The World's Most Dangerous Population Ethics
The person affecting view
Hiding the ball
Torres — a person pathologically devoted to criticizing longtermism — has criticized what they see as a malicious bait and switch on behalf of longtermists. They claim that longtermists are unwilling to actually reveal their deeply shocking, putrid ideology, one which says that the primary thing that matters is making sure that the far future has unfathomable numbers of digital minds.
But I think it’s Torres who is really hiding their view on population ethics. In fact, there are numerous examples of Torres being pressed about population ethics and not talking about it.
Conveniently, Torres ignored this, while responding to loads of other tweets. Yet the responses began to subside the moment when population ethics was brought up.
No response here either.
Or here.
Or here.
Now, there are some decent philosophers that defend person-affecting views, but they are few and far between. And none of them claim that there are no bullets to bite for the defender of the person affecting view.
So Torres, despite frequently lamenting the alleged failure of longtermists to be honest about their views in population ethics has, on half a dozen occasions, ignored direct requests for them to specify their population ethics. Their accusation against longtermists would seem to be projection. For it is really Torres who has the appalling population ethics — one that cannot withstand scrutiny.
So what is this (dangerous) population ethics. Well, in short, it says that there’s nothing actively good about making someone with a good life. As the slogan goes, we should make people happy, not happy people.
This innocuous-sounding doctrine ends up having a deleterious effect on efforts to improve the future and even results in the conclusion that extinction of the world is good.
An implausible view
Torres outrageously claimed that there are no counterintuitive implications of the wide person affecting view. This despite ignoring the significant section of Nick Beckstead’s Ph.D thesis devoted to showing the numerous problems with the person affecting view. Torres was apparently willing to read the article carefully enough to quote-mine a pararaph about the instrumental value of saving a life in a rich country being greater than the instrumental value of saving a life in a poor country but missed the 23 pages dedicated to explaining why the person affecting view is wildly implausible.
I won’t detail all the problems with the person affecting view — there are too many to discuss here. But I’ll list a few from Beckstead
1
In other cases, Asymmetric Views have implications that are less plausible. The most obvious problem is that Strict Asymmetric Views cannot explain why, when choosing which of two “extra” people to create, it is better to create someone who would have an excellent life rather than someone who would have a pretty good life. Since the interests of all “extra” people are ignored, there is nothing to choose between these alternatives.8 But this is very implausible.
2
Though many people think that Asymmetric Views can best capture our thinking about the morality of having children, this is not true. According to common sense, it is not bad to have children under ordinary conditions, provided one can be reasonably confident that one's child will have a good life, one can fulfill one's duties to the child, and having the child does not interfere with one's pre-existing obligations. But if we accept a Strict Asymmetric View, if we create a happy child, we do something that is not good. However, if we create a person with a bad life, such as the Wretched Child, we do something bad. If some action could be bad, but could not be good, then it must be bad (in expectation). This point has enough independent plausibility, but let me illustrate it with an example. Suppose that pressing a certain button could result in some very bad outcome that we have reason to avoid (such as causing some person to have a painful disability), but could not result in anything good. At best, pressing this button would leave things as they are. If this were true, then it would be bad (in expectation) to push the button. If we accept a Strict Asymmetric View, then having a child cannot be good, but could be bad (ignoring benenefits to the parents or others). Someone might claim that considering the welfare of the child can only count against having children, but it can be good and permissible to have children for other reasons, such as the for the sake of the parents. Though this view is consistent, it is a fairly disturbing view; it does not seem appropriate for a parent to say, in effect, “Sure if you look at my child's welfare, it's a bad call, but I'm going to do it because I personally find it fulfilling.”
3
We can make another objection along these lines: The Risk-Averse Mother : A mother faces two options for her (as of now) merely potential child. The first option involves some risk. On this option, there is a 99.99% chance that her child will have a rich and flourishing life, but a 0.01% chance that the life will not be worth living. The second option involves no risk. On this option, the child will definitely have a life that is neutral.
