What does the term 'welfare' mean? The dictionary meaning is straightforward ' the health, happiness, and fortunes of a person or group.' We feel confident that given enough information we can- if members of a jury- decide if a particular person's, or people's, welfare has risen or fallen. We may even feel we have a means of specifying such things in money terms. Can we do this for our whole species? Sure. Why not? It seems clear that finding a cure for COVID or cancer would enhance Human Welfare though no doubt some particular group may be adversely affected. Still, we feel there is a 'Hicks-Kaldor improvement'- i.e we could compensate such people from the surplus we gain.
Simon Beard, an expert on 'Existential Risk' writes-
If you have ever studied moral philosophy, and especially utilitarian moral philosophy, chances are that you have come across the ‘Repugnant Conclusion'. This is a commonly cited objection to the view that we should maximise the total amount of happiness in the world. If that were true, the objection runs, then compared with the existence of many people who would all have some very high quality of life, there would be some much larger number of people whose existence would be better, even though these people would all have lives that were barely worth living.
This is clearly a specious argument. Maximizing Welfare now means doing stuff which results in 'Hicks Kaldor' improvements for the existing population. That is all we are concerned with. We don't need to talk about some other population which doesn't really exist.
One possible reply is- 'but surely by adopting pro-natalist policies Welfare increases'? The problem here is that babies can't compensate anyone so long as they are babies. They are consumption goods, not productive resources. They can't make even a notional Hicks Kaldor improvement. No doubt, the parents' welfare is enhanced coz they have a bundle of joy. But this merely means they substituted one type of good for another. Since neighbors and friends, not to mention family members, also gain pleasure from seeing the baby, it is possible that there is a 'Hicks Kaldor' improvement for Society as a whole. However, there are diminishing returns to the joy an additional baby brings. One or two kids are enough for most people. Having a tenth child who is doomed to an impoverished existence isn't necessarily welfare enhancing.
Though seemingly rather innocuous, the Repugnant Conclusion has formed the basis for an increasingly intractable tangle of debates in moral philosophy.
This is because moral philosophy should be using sequent calculi or directed graphs rather than comparing possible worlds which have no causal link to each other.
Like a mathematical fractal, as philosophers have examined it in greater and greater detail, it has seemed to grow in its complexity, and its repugnance. One widely discussed manuscript on the subject, by the Swedish philosopher Gustaf Arrhenius, considers 400 pages of detailed formal arguments on the subject before concluding that the only way out of this mess is to give up on the idea that we can talk about objective ethical truths at all.
It is enough to adopt a notion of oikeiosis- i.e. to say ethics is grounded in what actually exists- and a regret minimizing strategy for objective (i.e protocol bound in a particular manner which gets rid of hysteresis) ethical judgments (which are buckstopped, whereas truths may be infinitely sublatable) to continue to play a role in solving coordination and discoordination games in the manner they always have.
Another colleague once told me that, as far as he was concerned, it was the greatest proof ever devised for the non-existence of God!
The problem is that it would also disprove the existence of cats. Imagine a world in which cats don't exist. Now ask why that world shouldn't exist in a more existential way than a world where cats exist but existence doesn't. Then give up and say 'OMG! Cats don't exist any more than existence exists in a more existential way than non-existence!'
Yet, despite this, the Repugnant Conclusion has become one of the most popular and famous results of modern moral philosophy.
Which is why modern moral philosophy is popular only with credentialized cretins.
What seems to be much less well known is the story of how it came to be, how philosophers have wrestled with it since and how Derek Parfit, who first came up with the conclusion half a century ago, apparently arrived at a solution shortly before he died on New Year's day, 2017. I want to tell you that story.
I want to listen to that story because I still don't get why Parfit wasn't immediately condemned as a cretin.
Derek Parfit was, by all accounts, one of the most brilliant history students of his generation. Having won a scholarship to Eton in 1955, he sailed through the school at the top of every class (except, perhaps, mathematics)
There it is! If Parfit had known from Math, he'd have known about sequent calculi and Graph theory and so on. I'm kidding. Plenty of mathematicians are as thick as shit.
before winning another scholarship to Balliol College Oxford. Not only did he excel academically, but he would edit Isis, the leading Oxford student magazine, play Jazz trumpet, write poetry, get involved in student politics and generally be everything a 1960's Oxford student was supposed to be. A close friend, and fellow editor of Isis, Stephen Fry (no, not THAT Stephen Fry) tells of how Derek once dictated a blistering editorial against the hypocrisy of colleges locking out their students at night, having injured himself climbing back into Baliol after a happy evening spent at Somerville. "I mean," he argued, "they put the spikes there a) to stop you climbing in and b) so you can use them as a foothold!".
This is not hypocrisy. The College acted rationally in creating a visible sign to discourage an activity which, however, it didn't want to see punished by a horrible death.
All this was about to change.
Derek's first real taste of failure came when, after graduating with a first in 1964, he was denied a history fellowship at All Souls, Oxford's only college without any students and one of the most prestigious academic institutions in the world. So he went to America, taught himself a new subject and came back, three years later, to successfully retry for a fellowship, this time in Philosophy.
So the guy wasn't smart enough to be a Historian- not exactly a high I.Q business- and thus found refuge in a department specially dedicated to the feeble minded.
In 1968, the year of the Paris uprising, the assassination of Martin Luther King and the publication of the Population Bomb, Derek worked with two other young philosophers, Jonathan Glover and James Griffin, to establish a new seminar in the Oxford Philosophy department. This aimed, in keeping with the spirit of the times,
which were kray kray
to consider the application of ethical principles to real-world problems.
Apparently, these guys were unaware that ethics is only ethical if it applies to the real world- not worlds where there are no cats which may nevertheless exist in a more existential way than our own cat infested reality.
The original idea was to call it ‘life, happiness and morality.' However, Derek insisted that this wasn't interesting enough and changed its name to ‘death, misery and morality.' It was immensely popular with fellows and students alike.
because Oxbridge at that time had gone totes Monty Python.
Jonathan Glover tells the story of what happened next:
"Each week, one of us would speak, and one of us would open the discussion. At the end of one class, the one who would speak next week would hand over their paper to the one who would reply. One week Derek was to speak on a topic, not yet named, and the idea was that I would reply to him. Derek, always polite, made profuse apologies, but he would not be able to hand over the paper – he had a point that was not quite yet settled, but he would send the paper very soon."
