist* view, it suffices to note that there are *some* cases where replacement would be OK, or even for the best.
And yes, to make it a genuine "replacement" case, we build in that Sally would not have been created if Bob had not died when he did. (Not a very realistic sort of case, but still interesting to think about.)
I think it's very important whether Bob is 'thought experiment fantasy' style replaced with Sally, so Bob is deleted and instead Sally is inserted fully grown with life history and social connections --- then I think the OP argument stands, that while deleting Bob is regrettable (because Bob is uniquely Bob), the harm is potentially made up for by creating fully developed Sally. But if a Real Bob (RB) actually dies, rather than just disappears from the timeline, and is replaced by Sally's mere birth, then the harm of RB's dying is only partially in his demise. It's also in how RB's death affects countless smaller and bigger things in the world, and especially other people. RB doesn't just die *for himself*. He dies for all the people who will be to any extent affected by his death. In some, largely figurative (tho you could make a "neurological representation" argument claiming it can be material too) sense, all those people's Bobs in their heads die too. The whole world changes. No man is an island etc.
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Idk if it makes me a hopeless consequentialist but all that reminded me of a novel (I forgot the title/author now) in which someone had a chance of changing the past into one in which the Holocaust genocide didn't happen BUT Jewish people as an ethnicity (iirc correctly, genetically/culturally but not 100% sure) was effectively ended by making it infertile. This was seen in said novel as an absolutely disastrous result to which the genocidal horror was regrettably preferable. I could never, ever got my head round this notion in which horrific suffering of the millions was seen as overall preferable to gradually extinguishing a particular genotype. That's notwithstanding the obvious sadness/despair of "this bloodline ends with us" -- I still think it's highly preferable to the active horror of genocide.
But then I imagined the ethic scenario extended to the species level: what if the atrocious choice was between human beings ALL dying out within a couple of generations (no obvious suffering, tho clearly we'd need to create euthanasia tools for the last old ones) vs a huge number dying horrible deaths BUT a significant proportion surviving to continue the human species. And I started to have doubts. I really don't know.
It's not really about replaceability because it adds an extra of the group existential factor on the one hand and the horrific manner of death on the other, but it feels intuitively somewhat related.
I'm a layperson (non-academic), and my thoughts might not be fully well-reasoned here, but I think that you make the case here very strongly for the attitudinal view and against the hybrid view. It does seem obvious to me that any ethical consideration should be considered from the post-facto perspective. So I agree that the personal reasons not to kill Bob must be weiged in light of the post-facto state of the world in which Sally exists. In that world there are equally strong personal reasons to want Sally to exist, thus negating the hybrid view.
I would go so far as to offer that your argument in favor of the attitudinal position effectively undermines the distinction you make in this other blog post you cited (https://rychappell.substack.com/p/killing-vs-failing-to-create) between personal and impersonal differences in killing vs. creating people. If ethical considerations must be considered from the post facto-perspective, creating people is equally as personal as killing people. You gave the example there of saving children from malaria vs promoting the conception of children. I have some doubt about whether these are indeed comparably equal welfarist goods (i.e. as there is also cost in creating and raising the not-yet-conceived children to the equivalent health and mental wellbeing of the existing children, and that cost imbalances the eqiuvalency IMO), but, assuming that they are equivalent, then the argument you make here I think would undermine the assertion you make there that it is better to save children from malaria than to promote the creation of new ones. Does that make sense?
I would furthermore say that given your argument here, the entire distinction between the personal and impersonal falls away and can be discarded since the impersonal will always, post facto, be personal.
I don't find it entirely "obvious" that the post-facto perspective trumps. (Isn't there something important about the normative perspective / standard that applies *at the moment of decision*? And see the final footnote for cases where the post facto perspective might seem outright misleading.)
But it at least seems like a reasonable perspective to take, and I agree that (insofar as that's right) it could limit the significance of the killing/non-creation distinction.
In my view often individuals are obviously replaceable: a fertilized egg or embryo has never been conscious is obviously replaceable.
Additionally, while animal suffering is commensurate with human, human life is massively more important. We are far more intertemporal than animals: we have plans and narratives that span for years. Our fear of death is more persistent, our imagination of death more intense (so any regime of “high repleceability affects more our current welfare).
Yeah, I like the point that there are significant practical reasons to oppose a "regime of high replaceability" for people. That could partly explain why we're inclined to treat death as a much bigger deal than non-creation. But it would be surprising & very revisionary for that to be the *full* story.
