We cannot say "nothing at all about bringing new above-zero-happiness people into existence." We should support the creation of happy, healthy, and moral people.
Sep 17, 2022·edited Sep 17, 2022Liked by Ives Parr
I also have problems with the Repugnant Conclusion. I haven't given enough thought to my philosophical position to state one.
But, a thought - I have the feeling that happiness doesn't sum in a simple linear fashion.
Suppose we said the utility of an additional life with happiness H is something like H^E, where E is a positive exponent, where the unit of utility is the mean (or perhaps median) happiness of all lives, then I think we get a measure of utility that can be summed in a way that fits with (my) intuition.
Yes, I know I'm being terribly vague and handwavy. And I have no idea how we'd figure out the proper value of E. And no argument why the unit should be the mean (or what else it ought to be).
If E were (just for example) 2, then:
A new life with happiness at the mean of all lives has utility 1^2, or 1.
A new life with happiness 5x the mean has utility 5^2 = 25.
A new life with happiness 1/10th of the mean has utility 0.1^2 = 0.01
I think this works for negative (net unhappy) lives, too.
Not only does this make intuitive sense, but it eliminates the incentive to drag down very happy people in order to create more less happy people. (Assuming that happiness is linear with resources available, which seems like it might be reasonable within some range.)
It seems I could still create a Repugant Conclusion type situation. If I were to choose between 10 billion people above the average, or X billion with lives barely worth living, it seems I could find a number X which could be large enough.
Sure, that's my point. At *some* point enough lives with low-but-positive value outweigh a few lives with high positive values. That fits with my intuition, anyway.
What's repugnant about the Repugnant Conclusion is the 1:1 ratio, leading to the conclusion that it's equally good to have 1000x lives with 1/1000 the quality. With the exponential method you don't get that - maybe it's equally good (or better) to have 1 billion times as many lives with 90% of the quality in each life (making up numbers here) - there IS a tradeoff, but it's not 1:1.
Oh I see. Okay, that's interesting. I think some people lean toward "lives barely worth living" as being bad, so they don't want that. You have a different intuition. Interesting thought.
“A theory with an indifference to the creation of happy people seems to have a major blindspot”
I would not view any society as just which seeks to control peoples power of procreation, even for the sake of hypothetical happy people.
Imagine the US were to implement a law requiring that every healthy able-bodied person have at least one child or pay a fine. This would not only be unconstitutional, but morally perverse.
Imposing a duty to procreate is forcing procreation. Creating future happiness is just a factor for one’s own person preference and is outweighed by other factors from having moral force. Population ethics of this type falls outside the bounds of morality and cannot create an obligation.
I don't think people have a moral obligation to reproduce. I do think that it is often good if people do. I will note that someone having an obligation to do something does not mean we have to coerce them. I could say people have an obligation not to cheat on their spouse, but it doesn't necessarily mean I think that we should use the law to punish cheaters.
If you don’t think there is a moral obligation to reproduce, then claims about welfare obtained from reproduction fall outside of morality. If there is no moral difference between someone who is childless vs someone with 10 happy children, then what moral duties can arise?
A legal system would be legitimate in taking cheating into account. For instance, using adultery as a justification for divorce and serving as a factor when determining alimony. And people would say that it is unethical to cheat on your spouse, justifying a duty of loyalty. If there is no duty to reproduce, how can you connect reproduction with morality?
Some actions are obligatory and some actions are supererogatory. Having children is supererogatory. Supererogatory actions still fall within the domain of ethics. There is still a moral difference. Even if an action is an obligatory duty, it does not mean it is obligatory for others to punish or coerce someone to fulfill their duty.
It may fall within a broad conception of ethics, like how reading books or appreciating nature may be good. Anyones conception of the good can fall under this broad ethics. But if it cannot justify duties, it is not ethical in a narrow sense.
An ethical system can’t rest on mere preferences. Sure, creating future welfare may explain someone’s personal preference for reproduction. But reproduction falls outside of a narrow definition of ethics that would inform our duties to each other and our legal system.
This is my problem with utilitarianism generally, not your argument in particular. I plan on writing up my criticisms and would be interested in your feedback.
There are ~4 levels of incentivising birth rate via government action.