After a week of apologetic phone calls, Derek still hadn’t handed over the paper and asked that Jonathan just listen and reply off the cuff. "Not having the faintest idea of what was coming I cheerfully agreed. It was the first outing of the Population Paradoxes and the Repugnant Conclusion. He covered the board with complicated diagrams representing different possible worlds, with named principles and the objections to them. I sat there aghast. It was as though, with no prior knowledge of Quantum Theory, I had gone to some lecture by Niels Bohr and found myself expected to reply to it. I felt I had been in at the birth of something really important, but at the same time had blundered into playing chess with a grandmaster."
Perhaps, if Parfit had actually handed over his paper, the flaw in his argument would have been immediately detected. In nuce, it is this. We know the world we live in is a possible world. We don't know that any other world we might stipulate is genuinely compossible. Ethical actions are concerned with actions and their consequences in compossible realities knit together by an arrow of causation. They feature comparable trajectories or directed graphs of a particular type.
While Derek would eventually publish that paper, in 1982, his conviction that he still had ‘a point that was not quite yet settled' would remain...
The poor fellow was barking up an imaginary tree.
The Reverend Thomas Malthus was a man with a problem. People’s lustful natures, he believed, were leading them into terrible danger and the world, as he knew it, was coming to an end. Unfortunately for Malthus, while many people, and especially many Christian ministers, had believed this sort of thing for a long time Malthus concluded that these disasters would befall humanity as a result of the laws of nature, rather than the will of God. As he put it
"The power of population is so superior to the power of the earth to produce subsistence for man, that premature death must, in some shape or other, visit the human race. The vices of mankind are active and able ministers of depopulation. They are the precursors in the great army of destruction, and often finish the dreadful work themselves. But should they fail in this war of extermination, sickly seasons, epidemics, pestilence, and plague advance in terrific array, and sweep off their thousands and tens of thousands. Should success be still incomplete, gigantic inevitable famine stalks in the rear, and with one mighty blow levels the population with the food of the world."
This view is to be found in the Biblical story of the Flood and its many analogues in the Scriptures of other sects- e.g. the Zoroastrian tale of Yima.
Yes, the Bible did extol Adam and Eve to ‘be fruitful and multiply,' but Malthus was convinced that we should take this commandment with a pinch of salt. It could not be right for people to have children if they had no care for how these children were to live, and what their quality of life would be. Instead, what was needed was to self-consciously limit our reproduction as a species to keep the population size in line with our ability to feed and care for ourselves. Having too many children meant subjecting them "to distress” and squandering the “great permanent amelioration of their condition" that human and technological progress might otherwise bring. If people refused to see this, and to act accordingly, then the state should not step in and save them, or their children, from the ultimate consequences of their actions, since this would only spread the costs to others, encouraging this behaviour and ultimately making the problem worse.
This was perfectly sensible. Of course, what Malthus was not saying was that kids as young as 5 could make themselves useful in coal mines. Adam Smith was a great believer in the earning power of wee bairns. He was jealous of England's superior ability to exploit its kiddies.
Yet, not all of Malthus's critics were religious. Jeremy Bentham, his contemporary and the founder of modern utilitarianism, believed that population growth was the result of injustice, not of nature. As a utilitarian, Bentham believed that one should seek to maximize the amount of pleasure in the world, and minimize the amount of pain. What is more, he believed that this fact was self-evident and that people only failed to act accordingly because of the conditions in which they lived. Social reforms, such as improving labouring conditions, economic growth, educational provision and criminal justice, would lead to moral reform and allow people to choose what was best.
As a matter of fact, when the lives of working people get better, they stop having babies like crazy. One or two little nippers will suffice. Parents enjoy spending money on them instead of sending them up chimneys or down coal mines.
Bentham was therefore critical of any claim that the poor should be punished for having children by the removal of financial benefits, as Malthus had suggested. Such a policy would not only be unnecessary he believed, but would be actively harmful by increasing the suffering of those who were already burdened by family responsibilities.
Educating kids turned out to be very good for the economy because it enabled endogenous growth of a technological type. But this meant that family size fell. It turned out that babies were a 'Giffen good'- i.e. you have less as your Income rises.
Another critic of Malthus’s proposals was the Victorian philosopher John Stuart Mill. Like Bentham, Mill was a utilitarian and opposed the imposition of sanctions on those with large families because this would do them more harm than good. However, Mill spent much more of his time worrying about the effects of population growth and how it kept people in poverty and suffering, unable to fully benefit from the economic growth of his age. His solution was to be an activist for the availability of contraception, something that neither Bentham nor Malthus dared to propose publicly and which lead to his imprisonment at the age of 17.
This did not prevent him going to work for the East India Company in that year.
Mill also famously disagreed with Bentham, whilst partially agreeing with Malthus, on one key point. What should concern utilitarians, he argued, was not the mere quantity of pleasures and pains that individuals experienced, but their overall quality of life. Furthermore, he went on, some pleasures had such “a superiority in quality, so far outweighing quantity as to render it, in comparison, of small account.” This, for Mill, was part of the real benefits that contraception and population control might bring. Not only would it generally reduce the amount of poverty and suffering in the world, but it would also give more people, and especially more women, the opportunity to enjoy a higher quality of life.
Mill was influenced by his early exposure to French thought. But contraception meant France's population growth fell behind that of Germany. It seems higher liberty and welfare today may have a terrible price in subsequent years.
However, other utilitarians took a fundamentally different approach. Far from being a mere burden, they argued, population growth would mean more people and hence more happiness. Chief amongst these was Henry Sidgwick, a Cambridge philosopher and late Victorian radical who helped to found Newnham College Cambridge (for the education of women) and the Society of Psychical Research (for the scientific investigation of Christian beliefs). Sidgwick argued that "the point up to which, on utilitarian principles, population ought to be encouraged to increase, is not that at which the average happiness is the greatest possible - as appears to be often assumed by political economists of the school of Malthus - but that at which the happiness reaches its maximum."
i.e. where the marginal utility of the newest addition to the race is zero. But, because the marginal cost of child bearing is quite high- this point would never be reached. In any case, because of Knightian Uncertainty re. future states of the world, the regret minimizing strategy would be somewhat pro-natalist.