I also agree with your verdict about non-conscious embryos. Though I'd say that's because it isn't yet an "individual" (in the morally relevant sense) at all. Moral individuals are mental beings, not biological ones, as per the psychological view of personal identity. (An individual lacking psychological continuity does not mentally persist through time, and so is effectively "replaced" every moment.)
I suspect that the reason why, a decade on, you still hear the worry that utilitarianism doesn't respect the separateness of persons is because your paper (if the quote above fairly represents it) isn't responsive to the actual worry. Nozick (ASU 32-33) takes the separateness of persons to be what makes trades-offs impermissible (killing one to save five, or whatever). That utilitarianism, upon having sanctioned such trade-offs, can nonetheless rationalise feeling regret for the one's death is, I would think, largely irrelevant to his concern: it's not a concern merely about some moral "significance" (as you put it), but instead about permissibility.
No, the quoted passage does not exhaust the content of my paper. I further explain why the fungibility interpretation is the *most pressing* interpretation of the "separateness of persons" objection, and why a purely extensional interpretation (being about "permissibility" rather than "significance", as you put it) offers no objection at all.
It seems to me that this debate about replaceability is artificial. One human being can never "replace" another. Each has an alloted time to become the individual he or she has the potential to become. There are frequently seen attempts to replace a lost loved one with another child, spouse, mentor, etc.
But loss is a part of life and the present is all we can be certain of. Each life brings a unique self and when we lose someone we grieve their place in our lives and the meaning they have brought to our
lives. I hope we honor and respect all life, young and old, healthy and sick and disabled. We cannot afford to measure value by condition or age. People are never fungible although there are figures in history who behaved as though they were. Perhaps it was easier to make decisions by looking at persons as replaceable.
Can't really understand your defence of utilitarianism on replaceability. Utilitarianism is the practice of cardinalizing mental states. I don't understand how saying that there is a genuine tradeoff denies that.
A trivial implication of cardinality is additivity and a trivial implication of additivity is replaceability, this is like saying that 2+3 can be replaced by 1+4.
Do you explain what your kind of utilitarianism is somewhere?
I deny that additivity implies fungibility. Two goods of value 2 and 3 could be replaced with distinct goods of value 1 and 4, and the result would be *equally good* (worth choosing), but it's a further question whether the tradeoff is a matter of indifference (as between fungible goods) or of ambivalence (if you have *different reasons*, of equal weight, to regret either loss). I explain this view further in my paper 'Value Receptacles', linked in the OP.
Thank you for this thoughtful discussion. I've been thinking a lot about this lately. I don't have any settled views or real arguments (unfortunately) on this matter, but one thing I've been thinking of is to consider what happens w/ intergenerational replacement when people in the older generation die. They are as you say not fungible tokens, they leave certain causal traces and they leave certain legacies (e.g., their intentions, policies they put in place, certain final wishes). The current generation can honor those things, or alternatively, they can try to rid themselves of burdensome past things the previous generation installed. Still, this downstream causation creates an asymmetry between the newly-created person (say, the baby in your example) and the people already existing (the aging parents).
In cultures where we feel strong obligations to past generations--e.g. some Indigenous societies, Confucian cultures--those earlier-gen traces can become deeply entrenched and very strong. I find it a separate interesting issue how strong we should weigh those ideas, wishes, values of earlier generations. We can get weighed down by them. On the other hand, it can be valuable (and by doing it, we sort of reassure ourselves there will be a chance we will not be "erased" the moment we die.)
As you say, sometimes the new life we welcome outweighs the value of keeping the old. Not because we are fungible and replaceable, but because (in my naturalistic pic where you can skip rather easily from "is" into "ought") this is just how it is and should be. I draw a lot of comfort walking in a park nearby and seeing dead trees lie there. They used to remove them, now they let them lie and you can see mushrooms grow on them. Ideally, one's legacy is like this: not erased, not fungible, but fertile ground for the future. The future deserves a place and deserves a shot, and should not feel overtly weighed down by the past.
I (no philosophical background) feel that you're touching on something important here with the NECESSARILY socially contextualised existence/value of people.
I disagree with the argument that "you will cease to regret this change once this change has happened" undermines the moral force against making the change in the first place. To use a very extreme example, think of fictional monsters like the Borg or the Cybermen who forcibly transform their victims into more of them. One common argument they use to try to get their victims to submit is that once they have made you into one of them, you will want to be one of them. I do not think this argument is persuasive. It is possible to recognize that some events can change what you value while also having some meta-values about what kinds of changes to your values are desirable and when.
