Person-affecting intuitions can often be money pumped

If we want to move people away from person-affecting views entirely, we need other arguments.

Fwiw, I wasn't particularly trying to do this. I'm not super happy with any particular view on population ethics and I wouldn't be that surprised if the actual view I settled on after a long reflection was pretty different from anything that exists today, and does incorporate something vaguely like person-affecting intuitions.

I mostly notice that people who have some but not much experience with longtermism are often very aware of the Repugnant Conclusion and other objections to total utilitarianism, and conclude that actually person-affecting intuitions are the right way to go. In at least two cases they seemed to significantly reconsider upon presenting this argument. It seems to me like, amongst the population of people who haven't engaged with the population ethics literature, critiques of total utilitarianism are much better known than critiques of person affecting intuitions. I'm just trying to fix that discrepancy.

Also a minor terminological note, you've called your argument a Dutch book and so have I. But I think it would be more standard to call it a money pump.

Thanks, I've changed this.

elliottthornley @ 2022-07-12T11:02 (+24)

I'm just trying to fix that discrepancy.

I see. That seems like a good thing to do.

Here's another good argument against person-affecting views that can be explained pretty simply, due to Tomi Francis.

Person-affecting views imply that it's not good to add happy people. But Q is better than P, because Q is better for the hundred already-existing people, and the ten billion extra people in Q all live happy lives. And R is better than Q, because moving to R makes one hundred people's lives slightly worse and ten billion people's lives much better. Since betterness is transitive, R is better than P. R and P are identical except for the extra ten billion people living happy lives in R. Therefore, it's good to add happy people, and person-affecting views are false.

MichaelStJules @ 2022-09-08T18:40 (+3)

There are also Parfit's original Mere Addition argument and Huemer's Benign Addition argument for the Repugnant Conclusion. They're the familiar A≤A+<B arguments, adding a large marginally positive welfare population, and then redistributing the welfare evenly, except with Huemer's, A<A+, strictly, because those in A are made slightly better off in A+.

Huemer's is here: https://philpapers.org/rec/HUEIDO

I think this kind of argument can be used to show that actualism endorses the RC and Very RC in some cases, because the original world without the extra people does not maximize "self-conditional value" (if the original people in A are better off in A+, via benign addition), whereas B does, using additive aggregation.

I think the Tomi Francis example also only has R maximizing self-conditional value, among the three options, when all three are available. And we could even make the original 100 people worse off than 40 each in R, and this would still hold.

Voting methods extending from pairwise comparisons also don't seem to avoid the problem, either: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/fqynQ4bxsXsAhR79c/teruji-thomas-the-asymmetry-uncertainty-and-the-long-term?commentId=ockB2ZCyyD8SfTKtL

I guess HMVs, presentist and necessitarian views may work to avoid the RC and VRC, but AFAICT, you only get the procreation asymmetry by assuming some kind of asymmetry with these views. And they all have some pretty unusual prescriptions I find unintuitive, even as someone very sympathetic to person-affecting views.

Frick’s conditional interests still seem promising and could maybe be used to justify the procreation asymmetry for some kind of HMV or negative axiology.

Rohin Shah @ 2022-07-13T07:44 (+3)

Nice, I hadn't seen this argument before.

Only presentists have the problem in the first bullet with your specific example.

There's a similar problem that necessitarians have if the identity of the extra person isn't decided yet, i.e. before conception. However, they do get to learn something new, i.e. the identity. If a necessitarian knew the identity ahead of time, there would be no similar problem. (And you can modify the view to be insensitive to the identity of the child by matching counterparts across possible worlds.)

The problem in the second bullet, basically against burning bridges or "resolute choice", doesn't seem that big of a deal to me. You run into similar problems with Parfit's hitchhiker and unbounded utility functions.

Maybe I can motivate this better? Say you want to have a child, but being a good parent (and ensuring high welfare for your child) seems like too much trouble and seems worse to you than not having kids, even though, conditional on having a child, it would be best.

Your options are:

1. No child.
2. Have a child, but be a meh parent. You're better off than in 1, and the child has a net positive but just okay life.
3. Have a child, but work much harder to be a good parent. You're worse off than in 2, but the child is much better off than in 2, and this outcome is better than 2 in a pairwise comparison.

In binary choices:

1. 1 < 2, because 2 is better for you and no worse for your child (person-affecting).
2. 2 < 3, impartially by assumption.
3. 3 < 1, because 1 is better for you and no worse for your child (person-affecting).

With all three options available, I'd opt for 1, because 2 wouldn't be impartially permissible if 3 is available, and I prefer 1 to 3. 2 is not really an option if 3 is available.

It seems okay for me to frustrate my own preference for 2 over 1 in order to avoid 3, which is even worse for me than 1. No one else is worse off for this (in a person-affecting way); the child doesn't exist to be worse off, so has no grounds for complaint. So it seems to me to be entirely my own business.

