Contra Eliasen on Totalism
Responding to an interesting blog post
Eliasen has written an interesting blog post. I have lots of significant disagreements with it, so I thought it would be worth responding to.
I have a strong intuition that there’s something off about anti-natalist arguments. In fact, I have the same intuition about pro-natalist arguments.
Is it good or evil to have kids? There’s something weird about evaluating the morality of bringing a new person into the world. It’s an evaluation of the morality associated with a marginal existence.
I don’t think there’s anything weird about it. Of course having kids is either good or bad. Let’s imagine that you knew that your kid would experience more suffering than all humans in history. It seems clear that it would be bad to bring them into existence. Similarly, as I’ve argued here, the case for creating people with good lives is equally undeniable.
We can’t know what the life would be like if realized
This is a fully general problem — we can never know with certainty the effects of our actions. However, we can still maximize expected value by making our best guess of the effects of various actions.
but more importantly, even if we could know what the life would be like, the person in question has no consciousness with which they suffer their circumstances—whether those circumstances are an inexistence or a hypothetical miserable existence.
They don’t have consciousness currently. However, they will have consciousness — and that consciousness can be good or bad. I currently do not have the experience of being 80 years old — but that doesn’t mean that it would be responsible to press a button that would cause me to experience infinite suffering when I’m 80. Anytime we evaluate the future, we’re evaluating something that doesn’t yet exist.
They cannot be glad that they’re avoiding a miserable life, and they do not long for existence
This is also true of people in comas. However, people in comas shouldn’t be killed. Again, we can evaluate one’s future experiences.
Should we assign value to their well-being or suffering if it doesn’t exist? Should we assign value to the lack of well-being or suffering, or is lack of well-being only significant insofar as it is displacing well-being?
We should assign positive value to well-being and negative value to suffering when they exist. However, if something good could happen in the future if we take a particular action, that gives us a reason to take that action.
Consider a horrible society in which every single life is barely worth living: it is miserable but not quite so miserable that it would be better to be dead. The pro-natalist looks at this and says, “A person would not kill himself, therefore there is positive utility associated with the existence of that person, therefore there is positive utility associated with bringing people into this world.”
I, despite being a pro-natalist would not say that. A person might not kill themselves for reasons other than their life being good — perhaps they care about their friends and family or are not motivated purely by self interested. Maybe they incorrectly assess the quality of their life.
The assumption that the pro-natalist makes is that the proposition of killing a person and the proposition of creating a person are equivalent in magnitude and point in opposite directions. The argument is: a person’s death is -1, therefore a person’s birth is +1. It’s the “therefore” that I’m not sure about, because the person subject to death exists, and the person subject to birth does not. I think this asymmetry should be enough to put it into question whether the +1 value assigned to birth follows from the -1 value assigned to death.
Consider also the pro-natalist position that the best thing we can do as a society is simply procreate as much as possible to easily manufacture as much positive utility as possible.
I’ve defended this here. But also, I think we have practical reasons to be a bit hesitant about more people now.
The repugnant conclusion of utilitarianism is the scenario where a large enough society of people whose lives are barely worth living is considered better than a small society of people with rich, happy lives because the small amount of utility in each miserable life can add up to be a greater amount of total utility than whatever is offered by the relatively small number of happy people. The rhetorical point here is that our intuitions tell us that a society filled with lives barely worth living must be worse than a society filled with happiness and meaning. It is very often put forth as an argument against utilitarianism, but utilitarians don’t see it as completely defeating the philosophy. Some utilitarians accept the repugnant conclusion as the truth, others do not accept it but choose not to worry about it.
What the anti- and pro-natalist positions have in common with the repugnant conclusion is that they all deal with marginal existences: hypothetical incremental persons. The proposition of having children deals with marginal existences—the future children are marginal. And the repugnant conclusion uses marginal existences as its vehicle toward repugnancy—it depends on your imagination adding all these hypothetical people to the scenario. Derek Parfit called this “mere addition,” and as such the repugnant conclusion is also called the “Mere Addition Paradox,” but I don’t think that term works so well for the prospect of having children.
The oddness of anti-natalism, pro-natalism, and utilitarianism results from value placed on marginal existences. This is where my intuition diverges from these philosophies—I’m not sure there should be value associated with marginal existence.
I’ve defended the repugnant conclusion elsewhere — here and here most notably. But it’s worth noting that if you say there’s nothing good or bad about marginal existence, then you get indifference to the repugnant conclusion. If neither 10 billion with great lives nor a vast number with lives barely worth living matter at all, then neither are either good or bad. Thus, this doesn’t avoid the RC at all.