In Parfit's "What Makes your Life Go Best" he discusses a case where someone gives you a drug that you have a strong preference take more of, and a lifetime supply of the drug. Parfit argues, correctly, that doing that does not make your life go better, because you have "global preferences," which are meta-preferences about your life as a whole and what kinds of preferences you will have in the future. Because of these "global preferences" you can regret being addicted to the drug, even though now that you are addicted it is a good thing that you have a lifetime supply. Similarly, you can have global moral meta-values about when it is good or bad to create new "person-directed reasons." (Obviously this metaphor only goes so far. Creating Sally to replace Bob seems less analogous to addicting someone to a drug and more analogous to something like forcing someone to give up a fulfilling romantic relationship or life project and to adopt a different one)
Because of this, I do not think that a hybridist has to commit to a time inconsistent view where their normative standards change depending on whether it is before or after Sally's birth. I think that they can have timeless, impartial meta-values about when it is good, bad, or regrettable to create new "person-directed reasons." This can allow them to timelessly and impartially say that the world where Bob lives is the better one, overall. I do not think this is disrespectful to Sally or that it is saying that Bob counts more than she does. It is saying that the "person-directed reasons" for valuing Bob and Sally are exactly equal, but that there are timeless, impersonal reasons to regret the addition of more "person-directed reasons."
I think it is very important for a moral system to have some kind of "global preferences"/meta-values about what values it is acceptable to add or change. I think lacking these meta-values creates all sorts of problems, like the Mere Addition Paradox, or (more extremely) not being able to explain why the Federation should resist the Borg!
Yeah, I'm not a subjectivist so I'm inclined to respond to Parfit's addiction case by appeal to objective values: "addiction is bad, and creating desires for bad states of affairs is also bad". But Sally's existence isn't bad at all! That seems a very important difference.
It's an interesting suggestion to appeal to the idea that *replacing Bob with Sally* is bad. If you took that as a basic datum, that could indeed support a very robust anti-replacement obligation. But that seems to put the cart before the horse. *Why* is it bad? Isn't that something that needs to be explained, rather than assumed? That was what the appeal to person-directed reasons was supposed to accomplish: give us some normative machinery out of which anti-replacement verdicts naturally emerge, as a *conclusion*.
It's easy enough to replace Parfit's drug example with something genuinely good. For example, imagine someone deeply in love is given a drug that makes them fall out of love and then fall deeply in love with someone else. Or imagine an author writing a beloved book series with many fans that has to stop writing it because of some rights conflict with their publisher, and then they go on to start a new series that gains many fans. I think someone can rightfully have "global preferences" they not lose the original good, even if the new one is as good in many ways. (I think you once described your non-subjectivist views as an "objective menu," I am essentially arguing that forcing someone to stop eating their original "menu" item and order again is often bad, or at least not without cost).
I do think that "person-directed reasons" provide a normative reason against replacement, what I am trying to push back against is the idea that once the replacement has happened there is no longer a normative reason to regret it. I am not trying to propose a new, assumed moral principle against replacement, I am trying to describe what it even means to have "person-directed reasons" and how they are structured. I think that a neccessary part of valuing something is having meta-rules about how values change and are added. I don't think that what Parfit described as "global preferences" are a set of extra preferences above more down-to-Earth preferences, I think they are more like meta-rules about what it even means to value things and have wellbeing (regardless of whether that wellbeing comes from subjective sources or from picking from an objective menu).
I think in order to have values, be they personal or moral, you need to have these meta-values about how they change. Otherwise you get absurd arguments like how we should try not to value anything because once you don't value anything you won't care that you don't value it. I see the preceding sentence as one end of a spectrum. Further up that spectrum is the idea of replacement, where you have gone far enough down the spectrum to not value specific people, but not so far down it that you have stopped valuing human flourishing in general. The arguments against replacement I am making are not made up just to reject replacement, they are a part of our value architecture to stop us from sliding further and further down that spectrum.
Yeah, I definitely feel the force of anti-replacement concerns, even within the scope of the objectively valuable. But I think they are clearest *pre*-replacement: given my current attachments, I wouldn't want to undergo a relationship-swap, even if it involved rewiring my brain to love my new partner just as much. I think that's just part of what it is to have genuine attachments (see also G.A. Cohen on "cherishing" values: https://www.philosophyetc.net/2008/05/question-of-conservatism-is-value.html ).
