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
Ethical Consumerism – Philip Trammell (Global Priorities Institute and Department of Economics, University of Oxford)
I study a static production economy in which consumers have not only preferences over their own consumption but also external, or “ethical”, preferences over the supply of each good. Though existing work on the implications of external preferences assumes price-taking, I show that ethical consumers generically prefer not to act even approximately as price-takers. I therefore introduce a near-Nash equilibrium concept that generalizes the near-Nash equilibria found in literature on strategic foundations of general equilibrium…
Respect for others’ risk attitudes and the long-run future – Andreas Mogensen (Global Priorities Institute, University of Oxford)
When our choice affects some other person and the outcome is unknown, it has been argued that we should defer to their risk attitude, if known, or else default to use of a risk avoidant risk function. This, in turn, has been claimed to require the use of a risk avoidant risk function when making decisions that primarily affect future people, and to decrease the desirability of efforts to prevent human extinction, owing to the significant risks associated with continued human survival. …
Crying wolf: Warning about societal risks can be reputationally risky – Lucius Caviola (Global Priorities Institute, University of Oxford) et al.
Society relies on expert warnings about large-scale risks like pandemics and natural disasters. Across ten studies (N = 5,342), we demonstrate people’s reluctance to warn about unlikely but large-scale risks because they are concerned about being blamed for being wrong. In particular, warners anticipate that if the risk doesn’t occur, they will be perceived as overly alarmist and responsible for wasting societal resources. This phenomenon appears in the context of natural, technological, and financial risks…