Malthus, Bentham, Sidgwick and Mill laid the groundwork for most 20th and 21st century thinking about the ethics of population, and of how we should treat future generations.
Nonsense! Only a few eggheads spoke in those terms. Everybody else had perfectly sensible ideas on this issue.
However, their writings seem to pose a great many more questions than they answer. When we consider population policies,
we immediately realize that they are not formulated on the basis of our suggestions. Indeed, sensible people won't talk to us unless well lubricated and in the hope of having a story about this crazy pedant they bumped into who talked utter bollocks.
should we focus on the wellbeing of future generations or on how these policies will affect people here and now?
Why focus on anything if everybody thinks you are a moron?
And, to the extent that we do care about future generations, should we be concerned about their total sum of happiness or wellbeing, the average wellbeing level of the population as a whole or something else, like each individual's quality of life? These questions would remain largely unaddressed for the next century.
Because smart people were doing useful things. Then there was the G.I bill and high income elasticity for Higher Education meant there were lots of adolescents who were willing to waste their time getting a more or less bogus credential and so some stupid pedants could cash in on this type of availability cascade or Ponzi scheme.
Throughout his life, Derek Parfit was a passionately perfectionist photographer. There are many stories of him travelling to Venice and St Petersburg (the only places he thought worth photographing) and standing around on some street corner for hours with his camera ready and waiting for just the right light. He would then spend days touching up these photographs at home until he was satisfied that they were as good as possible.
Yet, for him, the best photograph ever taken was one that was taken on the fly and in far from perfect conditions. ‘Earthrise' was snapped by Bill Anders aboard the Apollo 8 moon orbiter on Christmas Eve 1968. "Oh my God!" Anders was recording saying "Look at that picture over there ... hand me that roll of colour quick, would you."
Parfit argued that this photograph was best because it gives everyone who sees it the sense that we are there, floating in space far from the place we call home. This could not be explained only by the image itself, no mere artist’s impression however accurate or compelling, would have been so worthwhile. It is said that Earthrise divides the earth’s population into two groups, those who were already alive before it was taken, and who can remember seeing it for the first time, and those who have grown up in a world where there this photograph already exists. It changed the world.
No it didn't. Still, it was famous in its day.
One of the things that resulted from the publication of Earthrise was a renewal in thinking about the problems described by Malthus.
Nonsense! The business magnate, Hugh Moore, coined the term 'Population Bomb' in a pamphlet published in 1954. But that type of thinking was already widespread in the Thirties. Evelyn Waugh satirizes it in 'Black Mischief.
In the 30 years following the Second World War the combination of the demographic Baby Boom and the post-war Economic Miracle lead to a huge increase in the size of humanity’s impact on the planet with some pollutants increasing by 900%. Faced with the reality of a single finite planet floating in a black abyss, the unsustainability of this trend began to hit home. This helped to turbocharge the nascent environmental movement of the time and radically altered people's notions of what it meant to live an ethical life.
Clearly, it did no such thing. Gas continued to be guzzled till the Scientific evidence for Global Warming became irrefutable- if that is what has happened.
This new thinking reached its zenith in 1972 with the publication of the influential report ‘Limits to Growth' by the Club of Rome. Its conclusions were stark "If the present growth trends in world population, industrialization, pollution, food production, and resource depletion continue unchanged, the limits to growth on this planet will be reached sometime within the next one hundred years." As it happened, global population growth had peaked at 2% per year in the late 1960s, while the years of high economic growth were almost at an end. However, for a time at least the need for a coherent global population policy seemed extremely urgent. All of a sudden the 19th century's unanswered questions about how we would treat future generations felt a lot more urgent.
China did take draconian action which appears to have paid off. But, it appears, rising Income and opportunities for women to work lead to demographic transition in any case.
Two of the first philosophers to take up this challenge were Jan Narveson and Peter Singer. Both were deeply unconvinced by Sidgwick's argument that we should have more children because these would increase the overall sum of happiness, even if this meant each individual was worse off. For Narveson, this was conclusive proof that utilitarians were getting something badly wrong in how they viewed the world. We should not care about people because they might experience happiness, he argued, rather we should only care about happiness because it is, in fact, good for people. This he summarized in his infamous philosophical slogan ‘we are in favour of making people happy, but neutral about making happy people'.
But nobody sensible was in favor of listening to the fool.
Singer, who was to become one of the most influential, if controversial, philosophers of our times, did not quite share this view though he also rejected Sidgwick's conclusion. For him, it was vital that humanity continued, but not that the population of humans grew any larger. His initial proposal was that we should seek to divide future generations into two separate groups, consisting of those people “who would exist anyway, i.e. independently of whatever choice or policy was under consideration” and those “whose existence would be contingent upon our actions.”
Like making sure your daughter has enough money to have a baby rather than get an abortion. Speaking generally, our ethical intuition is that a rich man should help his grandchild flourish and thrive. We would also feel that a wealthy man who refuses to impregnate his wife because he doesn't want to get stuck with bills for diapers and baby formula is a selfish pig.
We should then treat this ‘core' of people whose existence was guaranteed in the same way that we might treat anyone who already exists, and should promote their welfare as much as possible. However, we should care much less about those whose existence depended on our actions and should not be concerned if we caused them never to be born, so long as this was in the interest of everyone else.
The problem here is that people who teach worthless shite aren't causing anything- except that at the margin a few more cretins get a credential which enables them to believe they aren't cretins at all. But then Madoff's investors thought they'd be rich in their old age. But this sort of fraud we will always have with us. It is perfectly ethical to only focus on stuff where we have an impact. But it is even more ethical to study stuff which allows us to have a bigger impact. If what you are doing more than pays for itself then, by all means, suggest 'Hicks Kaldor' improvements. But if what you are doing is just a wank, everybody will dismiss you as a virtue signaling cretin.
For Derek however, both of these views were incorrect. While he raised many complex objections against both of them, one that he continually returned to is that sometimes a person's life may be so full of suffering and other bad things that we would be forced to accept that this person was harmed by coming into existence.
Nonsense! We aren't forced to accept anything unless someone literally has a gun to our head. Still, at the margin, tax-payers may decide they want to shut down publicly funded medical care which keeps people alive but very miserable.