1. Government benefits for families
2. Childlessness tax
3. Criminalising childlessness
4. Government-enforced rape
Most Western countries do #1 and the Soviets did #2; I'm not aware of #3 ever happening or #4 happening in a modern state (whether to count things like wife-abductions gets complicated).
You're jumping to #3 when Parrhesia's statement - if understood as applying to government policy at all, which isn't obvious - doesn't necessarily imply more than #1.
I believe that there is a difference between a moral duty (which has a basis to become a legal duty) and the pursuit of the good, which falls outside morality.
We have government subsidies/tax breaks for activities like art and education. Yet appreciating art and pursuing education are not moral duties. Just choices that reasonable people can have different views on based on their concept of goodness.
The same goes for our laws. Subsidizing either art or education are choices that just societies can disagree on. But failing to subsidize these activities is not unjust, so long as the process for failing to do so was just.
I have strong views on the relationship between laws and morals, and I plan on writing more about the topic on my substack if you are interested.
I think treating everyone the same leads to wrong conclusions. American women having 1 extra child to the same father for a generation is going to have vastly different outcomes to the same population increase in the US coming from increased Somalian immigration.
Not all people are equal in their quality of life, economic productivity, social value, and so forth. I think everyone recognizes this. I think that adding a discussion along those lines, especially one about Somali refugees would distract from my overall point. I suppose I don't see how this has led me to the wrong conclusion?
Regarding your source number 4, about quantifying the wellbeing from the two selection strategies:
"One way to calculate this total is to multiply the number of individuals (N) with their average quality of life (Q)."
Life years gained is an easy number to understand.
IQ points gained is an easy number to understand.
What is a good way to quantify Q? This would actually be a really interesting question. Once you have it, you can figure out how to trade life years for Q.
One way to do it would be to measure chronic pain.
This is definitely a difficult problem. Some people try to use Quality Adjusted Life Years (QALYs) and some try to use Wellbeing Adjusted Life Years (WELLBYs). It is also difficult to measure happiness in an objective way. At the extremes, it is obvious but inbetween it can be difficult. And what counts as a life worth living? How many people have lives worth living? William MacAskill discusses this in his recent book What We Owe The Future. One method that some researchers have used is asking people if they would skip over time and then comparing the time they skip over to time they value. It's an important question.
In order to make better use of information, one must invariably possess a higher level of intellect which would be able to recursively comprehend the interactionist effects between multi-level variables of different order structures. There is no certainty to the degree of magnitude of maximizing one parameter over the other as even maximizing a utility or value function from the perspective of an individual is dependent on the local and global environment as well as the collective environment of other individuals which that individual is dependent on. The principles we should abide to are ones where we can observedly make informed judgements on the nature of such potential lives on the basis of many differing dynamics of many collective groups of various aggregate levels of parameters. Shyness, intolerance, ethnocentrism, trust, pride, benevolence, lawfulness, many-complex emotional states which tend to have a high-dimensional manifold of characterization of adaptivensss in trade offs. Parameters which increase the order, increase the efficiency of processes, increase the ability to cultivate and transform environments and individuals into greater actuations of phemeonologically-inductive beings will always be rendered superior to all other parameters. If one can harness the energy, the nature of space, time and reality then by all means such an entity would become the ultimate actuator of the universe and henceforth be able to rewrite existence at will from a foundational level where a sequence of atoms can be traced all the way into causing a series of events that create entire civilizations and even self-perpetuating life and “immaterial” second-order transformations of mappings like the game of life. This would be the ultimate form of morality in my view. In everyday life man may move objects, harness energy, outcompete against his fellow men, create alliances and co-conspire with one another until he unifies peoples and collectives as an en tente force of unified system of comprehensible logistics and materiel to produce a certain state or quality of civilization as he sees fit in the longer time horizon where his less salient predecessors are either absorbed, displaced or removed from existence altogether. Just as cells organize collectively or the organelles or the dna or ribosomes or transcript ones, the organizing nature of the world itself is only locally retrieved at the moment at an entropic level but such processes are cascading in tandem to produce greater consciousnesses. In effect, a population which