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Stuart_Armstrong comments on Embracing the "sadistic" conclusion - Less Wrong Discussion
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Comments (41)
That's deliberate, for two reasons. The first is that I think that some non-individual preferences are relevant to population ethics. I don't see them playing a strong role, but I do see them existing - that, say, a fully equal population is at least somewhat better than one with same total happiness and great inequality. Given that those are my preferences, I like to include elements which I feel may have such impacts in my descriptions. People who see only personal preferences should not be affected by the way I phrase the descriptions (just the ultimate happiness/utility/preference satisfaction). And it would be useful for others to see a more complicated and evocative image of how things go, which may trigger new intuitions.
But the main reason I try and do it is because I feel that the debate has gotten too clinical - that we throw around terms like "barely worth living" without really connecting to what they mean. "Barely worth living" is, by modern western standards, really awful - a young girl born into a rural village, fell in love with X at 14 but was raped by Y that year and made to marry him. Working on the land every day with her fading strength eyesight, she found some pleasure in her (very few) surviving children, but they all ultimately pre-deceased her, her favourite son being gutted before her by invaders, who then raped her again and broke her legs. Unable to work much after than, she took to begging in a new village, and found some solace in religious belief and in playing the role of the madwoman, but ended up dying terrified, alone and in great pain.
Or something along those lines, depending on where exactly you put the zero. I think that people who are in favour of the repugnant conclusion should be willing to face exactly what it means to have a life just above zero - if you inflicted that fate on most people today, you'd get deservedly reviled and imprisoned. I can see the worth of being dispassionate in making decisions, but not in choosing your values.
A very valid point, though my gut feeling was that it would have positive externalities as well (people like to feel superior). You can reduce the negative externalities by making the new population docile and unwilling to revolt, and reducing the cross-population empathy. Problem solved! (contrast this with my first point above).
I am very uncertain about where the "barely worth living" threshold is. The best self-introspecting question I can think of to try to get a handle on it is:
Would you rather vividly dream (including all physical pleasures and pains) a day at random in the person's life, or have a dreamless night of sleep?
From your description I guess that this life lies substantially below the threshold (indeed many lives today may be, even in affluent societies). Note that a life which is 'not worth living' for the intrinsic value could easily be worth living for the instrumental values of helping others and leaving a better world behind than without the life.
The debate about the zero level is interesting - Anders told me his zero is lower than I described, that you can get worse and still have a life worth living.
Your idea has merit, but the hedonistic treadmill is a problem - people would not want to dream a life much worse than their own, whatever the absolute value of it.
If this means what it appears to, that takes you outside the realm of welfarist axiologies -- in which case Arrhenius' impossibility results don't even apply.
However, this view can lie well within the realm of welfarist. Only personal preferences need be counted (the welfarist assumption makes no requirement about how they be aggregated).
So I'm not sure what you're saying. I was trying to provide an example where you took the same population and separated the societies, while holding everyone's welfare levels constant. If you accept the welfarist assumption, then this should be exactly as good as the one where they were part of the same society. Is that what you think?
I think trying to be clinical is useful in terms of slicing up the space of interacting factors and discovering which are actually driving our intuitions, and which merely get swept up along the way and tainted by association because of the examples we first thought of.
My understanding is that they would apply even stronger - more extraneous factors you add, the more likely you are to get one or more of the impossibility results (eg you can get the sadist conclusion in "total utilitarianism + intrinsic value for art").
When I said "non-personal preferences", I did not put the cut directly at the welfarist-non-welfarist boundary. But anyway, here are some things I suspect would make it into my finale population ethics:
As you can see, it's far from a well formed whole, yet! Most of these (apart from the birth-death asymmetry, not rep concl, and possibly diversity) I don't hold particularly strongly, and would just prefer some accommodation. ie if most people are part of the same huge, happy monoculture, a much smaller number of people in alternate cultures (with the possibility of others joining them) would be fine.
There definitely a need for clinical detachment, but I think there's also a time for emotional engagement. Decomposing our intuitions may sometimes just destroy them for no good reason (eg how bureaucracies can commit atrocities because responsibility is diffused, and no individual component is doing something strongly wrong).
I think you're confused here. The impossibility result is the theorem that says you get one of these apparently undesirable conclusions. It's a theorem about the class of axiologies which are welfarist (so depend only on personal welfare levels). If you look at a wider class of axiologies, the theorem doesn't apply. Of course some of them may additionally get one of these conclusions as well. It's also possible that we could extend the theorem to a slightly larger class.
Here's another, equivalent, statement of the theorem:
Any system of population ethics does at least one of the following:
Mixed systems (welfarist+other stuff) still fall prey to the argument. You can see this by holding "other stuff" constant, and considering the choices between populations that differ only in welfare. Or you can allow "other stuff" to vary, which makes it easy to violate more of the six conditions (the Dominance principle, the Addition principle, the Minimal Non-Extreme Priority principle, the Repugnant conclusion, the Sadistic conclusion, and the Anti-Egalitarian conclusion), maybe violating them all.
It doesn't seem clear that it is always possible to keep "other stuff" constant when varying welfare?
I guess I don't see how you're defining mixed systems. My first version makes any axiology at all "mixed", since you can just take the reliance on welfare to be trivial (which is a trivial example of a welfarist system).
If you have broader theorems about violating this set of conditions, they would be very interesting to know about.
Actually I'm not sure the anti-egalitarian conclusion is even well-formed for non-welfarist systems. You can look at welfare levels (if you think those exist) to get what looks like a form of the conclusion, but then we might say that what looks like it's anti-egalitarian is not better because of the less equal arrangement of welfare, but for some other, non-welfare, reasons. Which doesn't seem necessarily pathological (if you are happy with non-welfare reasons entering in).
I find that a rather odd statement. Isn't "zero welfare", by definition, the amount of welfare such that any life with greater welfare is a life which it is good to create? It seems like there's a paradox in the conception of "zero welfare". We wish to define such absolute minimum amount of acceptable welfare, but the idea of subjecting someone to the bare minimum of welfare is repugnant.
It's like those "structuring" laws, where it's illegal to not report a transaction with more than some maximum amount of money ... but it's also illegal to arrange transactions with the intent of having them be under that ceiling. If it's illegal to transfer $10,000 without reporting it, then someone who is transferring $9,999 is * obviously* up to no good. But then someone transferring $9,998 is obviously trying to avoid the suspicion that $9,999 would generate, so $9,998 should also be suspicious. If this logic is followed long enough, there would be no amount that wouldn't be suspicious. Similarly, if creating a just-barely-worth-living life is repugnant, then creating any life is repugnant.
Several different points:
First of all, the general point is that reducing a (standard, western) human to "zero welfare" would involve inflicting great pain and suffering upon them, which would get you reviled and imprisoned, with judges unlikely to be impressed by your philosophical justification.
That's a bit question begging, as some ethical systems have zero welfare, but don't generally advocate creating people at that level. My favourite definition, for what it's worth, would be that "lives below zero welfare are not worth creating in any circumstances (unless as instrumental goals for something else)".
Most ethical system that reject the repugnant conclusion also reject that argument. How do they do it? Generally by making the decision on the creation of lives dependent on the existence of other lives. Average utilitarianism would advocate against creating lives below the average, advocate for creating lives above the average (indeed average utilitrianism, uniquely among population ethics as far as I can tell, does not need a "zero" level). Egalitarianism would advocate creating any life above zero that didn't decrease equality, etc...
So all these systems would have some situation in which creating a life just above zero would be good, and (many) situations in which it would be bad.