Given that this is so, it would be wrong to overlook the value of these people's lives, even if they are in the far future or if their existence depended on our actions.
It is not wrong at all to overlook meaningless shite spouted by stupid pedants.
Hence, neither Singer nor Narveson give us excuses for ignoring the harm we might bring to future people, even if it is sometimes compelling to believe that we do not need to worry about the benefits we might give them instead.
Singer & his ilk give you an excuse for wasting your time studying worthless shite even though this harms future people- including your own future kin- because you haven't gotten yourself a useful occupation.
However, he went on to argue, if we only considered the harms we brought to future generations this would have highly counterintuitive results. For instance, it would imply that, even if we believed it was good that the world exists with its current population, because whilst some people suffer most people's lives are worth living, it could be wrong for us to have children who would live in a world that was like our own, or even much better, because that future world might still contain some suffering. Derek labelled this an ‘Absurd Conclusion'.
Yet it is the conclusion many monks and nuns and other celibates have come to. It is perfectly rational to refuse to procreate because you don't want people whom you will love to live in this world.
While there is more than one way to avoid this conclusion, he argued that the route we should take is to accept, right from the start, that every life that is worth living must be in some way good and make the universe better for its existence.
We can avoid any conclusion whatsoever by pointing to a flaw in the logic used to arrive at it. We don't need to accept an even more nonsensical doctrine.
He called this the ‘Simple View'. This view was nothing like a strong as Sidgwick's utilitarianism. However, Parfit realized that it would still face significant problems of its own.
A life dedicated to getting you to suck its cock by torturing you may make the universe better for its existence. But it makes your existence worse. Smash its fucking head in- if it is safe to do so.
"Like my cat, I often simply do what I want to do."
Sadly, humans, like cats, are creatures of habit. They do things they don't really want to do because that is the only way they know to pass the time.
This was the opening sentence of Derek Parfit's philosophical masterpiece, Reasons and Persons. He believed that it was the best way to begin his book because it showed something important about people. Often we are not as special as we think we are. For instance, when people simply do what they want to do they appear to be utilizing no ability that only people have.
If what they want to do is a human activity, the ability to do it is restricted to species of a certain type.
On the other hand, when we respond to reasons, we are doing something uniquely human, because only people can act in this way.
We don't know that. It is more likely than not that the Universe contains species whose reasoning we would currently find unfathomable. But then this may be true of certain species on our own world.
Cats are notorious for doing what they want to do, and the sense of proximity between a cat and its owner pleasingly heightens our sense of their similarity. Hence, there could be no better way for this book to begin.
However, there was a problem. Derek did not, in fact, own a cat. Nor did he wish to become a cat owner, as he would rather spend his time taking photographs and doing philosophy. On the other hand, the sentence would clearly be better if it was true. To resolve this problem Derek drew up a legal agreement with his sister, who did own a cat, to the effect that he would take legal possession of the cat while she would continue living with it.
This was foolish. Oikeiosis is about a natural type of connection. If the cat didn't think it was linked to Derek then it wasn't his cat all. In any case Derek had not in fact gained 'possession' of the cat. All he had got was a residuary control right contingent on his sister dying before the cat did.
Reasons and Persons was far from being Derek's final word on the philosophical problems that had consumed him for the previous 17 years. Indeed, it has been said that Derek only agreed to publish it under pressure from All Souls College who were threatening not to renew his fellowship, and he insisted the publisher accept it in 154 individual instalments so that he could submit each one at the last possible moment, mere days before the book went to press. Yet, the book has become one of the most influential, and heavily cited, works of philosophy published since the Second World War.
But it is only cited by cretins.
It consists of four sections, each of which considers a different set of arguments for why people matter less than we might suppose,
iff we were cretins
and why our reasons for action might be otherwise than they seem.
coz we are as stupid as shit.
In the first part, Derek corrects what he sees as some important errors in moral mathematics.
There is no such beastie.
For instance, he spends considerable time showing how individuals can be said to make a significant moral difference, even when they are only working as part of a much larger group and would achieve nothing on their own.
Talk about the bleeding obvious! Who really believes that Rambo can win a war all by himself?
More importantly, he begins a long argument, which he would continue in his later work, to the effect that many apparently large differences between ethical theories are much less deep than commonly assumed.
Because shite is shite is shite.
For instance, Some moral theories claim that people have special duties to help their own children, even to the detriment of the children of others.
No. There is a duty to help your own kids. There is no duty to harm other kids.
However, he argued, because everyone's children would expect to benefit if parents were more concerned about the wellbeing of children in general,
No. Parents know their own kids. They don't know about all children. The wellbeing of children in general should be left to those who have studied and contributed to that field. Sensible parents defer to the opinion of experts in such matters. They may be told 'your concern for the general wellbeing of children is misconceived. You think they will collectively benefit if we get rid of competitive games and exams and so forth. You are wrong. Studies show... etc.'
rather than always prioritizing their own children even if they could do more to help other people's,
You must 'prioritize' your kids. You must not invade my house to tuck my kiddies into bed.
such theories were ‘collectively self-defeating' if strictly interpreted, and should instead be revised to make them more utilitarian.
What would be more useful would be to declare the entire subject to be a waste of time.
In the second part, Derek attacked the notion that one had decisive reasons to place one's own, long run, self-interest over the wellbeing of others.
There is an information asymmetry. You know yourself better than you know what contributes to the wellbeing of others. Oikeiosis is 'natural' because it allows game theoretic solutions based on uncorrelated asymmetries which in turn support 'separating equilibria' based on public signals.
He did this by proposing a third possible position one might take, recklessly seeking present pleasures at the expense of one's long-run self-interest. Whilst accepting that all three positions might be, in some sense, rational, Derek conclusively showed how any argument for why one should be concerned with what would make one’s life go best overall, rather than merely right now, could be turned to imply that one should instead be concerned with everyone’s wellbeing, not just one’s own.
This could only happen if it ignored information asymmetry and the existence of uncorrelated asymmetries. The only valid reason to do so would be if people could actually practice complete 'antidosis' by swapping bodies.
In the third Part, Derek moved on to the concept of what constitutes a person, and in particular what makes someone the same person today, tomorrow and for their whole life.
This is what Kurt Lewin called 'genidentity'.