exhibits this characteristic of heightened awareness and aptitudes will also possess an upward mobility capability that is not previously available or accessible. Where the industrial revolution was possible due to a combination of high numbers of manpower and resources, cognition will be the next tier for which the predicate is based on to unleash the potential of unmapped space of possible and contingent existences, including unified superorganisms that span more than interplanetary distances in the future. All lower forms of order of life are subject to active processing as an eventuality. While there are inherent mechanisms such as rna restriction enzymes, retrotransposons and other modifier mechanisms working at the local level just as there are organizations, governments, corporations, etc the higher self-containing being would be able to directly intervene the modular sub-components of its own total being which would transcend a physical form or perceptible form as we know it in a time-less state that is enacted on as an operational-processing causal agent. Any ideal less than this would be in pursuit of the annihilation of self and existence and would only serve to mimick the backwater waves of the sea like oscillating vibrations. That is to say, in effect, retrograde existences cease to exist and the low-minima processing function units are eliminated and not invoked or called as a function because it has already served as a gateway to a higher-ordered construction which is non-reversible at a certain n-th level of perception. That it is to say, it is unidirectional in an aggregated abstract sense like a cosine embedded in a sine wave nested in an exponential function. When one observes AI agents exhibit emergent phenomena, cooperation, lying, cheating, stealing… more complex behaviour can and does arise and it is impossible to regress to a previous state— even if X at future state plays against Y 100, 300 or 5000 states ago there will be an unsymmetric continuum of evolving paths which cannot be collapsible to a singular state which preceded it. From a point of contention of one singular entity exhibiting a negative parametization of value relative to itself or to the collective of a society, it is merely a process to in itself of transition between temporal states, that is to say by invoking certain existences to come into being, it may have cascading consequences which are seemingly negative within the time span of whatever entities in relative abundance of some weighting function possesses but a greater entity would be able to correspond the mappings of each of those units of being to an operational abstraction in some loci of phenomenologically relevant effect in procuring tangibility. Just as geological processes create volcanoes or shape the terrain, creating war machines or corrupt politicians are necessary a prior conditions of conflict or in other words such seemingly antagonistic forces at the psycho social level are merely reducible to atomic interactions of Brownian motion like negatively charged ions and positively charged positrons, they necessarily must obey all the systematic operational-mechanisms of the contained space and medium which itself is in and can be variably and possibly manipulated if a being is conceivable to have expanded beyond the contains of such mediums of operation.
"Shyness, intolerance, ethnocentrism, trust, pride, benevolence, lawfulness, many-complex emotional states which tend to have a high-dimensional manifold of characterization of adaptivensss in trade offs."
Very good point. Just gathering information about how people are willing to make these tradeoffs would be tremendously interesting.
Parrhesia, could you imagine doing a collaboration paper with Savulescu, where you survey potential parents with questions like "How many IQ points would you trade for an additional year of life?" in the context of embryo selection?
That would definitely be interesting. My impression is that parents will care a lot about health and mental wellbeing. In polls, parents see selecting for health as more morally acceptable than selecting for intelligence. I think that is right to a certain extent, but intelligence is extremely valuable. Parents might discount it because they aren't familiar with all the good social and economic correlates. [1] They might also mistakenly think that there are threshold effects, but IQ is beneficial even at extremely high levels. People who are doing embryo selection now probably know these facts. A recent high profile case was Simone and Malcolm Collins who also run an institute for the gifted.
After mainstream acceptance, some parents might make pretty distasteful tradeoffs. Parents make bad tradeoffs now. Some "Tiger moms" push their kids extremely hard to become successful beyond the point of diminishing returns. Some parents push their kids to become successful athletes to the detriment of their schooling. I can imagine some parents wanting a genius even if it comes at a high risk of cancer, or an athlete even if it lessens his lifespan. Eventually we'll probably be able to have almost all the good traits, and people will be super geniuses and they'll live a very long time, and they won't be socially awkward. There are enough genes to avoid negative pleiotropic effects.
I also have problems with the Repugnant Conclusion. I haven't given enough thought to my philosophical position to state one.
But, a thought - I have the feeling that happiness doesn't sum in a simple linear fashion.