The trickier question is whether the reasons for opposition persist even post-replacement. It's not so clear that they do. We do not have to (overall) regret that we grew out of our childhood desire to be a firefighter, for example. We may reasonably be glad that a past relationship ended, so as to make possible the one we value now. And so on. It seems like there can be a genuine conflict of normative perspectives across time, in these sorts of cases. I'm not sure that this can really be avoided.
An advantage of objective value here is that it at least blocks the more extreme problematic arguments, "like how we should try not to value anything because once you don't value anything you won't care that you don't value it." That sort of reasoning presupposes an extreme form of subjectivism. A more objective account of well-being can easily avoid that extreme end of the "spectrum" (as you put it). Objectivist views may (at worst) offer *retrospective* approval of the replacement of one objective good with another. That doesn't seem *so* problematic to me; partly, I guess, because I don't see what systematic principles would avoid this without having even more absurd implications (e.g. that we all must deeply regret not marrying our first crush).
These are absolutely fascinating questions. They seem important.
I find them difficult to think about because all thought experiments are vague and artificial. One cannot simply replace Bob with Sally. Bob has irreplaceable knowledge and memories. He has relationships that cannot be recreated. Between Sally and Bob, there are so many aspects that are incomparable.
Consider a child who finds a rock. It's gonna be their favorite rock for some time, and woe to the adult who tries to replace it because "it's just a rock" ;-)
Interesting. Not sure I'm accepting of the (obvious) example of "an infertile couple might reasonable prefer to have children than to extend their elderly parents’ lives by an extra decade (if we imagine a genie offering them this forced choice)." What about extending the lives of their parents for all of their (the infertile couple's) lives vs. having (at this point unknown) children? That's a better thought experiment, I think. Not so obvious a choice in that case. Also, not sure what the cause-effect relationship is between Bob and Sally? Bob must die for Sally to be born?
I agree there are many non-obvious cases! I'm not claiming that replacement is always preferable. To push back against the *absolutist* view, it suffices to note that there are *some* cases where replacement would be OK, or even for the best.
And yes, to make it a genuine "replacement" case, we build in that Sally would not have been created if Bob had not died when he did. (Not a very realistic sort of case, but still interesting to think about.)
I think it's very important whether Bob is 'thought experiment fantasy' style replaced with Sally, so Bob is deleted and instead Sally is inserted fully grown with life history and social connections --- then I think the OP argument stands, that while deleting Bob is regrettable (because Bob is uniquely Bob), the harm is potentially made up for by creating fully developed Sally. But if a Real Bob (RB) actually dies, rather than just disappears from the timeline, and is replaced by Sally's mere birth, then the harm of RB's dying is only partially in his demise. It's also in how RB's death affects countless smaller and bigger things in the world, and especially other people. RB doesn't just die *for himself*. He dies for all the people who will be to any extent affected by his death. In some, largely figurative (tho you could make a "neurological representation" argument claiming it can be material too) sense, all those people's Bobs in their heads die too. The whole world changes. No man is an island etc.
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Idk if it makes me a hopeless consequentialist but all that reminded me of a novel (I forgot the title/author now) in which someone had a chance of changing the past into one in which the Holocaust genocide didn't happen BUT Jewish people as an ethnicity (iirc correctly, genetically/culturally but not 100% sure) was effectively ended by making it infertile. This was seen in said novel as an absolutely disastrous result to which the genocidal horror was regrettably preferable. I could never, ever got my head round this notion in which horrific suffering of the millions was seen as overall preferable to gradually extinguishing a particular genotype. That's notwithstanding the obvious sadness/despair of "this bloodline ends with us" -- I still think it's highly preferable to the active horror of genocide.
But then I imagined the ethic scenario extended to the species level: what if the atrocious choice was between human beings ALL dying out within a couple of generations (no obvious suffering, tho clearly we'd need to create euthanasia tools for the last old ones) vs a huge number dying horrible deaths BUT a significant proportion surviving to continue the human species. And I started to have doubts. I really don't know.
It's not really about replaceability because it adds an extra of the group existential factor on the one hand and the horrific manner of death on the other, but it feels intuitively somewhat related.
Thank you for this!
I'm a layperson (non-academic), and my thoughts might not be fully well-reasoned here, but I think that you make the case here very strongly for the attitudinal view and against the hybrid view. It does seem obvious to me that any ethical consideration should be considered from the post-facto perspective. So I agree that the personal reasons not to kill Bob must be weiged in light of the post-facto state of the world in which Sally exists. In that world there are equally strong personal reasons to want Sally to exist, thus negating the hybrid view.