He showed how while our concept of what it means to be a person is adequate for dealing with ordinary, everyday cases, there were other cases, which are not hard to imagine and that may well occur one day, in which it breaks down.
So what? Why cross that bridge before we come to it?
For instance, if people underwent the total separation of their two brain hemispheres or were replicated by a Star Trek style matter transporter into two separate individuals in different locations, who both believed themselves to be the original person.
Split-brain patients seem to be able to function quite well because one hemisphere dominates. Similarly, 'replicants' may be able to work together in a useful enough manner.
Other philosophers have devised sophisticated theories about personhood that tell us how we should react to these cases. However, Derek argued that our concept of a person simply cannot deal with them at all. He thus concluded that personhood is a ‘reductive' concept that, whilst tracking certain physical and psychological facts about an individual over time, implies no substantial further fact about the world.
This is foolish. Personhood is a 'Tarskian primitive'. It is undefined. We've all seen plenty of films where clones or replicants or future selves and past selves work well enough together.
In the final part, Derek tackled the problem of how we should ethically think about future generations of people, and deal with the problems of population ethics.
Did he say- 'look around you. Spot the guy similar to yourself doing most for future generations. Emulate him.?' That is the commonsense view. We improve as ethical beings in the same way that we improve as intellectual beings. We find a mimetic target of a superior sort and work hard to be just as good.
Of all the wild and ambitious arguments in Reasons and Persons, this section has proven the most controversial. On consideration, Parfit concludes that one must reject the view suggested by Henry Sidgwick about what a Utilitarian should do - i.e. seek to maximise the total quantity of future happiness. This view, he argued, would imply the Repugnant Conclusion, that enough people who each had a life ‘barely worth living' would be ethically better than some very large number of people who each enjoyed a very high quality of life, and ‘this would be very hard to accept'. Even if we had to accept that this was, collectively, better for all the people who would exist with lives worth living, it would still be a worse outcome, because these people would have a much lower Quality of Life.
The problem here is that we don't know what the future holds. It may be that some lethal virus will be unleashed in the year 2177. Only the descendants of some very poor woman living in a slum or a rain forest survive. Thankfully, she had ten kids before dying of exhaustion. They in turn had babies like crazy. This meant there was a big enough human population to 'bounce back'- though it might take several thousand years. But for these 'Sidgwickians', Humanity would have been wiped out.
Regret minimizing strategies take account of catastrophic risk. We 'hedge our bets' and are content that there is an evolutionarily stable mixture of reproductive strategies.
However, Derek also realized that this was not the end of the story because Sidgwick's utilitarian argument was not the only chain of reasoning that lead to this Repugnant Conclusion. Furthermore, all the other views one might hold, though they might not imply the Repugnant Conclusion, had their own problematic conclusions (including the Absurd Conclusion, which I mentioned earlier, the Sadistic Conclusion, the Ridiculous Conclusion and the Elitist Conclusion).
Pretending that deontic logic can be usefully expressed in other than sequent calculi or directed graphs is what leads to this nonsense. Stop it.
The many technical arguments of this part of the book are hard to summarize - so I will consider just one. A common first move people are tempted to take upon learning about the Repugnant Conclusion is to take the view Sidgwick (probably falsely) attributed to Malthus, according to which it is not the total quantity of wellbeing that we are trying to maximize but rather the average level of wellbeing of people in general. Parfit suggested many counter arguments to this view; however, his most convincing invited the reader to consider two possible worlds, Hell 1 and Hell 2. In Hell 1, very many people all live lives of unendurable suffering, yet they are forced to endure it for many years. They experience no pleasure or other good things, and their lives are full of pain. If any lives are ‘not worth living' it is surely these. In Hell 2, these same people will all live and have lives that are even worse, for instance, they will be just as bad but twice as long. Many other people will also live in this world and their lives will be very nearly, but not quite, as bad as that of the people in Hell 1. They will still suffer, but their agony will be slightly less. If there are enough of these people in Hell 2, then the average wellbeing level of the population will be slightly higher than in Hell 1, but surely we would not take the view that Hell 2 is, therefore, better than Hell 1? Clearly, it is worse.
Why would we take any view whatsoever? We don't live in a steady state equilibrium. We evolved under Uncertainty. We have no experience of or method of evaluating, or reason for evaluating, worlds very different from our own. In any case, suicide would thin out both worlds pretty quickly.
Eventually, Parfit came to the conclusion that the best way of avoiding the Repugnant Conclusion would be to revive the argument put forward by John Stuart Mill, that some changes in a person's ‘Quality of Life' might be so important that they would render any change in the mere quantity of wellbeing in the world morally insignificant.
The same may be said for 'Quality of Death' or 'Quality of queef'. You can't tell me that all the evils of the world would not be greatly ameliorated if the Queen had made a practice of queefing vigorously while addressing Parliament.
If only someone had sat down with him and taught him the rudiments of mathematical logic and graph theory, his life would not have been wasted.
Eventually, he would become a monomaniac; devoting his entire life to philosophical problems and nothing else.
He himself was the problem with philosophy.
One of the problems that concerned him greatly was the ‘non-identity problem'. As we have already seen, Derek believed that future people mattered a great deal and that any future person's life would make the world better if their life was ‘worth living', to say otherwise would be absurd. He also believed that it would be better if future people lived better lives, and worse if they lived worse lives. However, he could not get rid of the nagging doubt that this view was more problematic than it might, at first, seem.
Because suicide is easy, 'worth living' just means 'not topping oneself the moment the guards are distracted'
To appreciate this, we need to realise just how unique everyone is. I am not simply ‘Simon Beard' or ‘My parents' second son', I am an individual who is defined, at the very least, by a complex genetic code and a precise set of environmental conditions. These were themselves determined by a wide range of circumstances, not only who my parents were but the precise time and manner in which they conceived me, not only the exact sperm and egg the fused at that time, but the complex process by which the genetic material from each interacted in producing my own, unique, genetic code. Had any of these things been other than they were, I would never have existed.
We don't know that. It is likely that we will be routinely changing our genetic code without worrying too much about how this would alter our haecceity. Moreover, as evolutionary biology improves, we are likely to see that there are all sorts of epigenetic factors which tend to reduce 'uniqueness' or hysteresis effects.
This is a problem because it follows that somebody contemplating an act or choice that might affect ‘me' may also have some influence upon the conditions in which I come into being, and hence who I am.