Suppose we said the utility of an additional life with happiness H is something like H^E, where E is a positive exponent, where the unit of utility is the mean (or perhaps median) happiness of all lives, then I think we get a measure of utility that can be summed in a way that fits with (my) intuition.
Yes, I know I'm being terribly vague and handwavy. And I have no idea how we'd figure out the proper value of E. And no argument why the unit should be the mean (or what else it ought to be).
If E were (just for example) 2, then:
A new life with happiness at the mean of all lives has utility 1^2, or 1.
A new life with happiness 5x the mean has utility 5^2 = 25.
A new life with happiness 1/10th of the mean has utility 0.1^2 = 0.01
I think this works for negative (net unhappy) lives, too.
Not only does this make intuitive sense, but it eliminates the incentive to drag down very happy people in order to create more less happy people. (Assuming that happiness is linear with resources available, which seems like it might be reasonable within some range.)
Thanks for the comment Dave,
It seems I could still create a Repugant Conclusion type situation. If I were to choose between 10 billion people above the average, or X billion with lives barely worth living, it seems I could find a number X which could be large enough.
Sure, that's my point. At *some* point enough lives with low-but-positive value outweigh a few lives with high positive values. That fits with my intuition, anyway.
What's repugnant about the Repugnant Conclusion is the 1:1 ratio, leading to the conclusion that it's equally good to have 1000x lives with 1/1000 the quality. With the exponential method you don't get that - maybe it's equally good (or better) to have 1 billion times as many lives with 90% of the quality in each life (making up numbers here) - there IS a tradeoff, but it's not 1:1.
Oh I see. Okay, that's interesting. I think some people lean toward "lives barely worth living" as being bad, so they don't want that. You have a different intuition. Interesting thought.
“A theory with an indifference to the creation of happy people seems to have a major blindspot”
I would not view any society as just which seeks to control peoples power of procreation, even for the sake of hypothetical happy people.
Imagine the US were to implement a law requiring that every healthy able-bodied person have at least one child or pay a fine. This would not only be unconstitutional, but morally perverse.
Imposing a duty to procreate is forcing procreation. Creating future happiness is just a factor for one’s own person preference and is outweighed by other factors from having moral force. Population ethics of this type falls outside the bounds of morality and cannot create an obligation.
I don't think people have a moral obligation to reproduce. I do think that it is often good if people do. I will note that someone having an obligation to do something does not mean we have to coerce them. I could say people have an obligation not to cheat on their spouse, but it doesn't necessarily mean I think that we should use the law to punish cheaters.
If you don’t think there is a moral obligation to reproduce, then claims about welfare obtained from reproduction fall outside of morality. If there is no moral difference between someone who is childless vs someone with 10 happy children, then what moral duties can arise?
A legal system would be legitimate in taking cheating into account. For instance, using adultery as a justification for divorce and serving as a factor when determining alimony. And people would say that it is unethical to cheat on your spouse, justifying a duty of loyalty. If there is no duty to reproduce, how can you connect reproduction with morality?
Some actions are obligatory and some actions are supererogatory. Having children is supererogatory. Supererogatory actions still fall within the domain of ethics. There is still a moral difference. Even if an action is an obligatory duty, it does not mean it is obligatory for others to punish or coerce someone to fulfill their duty.
It may fall within a broad conception of ethics, like how reading books or appreciating nature may be good. Anyones conception of the good can fall under this broad ethics. But if it cannot justify duties, it is not ethical in a narrow sense.
An ethical system can’t rest on mere preferences. Sure, creating future welfare may explain someone’s personal preference for reproduction. But reproduction falls outside of a narrow definition of ethics that would inform our duties to each other and our legal system.
This is my problem with utilitarianism generally, not your argument in particular. I plan on writing up my criticisms and would be interested in your feedback.
Sure you can send it my way ives.parrhesia at gmail dot com
There are ~4 levels of incentivising birth rate via government action.
1. Government benefits for families
2. Childlessness tax
3. Criminalising childlessness
4. Government-enforced rape
Most Western countries do #1 and the Soviets did #2; I'm not aware of #3 ever happening or #4 happening in a modern state (whether to count things like wife-abductions gets complicated).
