Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…I guess many people have something like this intuition that, yeah, if you change the identities of people in the future, such that you can’t see any correspondence between them in the two different scenarios, then perhaps it doesn’t matter exactly what you do because there’s no significant person you can identify who’s worse off. Do you think this is a very strong counterargument to those views? Here’s a tension I think that we all have to face up to. Parfit talks about something called the person-affecting principle. How does your action affect some particular person? But if you’re willing to make aggregate judgments and engage in an active aggregation, saying some kinds of societies are better than others or some policies are better than others, there’s something in the micro foundations of that judgment that’s fairly nonindividualistic. People want to be consequentialists, and they want to be pure individualists sometimes. It’s not actually a fully happy marriage of views. And the notion that, once you jam together different measurements of well-being, you’re making a collective judgment about the overall course of history even slightly Hegelian. You could also think of this book as a Hegelian defense of liberty. I think I slightly messed up the explanation of the person-affecting issue there. Because often, what’s going on is people want to say, “If you change the number of people in the future, that can’t necessarily be good or bad because there’s no specific individual in both cases who is worse off or better off. The people who exist in one scenario are not in the other. They’re only there in one case, so you can’t say that they have a higher welfare than a specific person in the other scenario.” But then when you point out that, “Well, almost everything you do is going to result in there being no correspondence between the list of people in one scenario and the list of people in the other scenario. So it doesn’t matter whether you bury this nuclear waste that’s going to greatly harm people in the future in one case.” People tend not to like that conclusion. That just seems very counterintuitive and wasn’t really what they were aiming for. So you’re going to take the total view here, where we just sum up the consequences of our actions on lots of different people.…

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