The Thornley paper is a good critique of pure person-affecting population ethics. I was wondering how it would affect the type of hybrid view that you advocate in your post, "Killing vs Failing to Create."
I've had some thoughts on that matter recently, especially after reading this post about goal vs desire-based thinking:
The article is about singe individual's preferences rather than about population ethics, but I think the ways of thinking about goals and desires that it explores are relevant. It basically talks about how some people sometimes have difficulty understanding the idea that people can have specific life-goals, and assume (wrongly) that everyone has some kind of underlying meta-goal like "extinguish all desires" that is indifferent about the specific content of those desires. Because of this they see replacing one of a person's life goals with a different one (through brainwashing or some other type of invasive behavior modification) as good rather than bad, providing the new goal is easier to achieve than the previous one. In some more extreme differences they may see death as desirable because it extinguishes all desires.
I think this can be analogized to Parfit's Impersonal Total Principle where personal identity does not matter, only the "total quantity of whatever makes life worth living." This principle seems similar to the "extinguish all desires" attitude in that it posits a single meta-goal and does not care exactly how it is fulfilled. This threatens to collapse the distinction between killing and failing to create, because it does not recognize the strong moral reasons to value specific existing people. There needs to be some way to recognize those reasons, the same way a proponent of "goals" based thinking recognizes that people have specific reasons to achieve specific goals they have.
The fact that Daniel Munoz (one of the absolutely brilliant deontologist philosopher) liked the paper by Elliott Thornley shows the genius of Elliott. God bless him. Elliott is one of my favorites among the long list of philosophers (that I respect). He does magnificent work!
The Thornley paper is a good critique of pure person-affecting population ethics. I was wondering how it would affect the type of hybrid view that you advocate in your post, "Killing vs Failing to Create."
I've had some thoughts on that matter recently, especially after reading this post about goal vs desire-based thinking:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/iWJ5kzeqvx4kvB527/goal-thinking-vs-desire-thinking
The article is about singe individual's preferences rather than about population ethics, but I think the ways of thinking about goals and desires that it explores are relevant. It basically talks about how some people sometimes have difficulty understanding the idea that people can have specific life-goals, and assume (wrongly) that everyone has some kind of underlying meta-goal like "extinguish all desires" that is indifferent about the specific content of those desires. Because of this they see replacing one of a person's life goals with a different one (through brainwashing or some other type of invasive behavior modification) as good rather than bad, providing the new goal is easier to achieve than the previous one. In some more extreme differences they may see death as desirable because it extinguishes all desires.
I think this can be analogized to Parfit's Impersonal Total Principle where personal identity does not matter, only the "total quantity of whatever makes life worth living." This principle seems similar to the "extinguish all desires" attitude in that it posits a single meta-goal and does not care exactly how it is fulfilled. This threatens to collapse the distinction between killing and failing to create, because it does not recognize the strong moral reasons to value specific existing people. There needs to be some way to recognize those reasons, the same way a proponent of "goals" based thinking recognizes that people have specific reasons to achieve specific goals they have.
Thornley’s paper is absurdly clever.
The fact that Daniel Munoz (one of the absolutely brilliant deontologist philosopher) liked the paper by Elliott Thornley shows the genius of Elliott. God bless him. Elliott is one of my favorites among the long list of philosophers (that I respect). He does magnificent work!