Rob Wiblin: evaluation

Transcript context

…Derek Parfit, in his 1984 book, Reasons and Persons, had an example that, say, you would bury nuclear waste, and several generations from now, the waste would, say, kill millions of people. But the fact that you buried the waste would change the timings of subsequent conceptions. So the people who are being killed a million or, say, a thousand years from now, they wouldn’t have been born otherwise unless you had buried the waste. You could argue, “Well, I haven’t harmed anyone at all. By burying the waste, I caused them to be born.” They die of a terrible cancer when they’re 27 years old, but on net, this is still following the Pareto principle. I think I have an argument why that’s wrong, namely the case where you don’t commit the very harmful act. You might have different identities of people, but you’ll have a much greater aggregate of good in the more distant future. And it’s not about individual identities. So there’s something a little oddly collectivist about my argument, you might say. 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.…

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