Against Conservatism About Value
Responding to what Richard Chappell thinks is the best objection to utilitarianism
‘If you’re not a liberal when you’re 25, you have no heart. If you’re not a conservative by the time you’re 35, you have no brain.’
—A quote falsely attributed to Churchill (though, assuming Richard, Cohen, and I all have brains and hearts, it explains all the relevant data about the patterns of beliefs in conservatism about value).
GA Cohen has proposed the doctrine of conservatism about value. The basic idea is as follows: good things are worth cherishing and keeping around, rather than just promoting. This is why, for example, it would be wrong to press a button that would replace your kids or spouse with slightly better kids or a slightly better spouse. This is one of the few objections to utilitarianism that can actually be made into a coherent, clearly specified principle: all things of value are worth preserving. For this reason, combined with the extremely intuitive nature of the principle, Richard Chappell has called this “without question, the best objection to utilitarianism [he has] ever encountered.”
That said, I think the principle is false. Let’s call my view liberalism about value, because I don’t think value should be conserved. I’ve already talked a bit about why I believe this, but I think there are two especially convincing reasons to reject the principle.
(Ironically, in philosophy, it’s the conservatives who think that pre-existing conditions should be covered. Also, it is hilarious that this meme exists!)
The first is relatively straightforward: we know that people have status quo bias, an irrational desire to maintain the status quo. But conservatism about value, even more than deontology, is a direct theoretical embodiment of status quo bias. It tells you to maintain the status quo, even if an alternative world is better. It is basically an injunction to do exactly what status quo bias would tell you to do.
I think a lot of debunking accounts are just sort of implausible, non-specific, just-so stories. But this debunking account is quite specific and targeted—we’d expect to have conservative intuitions, based on the persistence of status quo bias, even if it weren’t true. So I think, for this reason, we should think that the intuition is on thin ice.
But I think the second argument is even more convincing. There are two versions of conservatism about value and both of them have their own problems. They are:
One-shot conservatism: when something of value is lost and replaced, that is bad at that moment.
Long-term conservatism: when something of value is lost and replaced, that is bad for as long as the original thing of value would have been around.
So one-shot conservatism says that when a person is replaced, that is bad as of the moment of replacement—when someone gets replaced, that is very bad at that moment, but is not bad at other moments. Long-term conservatism says that when things of value are replaced, that is bad for as long as the things of value would have stayed around—so if you replace a painting that would have been around for 100 years, that is bad for the full 100 years it would have been around.
The problem for conservatism about value, in short, is that one-shot conservatism fails to uphold the spirit of conservatism about value, and long conservatism has counterexamples. There is, furthermore, no version of conservatism I can think of that would avoid both problems.
Starting with the problem for one-shot conservatism, this has the unfortunate problem of implying that you should sometimes replace people with other, happier people. Suppose that replacing produces -1,000 units of intrinsic value when it happens. Suppose you could replace your child with another child who’d be happier by 1,500 units of intrinsic value. Conservatives about value would still probably oppose replacing your child, but on this account, it would be worthwhile. So conservatism about value fails to uphold the fundamental value conservative intuition.
Long-term conservatism about value maintains our conservative intuitions but has a clear counterexample. Consider two worlds. In world 1, some person will live forever. In world 2, after 100 years, this person will die and be replaced by a slightly happier person. That replacement is worse on the conservative account. Then, after another 100 years, the new child will be replaced by an even happier child. That would be worse again. Suppose we iterate this process. At each step of the way, the long-term conservative thinks things are getting worse. But at the end of the process, after 100000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 years, the resultant people are extremely well off—this seems like utopia compared to the original scenario with the one immortal person, but on this account, counterintuitively, the end world would be worse than the starting world with the single barely happy immortal. It would have been the starting world plus lots of things which make it worse, and given that the better than relation is transitive, this world would thus have to be worse than the original.
For this reason, I am not a conservative about value.
Conservatives, like deontologists, should be moderates rather than absolutists. They should be open to the possibility that a *sufficiently* better outcome can justify replacement. They just don't think it should be as cheap/easy as utilitarianism implies. So I don't think that one-shot conservatives should be too bothered by the objection that replacement is still possible on their view. The moderate "spirit" of their view just requires that replacement is not justified by merely *marginal* improvements.
Your counterexample to long term conservatism doesn't hold water for me. It seems to me like a world where people live forever is much more of a utopia than one where people die, even if the people who die are happier moment to moment.
Remember that when assessing how positive a life is, you add up how positive it is over a person's entire life. So when comparing the "utopia" of very happy people to the world of moderately happy immortals, you wouldn't compare 100 years of the immortals' lives to the lives of the very happy people. You'd compare the immortals' entire lives to the very happy peoples' entire lives. Since the immortals live a very long time in your example, they are probably far, far happier than the people in the "utopia." Even if the very happy peoples' lives are 10, 100, even 1000 times better, moment to moment, the immortal has lived so long that their cumulative life is far better.
I think in general your framing of both long term and short term conservatism suffer from relying too much on time, rather than taking a timeless view of people's lives. I think a better framing would be to have two types of conservatism: one in which when someone is replaced there is a fixed penalty in value for doing so, and one where the penalty is a ratio of however much value the replaced person would have generated had they not been replaced. I suppose there could also be a hybrid view that has a fixed penalty to start with that then increases in severity relative to how happy a person's life was. I am not sure which of these best captures Cohen's intuition best and has the least counterintuitive conclusions, but they definitely seem better than standard utilitarianism.