Intuitively, the first option is much better. However, on a Strict Asymmetric View, the first option has a potential downside (since the child might have a bad life) and no potential upside (since benefits to "extra" people are ignored). On the other hand, the second option will be neutral either way. Therefore, on a Strict Asymmetric View, the second option must be better
4
Strict Asymmetric Views have their least plausible implications in cases of extinction. This is especially relevant to the subject of this dissertation, since we are considering appealing to these views to lessen the importance of decreasing existential risk or producing other trajectory changes. Consider this problematic case, for instance: Mass Sterilization: Some terrorists engineer a highly contagious, incurable virus, and they spread it throughout the world. This virus causes sterilization in all people that are infected, but causes no other health problems. Within 150 years, no humans exist. Although all Asymmetric Person-Affecting Views can tell a story about why it would be wrong for these terrorists to disperse this virus, it seems that they cannot tell the whole story. They can appeal to the fact that many people alive had an interest in having children or perpetuating human civilization, they cannot appeal the fact that it is a simply a great loss, in itself, for human civilization to come to an end. This is easily brought out by considering a variant of the case: Voluntary Extinction: All people collectively decide not to have any children. No one is ever made upset, irritated, or otherwise negatively affected by the decision. In fact, everyone is made a little better off. As (Temkin, 2000, 2008) points out, it would be bad if this happened, the benefits to present people notwithstanding
5
On an Asymmetric Person-Affecting View, we must count the interests of "extra" people if they have bad lives, but not if they have good lives. This leads to another troubling conclusion: Mostly Good or Extinction: In one future, all but a few people have excellent lives. But a very small percentage of these people suffer from a painful disease that makes life not worth living. In the other future, no people exist.9
Intuitively, the first future is better than the second. But, given an Asymmetric Person-Affecting View, this is not true. On that view, all the good lives are ignored but the bad lives are not, and that makes existence worse than extinction. Ordinarily, we believe that there is a trade-off between bad lives and good lives. But on an Asymmetric View, we give no weight to the good lives, so the trade-o is not made properly
We can extend our conclusions from Section 4.2.1.2 in disturbing directions when we think about sentient life in general. If we are merely thinking about how things go for future generations, and not thinking about ourselves, it seems that we should conclude that it would be best if sentient life in the universe came to an end. This would be so even if the chances of having excellent lives in the future were very high. Consider the following example: The Anti-Biotic Explorers: In the future, humans gain the ability to travel through space. They come across a planet that, as of now, has no sentient life. However, their best technical analysis suggests that if left alone, very happy sentient beings will soon evolve. Still, they admit that they could be wrong: life on this planet might turn out to involve some significant hardships for a few of these beings. For these beings, life might not be worth living. Since this planet has no valuable resources, and there is some small risk of having people with bad lives, the explorers decide to destroy this planet. Intuitively, it was worse to destroy this planet rather than to let it be. However, for the reasons just given, Asymmetric Person-Affecting Views suggest otherwise.
6
It seems obviously bad to create a miserable person. So this person affecting view has to posit a troubling asymmetry between creating good lives and bad lives.
7
Torres’ view is conditional and wide — this means, among other things, that it says that if you know someone will exist, you should try to make their welfare as high as possible. Thus, if you’re going to create someone named John, it would be bad to reduce his welfare to half of what it would otherwise be.
But this doesn’t work. Suppose that there are two possible people, John and Meredith. In world 1, you can either create John with utility of 100 or Meredith with utility of 50 and in world 2 you can create John with utility of 50 or Meredith with utility of 100.
The person-affecting view says that there’s nothing wrong with creating Meredith in the first world. Thus, if someone offered you one cent to create Meredith instead of John in world 1, you should do that. Likewise, if someone offered you one cent to create John instead of Meredith in world 2, you should do that. Thus, this view holds that you should, if it gained you 2 cents, halve the quality of life of future people in this scenario. While you could have created John and Meredith with utility of 100, you should instead create them with utility of 50, if you were bribed with a single penny.
However, 100 and 50 are arbitrary numbers — 100 could be replaced with infinity and 50 could be replaced with .00000001 or 0. Thus, this person affecting view — which allegedly has no unintuitive implications — holds that, for arbitrarily small benefits to current people, you should deprive future people of infinite pleasure — people that will definitely exist.
In an ordinary case, the person-affecting view says that creating a person with a very good life is no better than creating a different person with a pretty good life. Thus, it would say ordinarily that creating John with utility of 10,000 is no better than creating Meredith with utility of 1. Adding in an extra world doesn’t change that — what happens a world away with no causal effects doesn’t change the choice-worthiness of creating someone.
8
This view of population ethics also probably has the implication that we should go extinct. The reason for this is simple — on this account, future lives that are not worth living are actively bad, but future lives that are good aren’t good. Thus, the future is unimaginably awful in expectation.
If we think that the future will have potentially quadrillions of miserable beings, even if it will have far more beings with a great life, we should go extinct immediately. So Torres’ view commits them to being in favor of nuclear war. This isn’t just wrong, it’s dangerous. There’s a reason that Torres hides their view.
The Asymmetry Thesis is one of the dumbest views in philosophy. I honestly think I have more respect for trivialists than for people like Benatar.
Me before going 8 rounds with Mr. Bulldog:
I love asymmetry. Your expected value calculations are BS. Longtermism is bunk.
Me after going 8 rounds with Mr. Bulldog:
Q_Q …. good thing logic is false.