Hm, then I find necessitarianism quite strange. In practice, how do we identify people who exist regardless of our choices?

if people generally treat it as bad when Bob takes action A with mildly good first-order consequences  when Bob could instead have taken action B with much better first-order consequences,

On my favored view, this isn't the case. I think of creating new people/beings as a special category.

I also am mostly on board with consequentialism applied to limited domains of ethics, but I'm against treating all of ethics under consequentialism, especially if people try to do the latter in a moral realist way where they look for a consequentialist theory that defines everyone's standards of ideally moral conduct. 

I am working on a post titled "Population Ethics Without an Objective Axiology." Here's a summary from that post: 

• The search for an objective axiology assumes that there’s a well-defined “impartial perspective” that determines what’s intrinsically good/valuable. Within my framework, there’s no such perspective.
• Another way of saying this goes as follows. My framework conceptualizes ethics as being about goals/interests.[There are, I think, good reasons for this – see my post Dismantling Hedonism-inspired Moral Realism for why I object to ethics being about experiences, and my post Against Irreducible Normativity on why I don’t think ethics is about things that we can’t express in non-normative terminology.] Goals can differ between people and there’s no goal correct goal for everyone to adopt.
• In fixed-population contexts, a focus on goals/interests can tell us exactly what to do: we best benefit others by doing what these others (people/beings) would want us to do.
• In population ethics, this approach no longer works so well – it introduces ambiguities. Creating new people/beings changes the number of interests/goals to look out for. Relatedly, creating people/beings of type A instead of type B changes the types of interests/goals to look out for. In light of these options, a “focus on interests/goals” leaves many things under-defined.
• To gain back some clarity, we can note that population ethics has two separate perspectives: that of existing people/beings and that of newly created people/beings. (Without an objective axiology, these perspectives cannot be unified.)
• Population ethics from the perspective of existing people is analogous to settlers standing in front of a giant garden: There’s all this unused land and there’s a long potential future ahead of us – what do we want to do with it? How do we address various tradeoffs?
• In practice, newly created beings are at the whims of their creators. However, “might makes right” is not an ideal that altruistically-inclined/morally-motivated creators would endorse. Population ethics from the perspective of newly created people/beings is like a court hearing: newly created people/beings speak up for their interests/goals. (Newly created people/beings have the opportunity to appeal to their creators' moral motivations and altruism, or at least hold them accountable to some minimal standards of pro-social conduct.)
• The degree to which someone’s life goals are self-oriented vs. inspired by altruism/morality produces a distinction between minimalist morality and maximally ambitious morality. Minimalist morality is where someone respects both population-ethical perspectives sufficiently to avoid harm on both of them, while following self-oriented interests/goals otherwise. By contrast, effective altruists want to spend (at least a portion of) their effort and resources to “do what’s most moral/altruistic.” They’re interested in maximally ambitious morality.
• Without an objective axiology, the placeholder “do what’s most moral/altruistic” is under-defined. In particular, there’s a tradeoff where cashing out “doing what’s most moral/altruistic” primarily according to the perspective of existing people leaves less room for altruism on the second perspective (that of newly created people), and vice versa.
• Besides, what counts as “doing what’s most moral/altruistic” according to the second perspective is under-defined. Without an objective axiology, the interests of newly created people/beings depend on who we create. (E.g, some newly created people would rather not be created than be at a small risk of experiencing intense suffering; others would gladly take significant risks and care immensely about a chance of a happy existence. It is impossible to do right from both perspectives.)

--

Some more thoughts to help make the above intelligible:

I think there's an incongruence behind how people think of population ethics in the standard way. (The standard way being something like: look for an objective axiology, something that has "intrinsic value," then figure out how we are to relate to that value/axiology and whether to add extra principles around it.)

The following two beliefs seem incongruent: 

1. There’s an objective axiology
2. People’s life goals are theirs to choose: they aren’t making a mistake of rationality if they don’t all share the same life goal

There’s a tension between these beliefs – if there was an objective axiology, wouldn’t the people who don’t orient their goals around that axiology be making a mistake?

I expect that many effective altruists would hesitate to say “One of you must be wrong!” when two people discuss their self-oriented life goals and one cares greatly about living forever and the other doesn’t.

The claim “people are free to choose their life goals” may not be completely uncontroversial. Still, I expect many effective altruists to already agree with it. To the degree that they do, I suggest they lean in on this particular belief and explore what it implies for comparing the “axiology first” framework to my framework “population ethics without an objective axiology.” I expect that leaning in on the belief “people are free to choose their life goals” makes my framework more intuitive and gives a better sense of what the framework is for, what it’s trying to accomplish.

