Mar 21, 2023·edited Mar 21, 2023Liked by Richard Y Chappell
Actualism and Frick's views imply the procreation asymmetry, but I wouldn't consider them absolute views or standard Existence Anticomparativism. Rather, I'd still consider them merely comparative views (although we could argue about definitions). They allow certain kinds of comparisons, but for principled reasons and without directly assuming asymmetry between apparent goods and apparent bads or asserting the existence of absolute harms while denying absolute benefits:
1. Actualism allows actual beings to compare their lives to nonexistence (or us to do so on their behalf), but not non-actual beings to compare their lives with anything (or us to do so on their behalf). That seems intuitive to me, because the actual and only the actual can have objects that exist in the universe we can point to in order to ground their interests (e.g. brains with interest-generating and identity-establishing structures*).
2. Frick's conditional reasons are of the form "I have reason to (if I do p, do q)" (or Bykvist and Campbell, 2021's contrastive version "I have reason to (if I do p, do q) rather than not (if I do p, do q)").
If all person-regarding reasons are actualist or conditional (as I think is assumed in actualism and Frick's views, respectively), then we get the procreation asymmetry. You also concede (or at least don't strongly object to) actualist reasons and so at least weak asymmetry in Rethinking the Asymmetry, as "partiality towards the actual". The existence of absolute reasons seems to require more than the existence of actualist reasons or Frick's conditional reasons, at least with respect to apparently good and bad lives, because actualist and conditional reasons (at least with respect to individual welfare) each have absolute counterparts that make stronger claims, and there are more absolute reasons. So, it seems that there's an extra burden of proof to establish absolute reasons.
I think we can also use Frick's conditional reasons (and only conditional reasons), along with transitivity and the independence of irrelevant alternatives, to establish absolute harms while denying absolute goods, basically antifrustrationism (e.g. Fehige, 1998).
*This is a bit subtle, because we want to consider the whole of the future, including future actual beings, not just presently actual beings. This depends on specific views of the nature of time, although I wouldn't be surprised if the differences turned out to be merely normative, anyway. It also seems like you're sympathetic to something similar, with "timeless difference" and 4-dimensionalism, as you discuss in https://www.philosophyetc.net/2009/08/must-harms-be-temporally-located.html. Another possibility is Bader's account.
>> "Note that there is (as far as I’m aware) no philosophical basis for then denying the same reasoning as applied to non-comparative goods. A happy existence is clearly non-comparatively good for the person who enjoys it."
I don't know about _denying_ the reasoning for non-comparative goods, but I think there really is an asymmetry between harms and goods, which is that the badness of suffering is surely the most undeniable moral fact we know; there is, to my intuition, no comparably obvious moral fact about goodness. Even though I _have_ a happy existence, I am much less certain when I introspect on the matter that this constitutes some non-comparative good--I honestly cannot tell you that I feel benefitted by my reasonably happy existence. But I am as certain as I am about anything at all, that if I were to be tortured for 100 years, that would be bad, and that I would be harmed by such an existence. I just genuinely, truly, feel orders of magnitude more confident drawing conclusions based on the badness of suffering than on the goodness of well-being.
The above is compounded by the fact that there is _much_ more disagreement as to what even constitutes well-being than what constitutes suffering--it just seems to me undeniable that the role that suffering and well-being should play in our theorizing has to be asymmetrical, even if only for reasons of uncertainty over definition.
>> "denying that our kids are better than nothing, or that utopia is better than a barren rock"
>>"It’s deeply disrespectful to deny that another person (who is, themselves, happy to exist) is better than nothing."
FWIW, I don't feel disrespected by the denial that I am better than nothing, despite being currently happy with my existence. I think some of the claims you make along these lines in the article undermine the argument: they feel like emotive appeals intended to short-circuit arguments. Further, it seems to me that most of the disagreement comes down to intuitions about non-existence and how it should be valued relative to happy existence, so these emotive appeals simply end up reading as rather strident restatements of your intuitions on the matter (to me, at least, who doesn't share these intuitions). Finally, "disrespect" is an odd term of analysis to bring in here; I'm sure many deontologists object that the utilitarian denial of intrinsic rights is "disrespectful" to people, but I doubt that would bother you (nor should it, in my opinion).