But we don't know there is any such problem. One may as well say 'hearing the Queen queef may change me into something rich and strange. Yet any action by any person may cause the Queen to queef through some complicated chain of events. Thus my haecceity is imperiled by every choice everybody else makes! Could you guys just stop making choices?'
If they do, then their choices cannot be said to benefit, or harm, me, because had they acted differently then I would not have existed.
Surely that is 'harm'? The Terminator, in the original movie, is trying to prevent the future savior of the Human Race from being born. He is considered a villain. Only when he tries to prevent this outcome, in the sequels, does he become a hero.
However, if that is so, and philosophers generally agree that it is, then why should they be concerned about my welfare at all? Yes, they affect whether I exist at all, but even that cannot be said to benefit me, because had I not existed, then there would be no me who was harmed by this.
But you do exist. You object to people trying to stop you existing by kicking your head in. You also object to time travelling robots who want to kill your Mummy and Daddy before you were born.
It is natural to assume that when we say
stupid virtue signaling
things like ‘anyone's life is good, and makes the world better, if that person's life is 'worth living' then this is good because it benefits the person who gets to live that good life. However, the non-identity problem suggests that this is not so. Either we must say that the lives of future people do not matter, or we must say that they are good, but not because they benefit the people who live them.
No. If we are sensible we should only say 'lives of future generations matter to x because we see x taking such and such actions to benefit people who will only be born 20 years from now.' Thus Nelson, ensuring that England was planting oaks which would mature in a hundred years, was credited with great care for the defense of his country even in the distant future. Obviously, Nelson did not know that the Royal Navy would abandon oak for steel to build its ships.
For most of his life, Derek believed that we must say the latter. He labelled this the ‘No Difference View' because it implied that it made no difference whether a person is actually benefited by living a good life or not, but only that this good life exists.
How foolish! Living a good life is beneficial because good means 'of benefit'.
However, he was deeply dissatisfied by this conclusion.
Then, over 30 years after the publication of Reasons and Persons he finally saw what he believed to be a fundamental mistake he had been making all of these years. In October 2016, he announced during a lecture in Oxford "I want to try and undo some of the damage I did" before setting out where he felt that he, and by extension many of the most eminent philosophers of the day, had been going wrong.
In the end, the problem seems almost trivial.
It wasn't a problem at all. It was sheer stupidity.
Derek was convinced that it had been incorrect to say that my life’s being good only benefits me if it makes the world better for me, i.e. if it is better for me than my non-existence. Instead, my life might be good for me simply because it was good in absolute terms, even though it could not be said to be better or worse for me relative to non-existence.
Why stop there? Why not say my death, or my farting, or the Queen's queefing, are all good in absolute terms? But so is just bashing the keyboard at random- .q2ejhif1qfqihrtw!
To put this another way, for more than 30 years he had been working on the problem of how to assign a value to my absence from the world for me.
If you are paying a lot of money to a hitman to shoot you in the head- that assignment is easy to make.
However, he now realized that one should not conflate the value of absence with the absence of value. The world in which I exist has value for me, the world in which I do not exist has no value for me.
This is silly. The world where my great-grand nephews and nieces flourish, but I do not, may be of considerable value to me. I might work hard so as to leave them a tidy fortune.
Hence, though it may not be ‘better' for me, my coming into existence can still be said to be ‘good for me'.
But anything at all- including the Queen queefing in your face- could be said to good for you.
With this simple move, Derek concluded that we might escape this problem without implying the No-Difference View. This would not mean that that coming into existence with a good life was a benefit of the same kind as already existing and having our lives improved in some way (he thought it wasn’t), but we do have a way to coherently argue that good lives are good because they are good for the people living them.
If this is coherence what is cretinism?
Derek wrote up his arguments into a lengthy paper ‘Future People, the Non-Identity Problem and Person Affecting Principles' which he submitted to the prestigious journal Philosophy and Public Affairs along with a note saying that the submitted draft was missing a conclusion and that he hoped to improve the article further with the aid of reviewer comments. The paper ended on a rather downbeat note, stating that while it resolved the Non-Identity problem, the principles it contained would still imply the Repugnant Conclusion. He was nevertheless consoled by the fact that these principles "would be only one of our beliefs" and that we might justifiably accept other principles that could yet avoid this conclusion.
Philosophy needs something like a 'Reverse Mathematics project'. Cut down the axioms (or principles) to the bare minimum by using a better system of logic.
Derek submitted the paper on January 1st, 2017 and sent copies of it to a few colleagues for their comments and feedback. Then, quite suddenly and without prior warning, he died. One of those colleagues says that the e-mail in which Derek had sent him this paper and the e-mail informing him of Derek's death sat one above the other when he opened his computer the following morning.
So, he ceased existing just when he thought he had an argument for why existence is a benefit. Sad.
Derek Parfit was famously a fast and creative thinker.
In a shite field.
He used to advise students and colleagues to set up autocomplete shortcuts on MS Word for their most commonly used phrases to boost their productivity, unaware that very few other philosophers felt that their productivity was being restricted by their typing speed.
Productivity?
Despite this, he published sparingly. He hated to commit himself to arguments unless he was certain of them. What he did produce however were numerous, and lengthy, drafts of papers and books (at least two of which never saw the light of day) that were widely circulated amongst the philosophical community and even more voluminous comments and responses to other philosophers on how they could improve their arguments. Likening Derek to an iceberg would be mistaken. Up to 10% of an iceberg is above the waterline, whereas I doubt if even 1% of Derek's work has ever been published. As one of his obituaries noted ‘When Derek Parfit published, it mattered!'
but only to people who didn't matter at all.
Thus, while Derek died before he could definitively set out how he thought we should avoid the Repugnant Conclusion; his thinking on the subject was already becoming clear.
In 2014, Derek was awarded the Rolf Schock Prize in Logic and Philosophy, perhaps the most prestigious award for philosophers and the closest thing we have to a Nobel Prize.
Everybody has heard of the Nobel and the Fields Medal. This is the first time I've come across this Schock dude. Apparently he was rich but failed to make his mark as an academic. Then he died.
As part of this, a symposium was held in his honour at the Swedish Academy of Sciences at which Derek gave a lecture. The organizers of that symposium insisted that the text of that lecture was published in the journal Theoria, and this gives us the only conclusive statement of Derek's final views about his Repugnant Conclusion.
