Future Suffering and the Non-Identity Problem
Theron Pummer (University of St Andrews)
GPI Working Paper No. 17-2024
I present and explore a new version of the Person-Affecting View, according to which reasons to do an act depend wholly on what would be said for or against this act from the points of view of particular individuals. According to my view, (i) there is a morally requiring reason not to bring about lives insofar as they contain suffering (negative welfare), (ii) there is no morally requiring reason to bring about lives insofar as they contain happiness (positive welfare), but (iii) there is a permitting reason to bring about lives insofar as they contain happiness. I show how my view solves the non-identity problem, while retaining the procreation asymmetry and avoiding implausible forms of antinatalism. We can be morally required to ensure that the quality of life of future people is higher rather than lower when this involves bringing about (worth living) lives that would contain less suffering rather than bringing about different (worth living) lives that would contain more suffering.
Theron Pummer gave the Parfit Memorial Lecture 2024, Future Suffering and the Non-Identity Problem, on 12 June 2024.
Other working papers
High risk, low reward: A challenge to the astronomical value of existential risk mitigation – David Thorstad (Global Priorities Institute, University of Oxford)
Many philosophers defend two claims: the astronomical value thesis that it is astronomically important to mitigate existential risks to humanity, and existential risk pessimism, the claim that humanity faces high levels of existential risk. It is natural to think that existential risk pessimism supports the astronomical value thesis. In this paper, I argue that precisely the opposite is true. Across a range of assumptions, existential risk pessimism significantly reduces the value of existential risk mitigation…
The structure of critical sets – Walter Bossert (University of Montreal), Susumu Cato (University of Tokyo) and Kohei Kamaga (Sophia University)
The purpose of this paper is to address some ambiguities and misunderstandings that appear in previous studies of population ethics. In particular, we examine the structure of intervals that are employed in assessing the value of adding people to an existing population. Our focus is on critical-band utilitarianism and critical-range utilitarianism, which are commonly-used population theories that employ intervals, and we show that some previously assumed equivalences are not true in general. The possible discrepancies can be…
Exceeding expectations: stochastic dominance as a general decision theory – Christian Tarsney (Global Priorities Institute, Oxford University)
The principle that rational agents should maximize expected utility or choiceworthiness is intuitively plausible in many ordinary cases of decision-making under uncertainty. But it is less plausible in cases of extreme, low-probability risk (like Pascal’s Mugging), and intolerably paradoxical in cases like the St. Petersburg and Pasadena games. In this paper I show that, under certain conditions, stochastic dominance reasoning can capture most of the plausible implications of expectational reasoning while avoiding most of its pitfalls…