You're jumping to #3 when Parrhesia's statement - if understood as applying to government policy at all, which isn't obvious - doesn't necessarily imply more than #1.
I believe that there is a difference between a moral duty (which has a basis to become a legal duty) and the pursuit of the good, which falls outside morality.
We have government subsidies/tax breaks for activities like art and education. Yet appreciating art and pursuing education are not moral duties. Just choices that reasonable people can have different views on based on their concept of goodness.
The same goes for our laws. Subsidizing either art or education are choices that just societies can disagree on. But failing to subsidize these activities is not unjust, so long as the process for failing to do so was just.
I have strong views on the relationship between laws and morals, and I plan on writing more about the topic on my substack if you are interested.
I think treating everyone the same leads to wrong conclusions. American women having 1 extra child to the same father for a generation is going to have vastly different outcomes to the same population increase in the US coming from increased Somalian immigration.
Thanks for the comment Jason Maguire.
Not all people are equal in their quality of life, economic productivity, social value, and so forth. I think everyone recognizes this. I think that adding a discussion along those lines, especially one about Somali refugees would distract from my overall point. I suppose I don't see how this has led me to the wrong conclusion?
Regarding your source number 4, about quantifying the wellbeing from the two selection strategies:
"One way to calculate this total is to multiply the number of individuals (N) with their average quality of life (Q)."
Life years gained is an easy number to understand.
IQ points gained is an easy number to understand.
What is a good way to quantify Q? This would actually be a really interesting question. Once you have it, you can figure out how to trade life years for Q.
One way to do it would be to measure chronic pain.
Thanks for the comment my me.
This is definitely a difficult problem. Some people try to use Quality Adjusted Life Years (QALYs) and some try to use Wellbeing Adjusted Life Years (WELLBYs). It is also difficult to measure happiness in an objective way. At the extremes, it is obvious but inbetween it can be difficult. And what counts as a life worth living? How many people have lives worth living? William MacAskill discusses this in his recent book What We Owe The Future. One method that some researchers have used is asking people if they would skip over time and then comparing the time they skip over to time they value. It's an important question.
I think they are already doing it in QALYs:
https://twitter.com/hsu_steve/status/1569715830291632134
In order to make better use of information, one must invariably possess a higher level of intellect which would be able to recursively comprehend the interactionist effects between multi-level variables of different order structures. There is no certainty to the degree of magnitude of maximizing one parameter over the other as even maximizing a utility or value function from the perspective of an individual is dependent on the local and global environment as well as the collective environment of other individuals which that individual is dependent on. The principles we should abide to are ones where we can observedly make informed judgements on the nature of such potential lives on the basis of many differing dynamics of many collective groups of various aggregate levels of parameters. Shyness, intolerance, ethnocentrism, trust, pride, benevolence, lawfulness, many-complex emotional states which tend to have a high-dimensional manifold of characterization of adaptivensss in trade offs. Parameters which increase the order, increase the efficiency of processes, increase the ability to cultivate and transform environments and individuals into greater actuations of phemeonologically-inductive beings will always be rendered superior to all other parameters. If one can harness the energy, the nature of space, time and reality then by all means such an entity would become the ultimate actuator of the universe and henceforth be able to rewrite existence at will from a foundational level where a sequence of atoms can be traced all the way into causing a series of events that create entire civilizations and even self-perpetuating life and “immaterial” second-order transformations of mappings like the game of life. This would be the ultimate form of morality in my view. In everyday life man may move objects, harness energy, outcompete against his fellow men, create alliances and co-conspire with one another until he unifies peoples and collectives as an en tente force of unified system of comprehensible logistics and materiel to produce a certain state or quality of civilization as he sees fit in the longer time horizon where his less salient predecessors are either absorbed, displaced or removed from existence altogether. Just as cells organize collectively or the organelles or the dna or ribosomes or transcript ones, the organizing nature of the world itself is only locally retrieved at the moment at an entropic level but such processes are cascading in tandem to produce greater consciousnesses. In effect, a population which exhibits this characteristic of heightened awareness and aptitudes will also possess an upward mobility capability that is not previously available or accessible. Where the industrial revolution was possible due to a