I would go so far as to offer that your argument in favor of the attitudinal position effectively undermines the distinction you make in this other blog post you cited (https://rychappell.substack.com/p/killing-vs-failing-to-create) between personal and impersonal differences in killing vs. creating people. If ethical considerations must be considered from the post facto-perspective, creating people is equally as personal as killing people. You gave the example there of saving children from malaria vs promoting the conception of children. I have some doubt about whether these are indeed comparably equal welfarist goods (i.e. as there is also cost in creating and raising the not-yet-conceived children to the equivalent health and mental wellbeing of the existing children, and that cost imbalances the eqiuvalency IMO), but, assuming that they are equivalent, then the argument you make here I think would undermine the assertion you make there that it is better to save children from malaria than to promote the creation of new ones. Does that make sense?
I would furthermore say that given your argument here, the entire distinction between the personal and impersonal falls away and can be discarded since the impersonal will always, post facto, be personal.
I don't find it entirely "obvious" that the post-facto perspective trumps. (Isn't there something important about the normative perspective / standard that applies *at the moment of decision*? And see the final footnote for cases where the post facto perspective might seem outright misleading.)
But it at least seems like a reasonable perspective to take, and I agree that (insofar as that's right) it could limit the significance of the killing/non-creation distinction.
In my view often individuals are obviously replaceable: a fertilized egg or embryo has never been conscious is obviously replaceable.
Additionally, while animal suffering is commensurate with human, human life is massively more important. We are far more intertemporal than animals: we have plans and narratives that span for years. Our fear of death is more persistent, our imagination of death more intense (so any regime of “high repleceability affects more our current welfare).
Yeah, I like the point that there are significant practical reasons to oppose a "regime of high replaceability" for people. That could partly explain why we're inclined to treat death as a much bigger deal than non-creation. But it would be surprising & very revisionary for that to be the *full* story.
I also agree with your verdict about non-conscious embryos. Though I'd say that's because it isn't yet an "individual" (in the morally relevant sense) at all. Moral individuals are mental beings, not biological ones, as per the psychological view of personal identity. (An individual lacking psychological continuity does not mentally persist through time, and so is effectively "replaced" every moment.)
I suspect that the reason why, a decade on, you still hear the worry that utilitarianism doesn't respect the separateness of persons is because your paper (if the quote above fairly represents it) isn't responsive to the actual worry. Nozick (ASU 32-33) takes the separateness of persons to be what makes trades-offs impermissible (killing one to save five, or whatever). That utilitarianism, upon having sanctioned such trade-offs, can nonetheless rationalise feeling regret for the one's death is, I would think, largely irrelevant to his concern: it's not a concern merely about some moral "significance" (as you put it), but instead about permissibility.
No, the quoted passage does not exhaust the content of my paper. I further explain why the fungibility interpretation is the *most pressing* interpretation of the "separateness of persons" objection, and why a purely extensional interpretation (being about "permissibility" rather than "significance", as you put it) offers no objection at all.
It seems to me that this debate about replaceability is artificial. One human being can never "replace" another. Each has an alloted time to become the individual he or she has the potential to become. There are frequently seen attempts to replace a lost loved one with another child, spouse, mentor, etc.
But loss is a part of life and the present is all we can be certain of. Each life brings a unique self and when we lose someone we grieve their place in our lives and the meaning they have brought to our
lives. I hope we honor and respect all life, young and old, healthy and sick and disabled. We cannot afford to measure value by condition or age. People are never fungible although there are figures in history who behaved as though they were. Perhaps it was easier to make decisions by looking at persons as replaceable.
Can't really understand your defence of utilitarianism on replaceability. Utilitarianism is the practice of cardinalizing mental states. I don't understand how saying that there is a genuine tradeoff denies that.
A trivial implication of cardinality is additivity and a trivial implication of additivity is replaceability, this is like saying that 2+3 can be replaced by 1+4.
Do you explain what your kind of utilitarianism is somewhere?
Sure, see: https://www.utilitarianism.net/introduction-to-utilitarianism/#what-is-utilitarianism
I deny that additivity implies fungibility. Two goods of value 2 and 3 could be replaced with distinct goods of value 1 and 4, and the result would be *equally good* (worth choosing), but it's a further question whether the tradeoff is a matter of indifference (as between fungible goods) or of ambivalence (if you have *different reasons*, of equal weight, to regret either loss). I explain this view further in my paper 'Value Receptacles', linked in the OP.