To help understand what I mean by minimalist morality vs. maximally amibitious morality, I'll now give some examples of how to think about procreation. These will closely track common sense morality. I'll indicate for each example whether it arises from minimalist morality or some person's take on maximally ambitious morality. Some examples also arise from there not being an objective axiology:

• Parents are obligated to provide a very high standard of care for their children (principle from minimalist morality).
• People are free to decide against becoming parents (“there’s no objective axiology”).
• Parents are free to want to have as many children as possible (“there’s no objective axiology”), as long as the children are happy in expectation (principle from minimalist morality).
• People are free to try to influence other people’s moral stances and parenting choices (“there’s no objective axiology”) – for instance, Joanne could promote anti-natalism and Marianne could promote totalism (their respective interpretations of “doing what’s most moral/altruistic”) –  as long as they remain within the boundaries of what is acceptable in a civil society (principle from minimalist morality).

So, what's the role for (something like) person-affecting principles in population ethics? Basically, if you only want minimalist morality  and otherwise want to pursue self-oriented goals, person-affecting principles seem like a pretty good answer to "what should be ethical constraints to your option space for creating new people/beings." In addition, I think person-affecting principles have some appeal even for specific flavors of "doing what's most moral/altruistic," but only in people who lean toward interpretations of this that highlight benefitting people who already exist or will exist regardless of your actions. As I said in the bullet point summary, there's a tradeoff where cashing out “doing what’s most moral/altruistic” primarily according to the perspective of existing people leaves less room for altruism on the second perspective (that of newly created people), and vice versa. (For the "vice versa," note that, e.g., a totalist classical utilitarian would be leaving less room for benefitting already existing people. They would privilege an arguably defensible but certainly not 'objectively correct' interpretation of what it means to benefit newly created people, and they would lean in on that perspective more so than they lean into the perspective "What are existing people's life goals and how do I benefit them.") 
 

I totally agree this is a consequentialist critique. I don't think that negates the validity of the critique.

From a non-consequentialist point of view, whether a "no people to lots of happy people" move (like any other move) is good or not depends on other considerations, like the nature of the action, our duties or virtue. I guess what I want to say is that "going from state A to state B"-type thinking is evaluating world states in an outcome-oriented way, and that just seems like the wrong level of analysis for those other philosophies.

Okay, but I still don't know what the view says about x-risk reduction (the example in my previous comment)?

Oh, the view here only says that it's fine to prevent a happy person from coming into existence, not that it's fine to kill an already existing person.

Interesting. It reminds me of a challenge for denying countable additivity:

God runs a lottery. First, he picks two integers at random (each integer has an equal and 0 probability of being picked, violating countable additivity.) Then he shows one of the two at random to you. You know in advance that there is a 50% chance you'll see the higher one (maybe he flips a coin), but no matter what it is, after you see it you'll be convinced it is the lower one.

I'm inclined to think that this is a problem with infinities in general, not with unbounded utility functions per se.

After reading the linked comment I think the view that total utilitarianism can be dutch booked is fairly controversial (there is another unaddressed comment I quite agree with), and on a page like this one I think it's misleading to state as fact in a comment that total utilitarianism  can be dutch booked in a similar way that person-affecting views can be dutch booked.

I don't think anyone should aim towards a local decision rule as an ideal, though, so there's an important question of whether your Dutch book argument undermines person-affecting views much at all relative to alternatives. Local decision rules will undweight option value, value of information, investments for the future, and basic things we need to do survive.

I think it's worth separating:

1. How to evaluate outcomes
2. How to make decisions under uncertainty
3. How to make decisions over time

The argument in this post is just about (1). Admittedly I've illustrated it with a sequence of trades (which seems more like (3)) but the underlying principle is just that of transitivity which is squarely within (1). When thinking about (1) I'm often bracketing out (2) and (3), and similarly when I think about (2) or (3) I often ignore (1) by assuming there's some utility function that evaluates outcomes for me. So I'm not saying "you should make decisions using a local rule that ignores things like information value"; I'm more saying "when thinking about (1) it is often a helpful simplifying assumption to consider local rules and see how they perform".

It's plausible that an effective theory will actually need to think about these areas simultaneously -- in particular, I feel somewhat compelled by arguments from (2) that you need to have a bounded mechanism for (1), which is mixing those two areas together. But I think we're still at the stage where it makes sense to think about these things separately, especially for basic arguments when getting up to speed (which is the sort of post I was trying to write).

Views can be transitive within each option set, but have previous pairwise rankings changed as the option set changes, e.g. new options become available. I think you're just calling this intransitivity, but it's not technically intransitivity by definition, and is instead a violation of the independence of irrelevant alternatives.

Transitivity + violating IIA seems more plausible to me than intransitivity, since the former is more action-guiding.

Or I guess maybe it could say that the available alternatives are so relevant, that they can even overwhelm one world being better on average than another for every person the two have in common?

Seems to have worked, thanks!