combination of high numbers of manpower and resources, cognition will be the next tier for which the predicate is based on to unleash the potential of unmapped space of possible and contingent existences, including unified superorganisms that span more than interplanetary distances in the future. All lower forms of order of life are subject to active processing as an eventuality. While there are inherent mechanisms such as rna restriction enzymes, retrotransposons and other modifier mechanisms working at the local level just as there are organizations, governments, corporations, etc the higher self-containing being would be able to directly intervene the modular sub-components of its own total being which would transcend a physical form or perceptible form as we know it in a time-less state that is enacted on as an operational-processing causal agent. Any ideal less than this would be in pursuit of the annihilation of self and existence and would only serve to mimick the backwater waves of the sea like oscillating vibrations. That is to say, in effect, retrograde existences cease to exist and the low-minima processing function units are eliminated and not invoked or called as a function because it has already served as a gateway to a higher-ordered construction which is non-reversible at a certain n-th level of perception. That it is to say, it is unidirectional in an aggregated abstract sense like a cosine embedded in a sine wave nested in an exponential function. When one observes AI agents exhibit emergent phenomena, cooperation, lying, cheating, stealing… more complex behaviour can and does arise and it is impossible to regress to a previous state— even if X at future state plays against Y 100, 300 or 5000 states ago there will be an unsymmetric continuum of evolving paths which cannot be collapsible to a singular state which preceded it. From a point of contention of one singular entity exhibiting a negative parametization of value relative to itself or to the collective of a society, it is merely a process to in itself of transition between temporal states, that is to say by invoking certain existences to come into being, it may have cascading consequences which are seemingly negative within the time span of whatever entities in relative abundance of some weighting function possesses but a greater entity would be able to correspond the mappings of each of those units of being to an operational abstraction in some loci of phenomenologically relevant effect in procuring tangibility. Just as geological processes create volcanoes or shape the terrain, creating war machines or corrupt politicians are necessary a prior conditions of conflict or in other words such seemingly antagonistic forces at the psycho social level are merely reducible to atomic interactions of Brownian motion like negatively charged ions and positively charged positrons, they necessarily must obey all the systematic operational-mechanisms of the contained space and medium which itself is in and can be variably and possibly manipulated if a being is conceivable to have expanded beyond the contains of such mediums of operation.
"Shyness, intolerance, ethnocentrism, trust, pride, benevolence, lawfulness, many-complex emotional states which tend to have a high-dimensional manifold of characterization of adaptivensss in trade offs."
Very good point. Just gathering information about how people are willing to make these tradeoffs would be tremendously interesting.
Parrhesia, could you imagine doing a collaboration paper with Savulescu, where you survey potential parents with questions like "How many IQ points would you trade for an additional year of life?" in the context of embryo selection?
What a killer paper that would be!
That would definitely be interesting. My impression is that parents will care a lot about health and mental wellbeing. In polls, parents see selecting for health as more morally acceptable than selecting for intelligence. I think that is right to a certain extent, but intelligence is extremely valuable. Parents might discount it because they aren't familiar with all the good social and economic correlates. [1] They might also mistakenly think that there are threshold effects, but IQ is beneficial even at extremely high levels. People who are doing embryo selection now probably know these facts. A recent high profile case was Simone and Malcolm Collins who also run an institute for the gifted.
After mainstream acceptance, some parents might make pretty distasteful tradeoffs. Parents make bad tradeoffs now. Some "Tiger moms" push their kids extremely hard to become successful beyond the point of diminishing returns. Some parents push their kids to become successful athletes to the detriment of their schooling. I can imagine some parents wanting a genius even if it comes at a high risk of cancer, or an athlete even if it lessens his lifespan. Eventually we'll probably be able to have almost all the good traits, and people will be super geniuses and they'll live a very long time, and they won't be socially awkward. There are enough genes to avoid negative pleiotropic effects.
[1] https://parrhesia.substack.com/p/why-intelligence-matters
If you did a survey with a simple survey tool, your socials would take it.
If you approached Savulescu with some polling results, he'd bite. Imagine being a co-author with Savulescu! He is important.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NjE-xteInjw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IU7B0eSKP6s
Thank you. I will consider. Perhaps you could co-author also :)
Yes!
Check your email then :)