In it, Derek asks us to imagine that ‘there would be no art, or science, no deep loves or friendships, no other achievements, such as that of bringing up our children well, and no morally good people', how could that be anything other than a moral tragedy, even if there was also ‘much more welfare in total?'
It may be the moral comedy we actually live- at least in affluent areas. Art and Science and passionate relationships may be the delusions we need only when times are very very bad. If we are rich and secure, it may be wise to laugh at our pretense of passionate commitment when the truth is we are just going through the motions.
Duke Vincentio says in 'Measure for Measure'-
Be absolute for death; either death or life
Shall thereby be the sweeter. Reason thus with life:
If I do lose thee, I do lose a thing
That none but fools would keep: a breath thou art,
Servile to all the skyey influences,
That dost this habitation, where thou keep’st,
Hourly afflict: merely, thou art death’s fool;
For him thou labour’st by thy flight to shun
And yet runn’st toward him still. Thou art not noble;
For all the accommodations that thou bear’st
Are nursed by baseness. Thou’rt by no means valiant;
For thou dost fear the soft and tender fork
Of a poor worm. Thy best of rest is sleep,
And that thou oft provokest; yet grossly fear’st
Thy death, which is no more. Thou art not thyself;
For thou exist’st on many a thousand grains
That issue out of dust. Happy thou art not;
For what thou hast not, still thou strivest to get,
And what thou hast, forget’st. Thou art not certain;
For thy complexion shifts to strange effects,
After the moon. If thou art rich, thou’rt poor;
For, like an ass whose back with ingots bows,
Thou bear’s thy heavy riches but a journey,
And death unloads thee. Friend hast thou none;
For thine own bowels, which do call thee sire,
The mere effusion of thy proper loins,
Do curse the gout, serpigo, and the rheum,
For ending thee no sooner. Thou hast nor youth nor age,
But, as it were, an after-dinner’s sleep,
Dreaming on both; for all thy blessed youth
Becomes as aged, and doth beg the alms
Of palsied eld; and when thou art old and rich,
Thou hast neither heat, affection, limb, nor beauty,
To make thy riches pleasant. What’s yet in this
That bears the name of life? Yet in this life
Lie hid moe thousand deaths: yet death we fear,
That makes these odds all even.
People used to talk like that because they didn't have Netflix. Sad.
Derek concluded that it could not. However, this did not mean we should abandon Utilitarianism, or Derek’s Simple View. Instead, he suggested ‘another, better view', we should accept utilitarian principles and other principles as well. Specifically, he believed that we should all accept the following claim ‘If many people exist who would all have some high quality of life, that would be better than the non-existence of any number of people whose lives, though worth living, would be, in certain ways, much less good.'
Why accept any sort of claim from which you don't gain some tangible benefit? Why not say- 'go away and come back with a better claim. This time, try to avoid talking bollocks.'
Yet, was this not the view he had dismissed as crazy 30 years before?
I think the wording is different- but I can't say I greatly care.
The solution Parfit proposed was that art, science, love, friendship and the other ‘best things in life' must not be valuable simply because they were preferred by the people who enjoyed them, as Mill had proposed, but that they must be valuable in ways that other kinds of good thing are not. Controversially, it would follow from this that different values cannot always be measured on a single scale, either narrowly, in terms of pleasure and pain as Bentham had suggested, or even using the broadest possible conception of wellbeing, what makes someone's life good or bad for them.
So Parfit had merely rediscovered the aggregation problem for posets of a certain type. But this does not matter greatly. There is always some multiplicative weighting update algorithm which is ethically regret minimizing (and thus may not be on the 'Pareto front'). That's all we need to gain Schelling focal solutions to coordination and discoordination problems of a practical type.
Derek begins his argument for this conclusion at the relatively small scale:
“There can be fairly precise truths about the relative value of some things.
No. There can be fairly precise judgments in this regard. But a judgment is not necessarily a truth. The former is buckstopped. The latter may be infinitely sublatable.
One of two painful ordeals, for example, might be twice as bad as the other,
in the judgment of some person or group
by involving pain of the same intensity for twice as long. But in most important cases relative value does not depend only on any such single, measurable property.
Value is a judgment, not a truth.
When two painful ordeals differ greatly in both their length and their intensity, there are no precise truths about whether, and by how much, one of these pains would be worse.
There are judgments. We would pay x to avoid the one but only y to avoid the other. That gives us a 'relative value'.
There is no scale on which we could weigh the relative importance of intensity and length.
Yes there is. We all make such judgments all the time.
Nor could five minutes of ecstasy be precisely 7.6 times better than ten hours of amusement.”
If you are indifferent between spending 7.6 times as much on the former as the latter then this is indeed the case.
However, he believed that it had its fullest, and most profound, implications when applied at the the scale of of human history as a whole. When we consider such profound changes as the loss of science, art, love or friendship then this is not merely ‘roughly comparable' with a gain in the total quantity of wellbeing, but incomparability. As he argued, ‘This great qualitative loss would, I believe, make [this] in itself a worse world".
So, Parfit was as stupid as Sen. The fact is no 'qualitative loss' would be suffered by us if their oeuvre had never existed. Still, by showing that their particular branches of the Academy are rotten, we help lower the prestige of Higher Education and, at the margin, may save young people from that Moloch.
Amongst the many reasons why Derek was initially sceptical about this kind of philosophical move is that it might be elitist.
Why not simply add twerking and queefing as items of a qualitatively superior kind essential for human flourishing? That would satisfy the hoi polloi.
If we argued that ‘the best things in life' were incomparably better than mere wellbeing would we not be lead to the conclusion that we should only really care about the best-off people, who actually enjoyed these things, and not about the great mass of humanity who did not? Furthermore, would we not be claiming that those things that happened to matter most to philosophers happen to be the most important things in life, and worthy of any amount of sacrifice by others to achieve. In the end, however, Derek concluded that this was not so, "if we care greatly about the quality of life, being in this sense perfectionists, that would not make us elitists, who care most about the well-being of the best-off people." Some may feel this is yet to be proven
In fact, Derek Parfit cared deeply about the wellbeing of the worst off, and in particular about the alleviation of suffering. Along with a small group of other philosophers he helped to inspire the Effective Altruism movement, which encouraged people to do the most good that they can do, by
not talking bollocks and getting useful jobs? No such luck.
thinking more about how they use their time, giving considerably more than they currently do to charity, and being more critical about the ultimate effects of their actions in the world.