Let’s consider a system in which it is stipulated that the value of a marginal existence is zero, no matter the quality of the hypothetical existence. (you could call this the “no mere addition axiom,” if you wanted to1).
I would call this zero-value marginal existence consequentialism. I would call it this because it makes a cool acronym: Z-VMEC. I would call it consequentialism rather than utilitarianism (despite the fact that I am still talking about moral evaluations based on maximization of theoretical quantities of well-being (or whatever)), simply to avoid the suggestion of the exact problems with utilitarianism (now synonymous with the name) which I am attempting to solve, but also to emphasize a slight difference in the basic currency of the system (elaborated below), which I think is better described as "consequences" than "utility" (however, I'm going to keep using the word "utility" to refers to quantities of moral goodness).
Here is an outline of the proposed system. I won’t attempt to formalize it because I’m not a philosopher. Also because I’m not a philosopher, I haven’t done enough reading of literature to know if this has been proposed before [it has been pointed out that this is more or less the same as the person-affecting view] or if there is some serious logical problem that I have not recognized. If this is the case, I apologize and I encourage you to let me know. But even if that is the case, I think this can add to the discourse around utilitarianism and repugnant conclusions regardless. Anyway, outline:
Improving the well-being of an existing person is good (positive utility).
The life of an existing person ending is bad (negative utility).
The marginal existence of a person is neutral (zero utility)—this obtains regardless of the quality of life of the marginal person.
This runs into disastrous problems. Consider a few
Let’s imagine that there is a machine that spawns babies before depositing them into pits of fire. On this account, destroying the machine wouldn’t be good — it just prevents babies from existing and being burned to death. But if their existence isn’t bad, despite their suffering, then there’s no reason to prevent it.
You are considering having a child. You know they’ll experience more suffering every moment than all people have in the history of the world. Should you have the child? On this account, it would be morally neutral. This is crazy.
You can either have a child with an unimaginably great life or a miserable, horrible, terrible life, experiencing more misery each second than all people in history. On this account, it’s a coinflip. That’s clearly false.
*Or, to be sure, it would be more accurate to say “bad life —> good life > 0” (that is, the transition from a bad life to a better life has positive utility) rather than “good life > bad life.” This is because if we are only considering the hypothetical existence of two independent hypothetical people—A who has a good life and B who has a miserable life—it is not true that A > B, because A and B are both marginal. The fact that I am requiring it to be understood as a transition is equivalent (as I see it) to conditioning on the existence of that person. So to revise the first point in the list above, good life > bad life, conditional on the existence of that life. I think this satisfies intuition: we value the betterment of lives, but we don’t necessarily value certain lives over others. We don’t say that a rich person’s life has more value than a poor person’s; such a comparison is amoral.
All of the previous reductios apply. I’ll quote a comment that I left when Eliasen left this as a comment below Chappell’s blog, responding to the claim that it’s better for rich people to have kids than poor people, all else equal.
This seems obvious. Let's imagine that you could choose to have a child who would have a great life or one with a pretty good life. Clearly, the great life would be better to create. If this is true, then it seems that, if you were impartially choosing to bring a child into the world, it would be better if it were born to rich parents and given a better life rather than poor parents and given a worse life. If we accept the following
1) A child being born to a rich family and living a pretty good life is just as good as if a child were born to a poor family with an equally good life.
2) A child being born to a rich family and living a pretty good life is less good than if a child were born to a rich family and lived a great life.
Thus, by transitivity. a child being born to a rich family is better than it being born to a poor family, if we assume this would make it have a better life -- which is the only way utilitarianism produces that judgment.
Next, Eliasen says
If it seems a bit silly to you (as it does to me) to evaluate / compare static scenarios on a moral basis (as is done to arrive at the repugnant conclusion), that’s because morality is more relevant for evaluating decisions and actions.
This is deeply implausible. A correct moral view should tell us that a world of pure torture is worse than utopia — independently of people acting to bring them both about.