>> "But the wrong view here could easily motivate anti-natalist “voluntary human extinction”, which would be literally the worst thing ever. It’s really worth not making mistakes that astronomically great."
I think the second sentence supplies a resolution to the first that takes a lot of the sting out of this argument as a criticism of the asymmetry: I presume much of what makes human extinction the worst thing ever is that it is _irrevocable_ in a way that almost no other decision can be--so under conditions of moral uncertainty, even theories that say that voluntary extinction is okay should be extremely unwilling to endorse it in practice.
One other worry for these views that say that creating happy lives isn't good is they inevitably imply in specific scenarios that it's not bad to gratuitously make future people's lives less good for trivial gains. https://benthams.substack.com/p/a-new-utterly-decisive-argument-against
>"there is (as far as I’m aware) no philosophical basis for then denying the same reasoning as applied to non-comparative goods."
Why is it your opponent who bears the burden of proof here? Even given the assumption that it is bad to create "miserable" individuals, applying the same reasoning to conclude that it is good to create "happy" individuals seems to require some version of the assumption that goodness and badness differ only in sign, rather than in dimension. This is a substantial assumption, and plausibly a false one (e.g. see Magnus Vinding's arguments here: centerforreducingsuffering.org/phenomenological-argument/). So do you think the assumption that value is basically one-dimensional, with good and bad differing only in sign, is well-supported? Or do you think your argument can work even without that assumption?
(1) On the philosophical issue: Michael covers the matter well. But to justify the asymmetry in a more straightforward way - arguments for creating net-negative lives is self-defeating, while creating net-positive lives is question-begging.
If you ground normative value on conscious beings and their preferences & interests (i.e. my life and welfare matters because there is *this* perspective from which these things matter and are valuable), then if such beings/perspectives *don't exist and never will* unless we create them, there is no question-begging reason to create them (i.e. the argument goes - we should create such people because their lives matter; but their lives matter only because they want to live; but they would only want to live if we create such people and they exist in the first place).
In contrast, the reasons for not creating bad lives are self-defeating (i.e. if we create them, then their lives are bad and we shouldn't have created them). There is no circularity here - conditional on us creating them, we have reason to regret out decision, and so have reason not to create them in the first place.
(2) On the practical side - within the EA space, I do think totalist views on population don't necessarily lead to prioritizing existential risk. There are two reasons for this. (a) Firstly, saving lives, at whatever point, creates future lives (since people have kids who have kids who have kids etc), and to the extent that global fertility rates are dropping, it's much more valuable to save lives now then in the future (and in AMF et al's operating locations especially). (b) Secondly, unless you think there will be a population bounce-back post catastrophe (e.g. 90% of the world is wiped out), in the sense of the remaining population having more kids than they otherwise would have sans catastrophe (which is extremely unlikely, and with the converse remaining far more probable, in fact), such near-catastrophes are merely a levelling down of the future aggregate human population, and 100% dying in the catastrophe would indeed be 10% worse than 90% dying, not disproportionately worse.
This is a minor stylistic point, but I think it is better to avoid using this word in online writing, since it lends itself too easily to misunderstanding. You are using it here to describe views like "there is no positive-valued well-being," but it is also widely used to describe views like "there is no such thing as moral value at all," or even "there is no such thing as *objective* moral value (but subjective moral value can still be important)." These views are very different from each other, and since it would be tedious to specify which one you mean every time, it is probably better just to avoid using the word altogether. (My assumption here is that you aren't deliberately conflating different views as part of your rhetorical strategy.)
Actualism and Frick's views imply the procreation asymmetry, but I wouldn't consider them absolute views or standard Existence Anticomparativism. Rather, I'd still consider them merely comparative views (although we could argue about definitions). They allow certain kinds of comparisons, but for principled reasons and without directly assuming asymmetry between apparent goods and apparent bads or asserting the existence of absolute harms while denying absolute benefits:
1. Actualism allows actual beings to compare their lives to nonexistence (or us to do so on their behalf), but not non-actual beings to compare their lives with anything (or us to do so on their behalf). That seems intuitive to me, because the actual and only the actual can have objects that exist in the universe we can point to in order to ground their interests (e.g. brains with interest-generating and identity-establishing structures*).