The problem with doing 'second order good' is that 'first order good' gets crowded out. You end up with hysterical virtue signaling and toxic wokeness.
Perhaps Derek's deepest held belief was that, contrary to much of popular opinion, there are objective facts about what we ought to do. This is what he meant when he talked about ‘reasons', and it was the recognition of these facts, either intellectually or merely by the application of common sense, that he saw as setting people apart. A cat cannot help its carnivorous ways, and it cannot help but follow its instincts to hunt and to kill, even if it no longer needs to.
I suppose cats will soon be genetically modified to supply a more 'woke' market.
However, people understand that our actions can produce suffering. Once we become aware of this we seem to face a choice. Either we make a conscious attempt to dismiss this fact (animals don't really suffer, nothing we can do could reduce the amount of suffering in the world) or we feel we ought to change our behaviour, for instance by becoming vegetarian or giving money to charity.
But we may do so even if we don't believe our actions produce suffering.
One of Derek's driving passions, therefore, was the concern that legitimate disagreements about the nature of morality would disguise these facts and give people the impression that there were no moral truths.
It is enough for moral judgments to exist- which they clearly do- to avoid nihilism.
Scientists have disagreed about the ultimate nature of things for thousands of years, but few have doubted that they are studying the same empirical reality.
No. They may agree that certain observations are empirical and 'objective' in the sense that everybody doing the same thing would get the same result but they don't agree at all that any of their own mathematical models are the same as each other or necessarily the same as that used by a colleague.
Similarly, Derek argued, moral philosophers might disagree about the nature of morality, but they should all accept that they are ultimately searching for the same morality truth, ‘climbing the same mountain’ as he put it.
This is nonsense. Moral philosophers- like the rest of us- think most other moral philosophers are concerned with mole hills they have themselves thrown up by their blind burrowings. They regard each other- truth be told- as a nuisance.
Disagreements about the value of future generations formed an essential part of this problem.
Simply using a discounting rule for Cost Benefit Analysis solves the problem.
However, they were by no means the most significant part. Hence Derek felt compelled to move further and further away from these issues as he explored the nature of disagreement in ethics (what we ought to do) and eventually meta-ethics (what it even means to say ‘what we ought to do'). However, ultimately, and unlike many of his contemporaries in these fields, Derek desperately wanted to make a difference in the world, and not only in moral philosophy.
He could have done this by actually doing it- setting up an OXFAM or Amnesty or something of that sort. A guy who is very effective in doing first-order good soon has imitators and acolytes. Mimetics makes the world better. Maiuetics is the couvade of pedants.
Hence, all his books ended with a peroration concerning what most needs doing, and the importance of doing it. Though he focused on moral philosophy to the exclusion of all else for much of his life, one shouldn’t overlook the fact that Derek did this because he was convinced that it was the most he could contribute to ensuring that what most needed doing was done.
The same could be said of David Icke- except lots of people actually read David Icke.
Derek had hoped to write a 5th book, On What Matters Volume 4, in which he would present the theories that he had been working on concerning the ethics of future generations and in which he could finally achieve the goal he had set out to achieve back in 1968, of applying the principles of moral philosophy to real-world problems. He would never complete it. However, by inspiring others to work in Effective Altruism, and giving them sound arguments to support their convictions that people can, and should, do a lot more good than they currently do, this does not seem to matter so much. His work was, ultimately, worthwhile.
But Effective Altruism is worthless. It has found a reason to prefer second order good to doing actual first order good. So now all you have is every crooked Corporation pretending it is actually saving the planet.
By the time that I, and indeed most people who worked with him, met Derek, the brilliant student of 1968 was hardly recognisable in the monomaniacal moral philosopher we knew. Yet in a way, and one in which Derek himself would have surely approved, it lived on as Derek supplied what he felt he was best at, good philosophical arguments, to a community that was able to achieve what he alone could not.
Fuck have these guys achieved? A cult of the techie billionaire who is impatient of elected politicians? But Donald Trump was once thought of as a smart guy. Do we really want a President Musk?
“What now matters most” Derek argued on the final page of his final book, published a few weeks after his death “is how we respond to various risks to the survival of humanity.”
STEM subjects- or even the proper practice of Law & Accountancy & Marketing & Plumbing- may help here. Moral Philosophy is useless.
However, in line with his controversial views about the value of future generations, Derek did not simply take the line, suggested by other philosophers, that that badness of human extinction lay solely in the many future people who would no longer come into existence, most of whom would have lives worth living. Rather he saw the real tragedy in human extinction as something greater:
“Life can be wonderful as well as terrible, and we shall increasingly have the power to make life good. Since human history may be only just beginning, we can expect that future humans, or supra-humans, may achieve some great goods that we cannot now even imagine … Some of our successors might live lives and create worlds that, though failing to justify past suffering, would have given us all, including those who suffered most, reasons to be glad that the Universe exists.”
Or that Queens can queef.
Arguments about the Repugnant Conclusion have not ceased because Derek Parfit is no longer here to contribute to them, and it seems unlikely that everyone will accept his solutions to the problems they raise. However, what mattered to Derek was not just getting moral philosophers to agree, but ensuring that their arguments could help us to understand the reasons we have to do what needs doing, to ensure the survival of humanity, reduce global poverty and fulfil our potential as a species, and, through this understanding, lead us to achieve these goals.
The problem here is 'ensuring the survival of humanity' is stuff Sciencey guys can actually do. If an asteroid is hurtling towards the earth we don't round up the world's best philosophers. We want rocket scientists and guys who know about quantum bombs and stuff of that sort.
We already have reasons to do stuff based on our natural interests or 'oikeiosis'. We don't need anybody to come along to give us reasons to have those reasons. Why? It is obvious that Queenji won't queef unless we are all nice, not naughty. David Icke will explain this in his next book. Then Humanity will become very nice. As soon as Naughtiness disappears the Queen's speech will be replaced by the Queen's queef. That will redeem all the suffering and misery set in motion by the Big Bang.
No comments:
Post a Comment