Ethics and ExistencePub Date : 2022-01-20DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192894250.003.0021
S. Segall
{"title":"Quarantined Prioritarianism","authors":"S. Segall","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780192894250.003.0021","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780192894250.003.0021","url":null,"abstract":"While utilitarianism is vulnerable to a Repugnant Conclusion with regard to populations of variable sizes, prioritarianism, it has been observed, does even worse. Because it gives greater weight to utility at lower absolute levels, prioritarianism encounters a Super Repugnant Conclusion. It is not surprising, then, that in his last published paper on prioritarianism, Derek Parfit argued that the priority view ought not to apply to cases involving ‘different people’. Prioritarianism, in other words, ought to be ‘quarantined’, and restricted to ‘same people’ cases. This chapter advances four related claims with respect to quarantined prioritarianism. First, contra Parfit it shows that it is far from obvious that prioritarianism ought to be quarantined in the first place, and that doing so entails a certain cost, namely sacrificing its alleged ‘completeness’. Second, that if prioritarianism is, for some reason, to be quarantined, then that should hold, contra Michael Otsuka, with respect to Different Numbers Choices and never with respect to Same Number Choices. Third, this ‘narrow’ quarantining approach is in fact consistent with other tenets of Parfit’s axiology that we have good reason to endorse (such as his ‘No Difference View’, and his views on the Value of Existence). And fourth, it is shown that future generations do, after all, present a certain difficulty to standard formulations of prioritarianism (e.g. Nils Holtug’s), and that a minor yet important revision to how we understand the priority view is called for.","PeriodicalId":299804,"journal":{"name":"Ethics and Existence","volume":"172 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-01-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124186555","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Ethics and ExistencePub Date : 2022-01-20DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192894250.003.0005
Patrick Tomlin
{"title":"The Impure Non-Identity Problem","authors":"Patrick Tomlin","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780192894250.003.0005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780192894250.003.0005","url":null,"abstract":"Some of Derek Parfit’s most significant work concerns the non-identity problem. Briefly put, this is the problem of how, morally speaking, we should understand cases in which we can act in one way, and produce persons with sub-optimal lives, or act in another way, and produce different persons with better lives. Discussions of the non-identity problem tend to assume that it is a single problem, raising a single set of moral issues. This chapter seeks to complicate this picture. It introduces ‘Impure Non-Identity Cases’. These are cases in which a policy, or group of acts, is a non-identity case, and so nobody is harmed, or made worse off, by the policy, or group of acts, but some (and maybe even all) of the individual acts within the policy or group are not non-identity cases, and are harmful. The chapter investigates the moral implications of such cases, and the problems and questions they raise, aside from those raised by ‘Pure Non-Identity Cases’.","PeriodicalId":299804,"journal":{"name":"Ethics and Existence","volume":"7 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-01-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"117132360","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Ethics and ExistencePub Date : 2022-01-20DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192894250.003.0020
M. Otsuka
{"title":"Prioritarianism, Population Ethics, and Competing Claims","authors":"M. Otsuka","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780192894250.003.0020","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780192894250.003.0020","url":null,"abstract":"In his restriction of prioritarianism to cases in which the same people would exist in all the possible outcomes, Parfit stakes out an unstable position, both for himself and more generally. There is no plausible rationale for a prioritarianism that is so restricted, which is consistent with the key features of Parfit’s elaboration and defence of this view and his other commitments. The principles that might be appealed to, in an attempt to justify such a restriction, give rise to a different view—one that is sensitive to the presence or absence of the competing claims of different individuals, where both the existence and the magnitude of these claims are determined by gains and losses to individuals in a manner that is not fully captured by Parfit’s prioritarian weighting.","PeriodicalId":299804,"journal":{"name":"Ethics and Existence","volume":"36 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-01-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"117159513","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Ethics and ExistencePub Date : 2022-01-20DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192894250.003.0014
S. Beard, Patrick Kaczmarek
{"title":"On Theory X and What Matters Most","authors":"S. Beard, Patrick Kaczmarek","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780192894250.003.0014","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780192894250.003.0014","url":null,"abstract":"One of Derek Parfit’s greatest legacies was the search for Theory X, a theory of population ethics that avoided all the implausible conclusions and paradoxes that have dogged the field since its inception: the Absurd Conclusion, the Repugnant Conclusion, the Non-Identity Problem, and the Mere Addition Paradox. In recent years, it has been argued that this search is doomed to failure and no satisfactory population axiology is possible. This chapter reviews Parfit’s life’s work in the field and argues that he provided all the necessary components necessary for a Theory X. It then shows how these components can be combined together and applied to the global challenges Parfit argued matter most: preventing human extinction, managing catastrophic risks, and eradicating global poverty and suffering. Finally, it identifies a number of challenges facing his theory and suggests how these may be overcome.","PeriodicalId":299804,"journal":{"name":"Ethics and Existence","volume":"6 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-01-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133561434","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Ethics and ExistencePub Date : 2022-01-20DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192894250.003.0003
M. Roberts
{"title":"The Value and Probabilities of Existence","authors":"M. Roberts","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780192894250.003.0003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780192894250.003.0003","url":null,"abstract":"The purpose of this chapter is to explore the Better Chance Puzzle and, with that puzzle, a question not entirely resolved by Derek Parfit in Reasons and Persons or in his later work: whether, other things being equal, an additional worth-having existence makes things better. The Better Chance Puzzle commences with the surely correct claim—the Better Chance Claim—that the fact that a given choice creates a better chance of a future person’s coming into existence often makes an otherwise wrong choice permissible. A fertility pill might, for example, come with side effects that burden a future child. But if taking the pill is necessary for that child to have any significance chance of existing at all, and the existence itself is worth having, the choice to take the pill is, we think, permissible. The Better Chance Claim is (however quietly) used in the construction of many of the most powerful versions of the nonidentity problem, including Parfit’s own risky policy and depletion examples. At the same time, Parfit introduces us to what he calls the Person-Affecting Intuition, the idea that, other things being equal, the addition of the worth-having existence doesn’t make things better. Though Parfit himself considered the intuition problematic, we may nonetheless continue to find it compelling. And thus the puzzle: how can the better chance of existence, in some sense, make things morally better when the actual fact of the additional existence is capable of no such thing?","PeriodicalId":299804,"journal":{"name":"Ethics and Existence","volume":"51 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-01-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134425067","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Ethics and ExistencePub Date : 2022-01-20DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192894250.003.0017
G. Arrhenius
{"title":"Population Ethics and Conflict-of-Value Imprecision","authors":"G. Arrhenius","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780192894250.003.0017","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780192894250.003.0017","url":null,"abstract":"Parfit (2016) has suggested a new way of avoiding the paradoxes and impossibility theorems in population ethics by revising our beliefs about fundamental axiological concepts such as “equally good” and “better than”. More specifically, Parfit suggests that “We might claim that…given the conflict between…values, [w]orlds are only imprecisely comparable, and would be imprecisely equally good.” From this it follows that many of the comparisons of different future populations will involve imprecise comparisons and hence that transitivity of “better than” might fail. Parfit suggests that this move in combination with an appeal to lexically superior values will open up a way of avoiding the Repugnant Conclusion without implying other counterintuitive conclusion, and thus solve one of the major challenges in ethics. This chapter tries to clarify Parfit’s proposal and evaluate whether it, or a possible development of it, will help us with the impossibility theorems in population ethics.","PeriodicalId":299804,"journal":{"name":"Ethics and Existence","volume":"51 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-01-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124333664","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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