2. Frick's conditional reasons are of the form "I have reason to (if I do p, do q)" (or Bykvist and Campbell, 2021's contrastive version "I have reason to (if I do p, do q) rather than not (if I do p, do q)").
If all person-regarding reasons are actualist or conditional (as I think is assumed in actualism and Frick's views, respectively), then we get the procreation asymmetry. You also concede (or at least don't strongly object to) actualist reasons and so at least weak asymmetry in Rethinking the Asymmetry, as "partiality towards the actual". The existence of absolute reasons seems to require more than the existence of actualist reasons or Frick's conditional reasons, at least with respect to apparently good and bad lives, because actualist and conditional reasons (at least with respect to individual welfare) each have absolute counterparts that make stronger claims, and there are more absolute reasons. So, it seems that there's an extra burden of proof to establish absolute reasons.
I think we can also use Frick's conditional reasons (and only conditional reasons), along with transitivity and the independence of irrelevant alternatives, to establish absolute harms while denying absolute goods, basically antifrustrationism (e.g. Fehige, 1998).
*This is a bit subtle, because we want to consider the whole of the future, including future actual beings, not just presently actual beings. This depends on specific views of the nature of time, although I wouldn't be surprised if the differences turned out to be merely normative, anyway. It also seems like you're sympathetic to something similar, with "timeless difference" and 4-dimensionalism, as you discuss in https://www.philosophyetc.net/2009/08/must-harms-be-temporally-located.html. Another possibility is Bader's account.
Frick, J. (2020). Conditional reasons and the procreation asymmetry. Philosophical Perspectives, 34(1), 53-87. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/phpe.12139
Bykvist, K., & Campbell, T. (2021). Frick’s Defence of the Procreation Asymmetry2. CLIMATE ETHICS, 263. https://www.iffs.se/media/23375/climate_ethics_vol4_webb.pdf#page=264
Fehige, C. (1998). A Pareto principle for possible people. Preferences, 508-43. https://www.fehige.info/pdf/A_Pareto_Principle_for_Possible_People.pdf
Bader, R. M. (2021). The Asymmetry. Ethics and Existence: The Legacy of Derek Parfit, 15. https://homeweb.unifr.ch/BaderR/Pub/Asymmetry%20%28R.%20Bader%29.pdf
>> "Note that there is (as far as I’m aware) no philosophical basis for then denying the same reasoning as applied to non-comparative goods. A happy existence is clearly non-comparatively good for the person who enjoys it."
I don't know about _denying_ the reasoning for non-comparative goods, but I think there really is an asymmetry between harms and goods, which is that the badness of suffering is surely the most undeniable moral fact we know; there is, to my intuition, no comparably obvious moral fact about goodness. Even though I _have_ a happy existence, I am much less certain when I introspect on the matter that this constitutes some non-comparative good--I honestly cannot tell you that I feel benefitted by my reasonably happy existence. But I am as certain as I am about anything at all, that if I were to be tortured for 100 years, that would be bad, and that I would be harmed by such an existence. I just genuinely, truly, feel orders of magnitude more confident drawing conclusions based on the badness of suffering than on the goodness of well-being.
The above is compounded by the fact that there is _much_ more disagreement as to what even constitutes well-being than what constitutes suffering--it just seems to me undeniable that the role that suffering and well-being should play in our theorizing has to be asymmetrical, even if only for reasons of uncertainty over definition.
>> "denying that our kids are better than nothing, or that utopia is better than a barren rock"
>>"It’s deeply disrespectful to deny that another person (who is, themselves, happy to exist) is better than nothing."