But where does that leave the repugnant conclusions from the perspective of Z-VMEC? Well, let’s get a little more precise on the concept of marginal existence. Strictly speaking, we could understand all of the individuals in any hypothetical situation (including those of the repugnant conclusion) marginal—they are nonexistent, hypothetical people, after all—in which case all static hypothetical scenarios come with a utility value of zero. Only hypotheticals in which there is a transition in the state of affairs would come with a non-zero utility. But I think this is a bit unsatisfying. We want to be able to say something about the scenarios in the repugnant conclusion. To allow this, remember that a transition in state of affairs is more or less equivalent to conditioning on existence. So we can say that, conditional on the existence of N people, a society in which those N people are happy is preferable to a society in which those N people are miserable. Unconditional on the existence of M people (that, added to N, make up a large enough society of miserable people to create more utilitarian value than that of the N happy people)—and it must be unconditional, because they are included in one scenario but not the other—there is zero utility associated with those M people, whether they are happy or miserable. In other words, we can only meaningfully compare scenarios of equal numbers of people (condition on their existence) to get non-equal utility value. This matches my intuition; when I hear the descriptions of the scenarios in the repugnant conclusion, I think something along the lines of, “Well those are just different scenarios. I’m not sure if they can be directly compared.” Z-VMEC satisfies that intuition.
But on this account, we can’t say that a hellish world is worse than a world of pure bliss, as long as they have different people. This is implausible.
Besides the pragmatist utilitarians, there’s also the faithful utilitarians who choose to accept the repugnant conclusion. These are the people like Sam Bankman-Fried and Eliezer Yudkowsky who apparently establish their positions based on the belief in some mystical moral truth that we just have to figure out—and utilitarianism is the way to do that. When they arrive at the repugnant conclusion they say, “Well that’s odd,” but then they say, “but it must be the truth because it’s the conclusion of utilitarian logic. I guess I better commit to that position.” Which is just odd. It comes from having faith in the existence of a moral truth, or at least faith in the irrefutability of the axioms of utilitarianism.
This is a slightly infuriating passage to read. There’s a reason that moderate intuitionist deontologists like Huemer accept the RC. There are lots of good reasons to accept it, even if one doesn’t start out as a utilitarian. It’s not just accepting whatever crazy conclusions follow from utilitarianism — there are potent proactive justifications for it, many of which I describe here.
Counterargument: Z-VMEC would say that the utility associated with the existence of an extremely happy, transcendental person and the existence of a person whose life are barely worth living are equal.
Response: Yes, but simply saying they are equal is not taking it all the way, which might be why it seems wrong. They are not only equal—they are both equal to zero. Both propositions are utility neutral. Like I said before, we don’t value the life of a rich person more than we value the life of a poor person. We don’t value the life of a person predisposed to happiness more than we value the life of a person with clinical depression. I think your intuition that there should be a preference for the first scenario comes from the fact that the actual moral thing to do is improve existing lives (or lives that we condition to exist); if we condition on the existence of this person, there is utility associated with improving his or her life from the poor state to the rich state. That’s where our intuitions come from, because in real life we never really have to think about the marginal existence of hypothetical people, knowing exactly what their lives will be like; what we have to do is make decisions that affect people.
I addressed the point about rich people before. But this implies that if you could make everyone have sex one second later, such that no future people who would have otherwise existed would exist — instead new people would exist, and that would also give all future people infinite pleasure, that would be neutral. This is very implausible.
Counterargument: There is utility associated with marginal existence, because, well, I exist! and I prefer that to not existing.
Response: This is where your intuitions fail you. It is difficult to evaluate the scenario of your existence compared to the scenario of nonexistence, because you exist, so any comparison you attempt to make is implicitly conditioned on your existence. In other words, the only comparison you are able to make based on your experience is a preference for continuing to live rather than dying, which Z-VMEC also has a preference for. You must acknowledge that if you did not exist, you would have no experience; you would not feel any pleasure, you would not suffer, you would not have any well-being, you would not long for existence. For it to be fair to say “I currently exist, and I prefer that to not existing, therefore there is positive utility associated with existence,” I would argue that you would also have to be able to say “I currently do not exist, and I would prefer to exist, therefore there is positive utility associated with existence” (at least to achieve the arithmetic morality that utilitarians are looking for: this is simply saying that for existence - nonexistence > 0 to be true, nonexistence - existence < 0 must also be true, simply by way of the principles of arithmetic), but you can’t say that, because you don’t exist.
And if I were dead, I wouldn’t prefer to be alive. But that doesn’t mean death isn’t bad. It just means that when you’re dead or non-existent, you can’t have desires. But you existing and having happiness is a good thing, better than neutral non-existence.
Counterargument: From here, you cannot make an argument for the continued existence of humanity.
Response: Yes, Z-VMEC cannot make an argument for the continued existence of humanity, which may be the point where you want to stop taking it seriously.
Agreed! If Z-VMEC says that there would be nothing good about creating a utopian future, it’s obviously false.
Conclusion
This is, I think, an interesting idea. However, it comes with enormous bullets that one must bite, including many of those of totalism. Thus, I think one is best off sticking with totalism over this view.