FWIW, I don't feel disrespected by the denial that I am better than nothing, despite being currently happy with my existence. I think some of the claims you make along these lines in the article undermine the argument: they feel like emotive appeals intended to short-circuit arguments. Further, it seems to me that most of the disagreement comes down to intuitions about non-existence and how it should be valued relative to happy existence, so these emotive appeals simply end up reading as rather strident restatements of your intuitions on the matter (to me, at least, who doesn't share these intuitions). Finally, "disrespect" is an odd term of analysis to bring in here; I'm sure many deontologists object that the utilitarian denial of intrinsic rights is "disrespectful" to people, but I doubt that would bother you (nor should it, in my opinion).
>> "But the wrong view here could easily motivate anti-natalist “voluntary human extinction”, which would be literally the worst thing ever. It’s really worth not making mistakes that astronomically great."
I think the second sentence supplies a resolution to the first that takes a lot of the sting out of this argument as a criticism of the asymmetry: I presume much of what makes human extinction the worst thing ever is that it is _irrevocable_ in a way that almost no other decision can be--so under conditions of moral uncertainty, even theories that say that voluntary extinction is okay should be extremely unwilling to endorse it in practice.
One other worry for these views that say that creating happy lives isn't good is they inevitably imply in specific scenarios that it's not bad to gratuitously make future people's lives less good for trivial gains. https://benthams.substack.com/p/a-new-utterly-decisive-argument-against
>"there is (as far as I’m aware) no philosophical basis for then denying the same reasoning as applied to non-comparative goods."
Why is it your opponent who bears the burden of proof here? Even given the assumption that it is bad to create "miserable" individuals, applying the same reasoning to conclude that it is good to create "happy" individuals seems to require some version of the assumption that goodness and badness differ only in sign, rather than in dimension. This is a substantial assumption, and plausibly a false one (e.g. see Magnus Vinding's arguments here: centerforreducingsuffering.org/phenomenological-argument/). So do you think the assumption that value is basically one-dimensional, with good and bad differing only in sign, is well-supported? Or do you think your argument can work even without that assumption?
(1) On the philosophical issue: Michael covers the matter well. But to justify the asymmetry in a more straightforward way - arguments for creating net-negative lives is self-defeating, while creating net-positive lives is question-begging.
If you ground normative value on conscious beings and their preferences & interests (i.e. my life and welfare matters because there is *this* perspective from which these things matter and are valuable), then if such beings/perspectives *don't exist and never will* unless we create them, there is no question-begging reason to create them (i.e. the argument goes - we should create such people because their lives matter; but their lives matter only because they want to live; but they would only want to live if we create such people and they exist in the first place).
In contrast, the reasons for not creating bad lives are self-defeating (i.e. if we create them, then their lives are bad and we shouldn't have created them). There is no circularity here - conditional on us creating them, we have reason to regret out decision, and so have reason not to create them in the first place.
(2) On the practical side - within the EA space, I do think totalist views on population don't necessarily lead to prioritizing existential risk. There are two reasons for this. (a) Firstly, saving lives, at whatever point, creates future lives (since people have kids who have kids who have kids etc), and to the extent that global fertility rates are dropping, it's much more valuable to save lives now then in the future (and in AMF et al's operating locations especially). (b) Secondly, unless you think there will be a population bounce-back post catastrophe (e.g. 90% of the world is wiped out), in the sense of the remaining population having more kids than they otherwise would have sans catastrophe (which is extremely unlikely, and with the converse remaining far more probable, in fact), such near-catastrophes are merely a levelling down of the future aggregate human population, and 100% dying in the catastrophe would indeed be 10% worse than 90% dying, not disproportionately worse.
I didn’t know you had a child :).
>"nihilism"
This is a minor stylistic point, but I think it is better to avoid using this word in online writing, since it lends itself too easily to misunderstanding. You are using it here to describe views like "there is no positive-valued well-being," but it is also widely used to describe views like "there is no such thing as moral value at all," or even "there is no such thing as *objective* moral value (but subjective moral value can still be important)." These views are very different from each other, and since it would be tedious to specify which one you mean every time, it is probably better just to avoid using the word altogether. (My assumption here is that you aren't deliberately conflating different views as part of your rhetorical strategy.)