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Future Generations: A challenge for Moral Theory, FD-Diss
Abstract
Arrhenius, G. 2000: Future Generations: A Challenge for Moral Theory. viii+234#? pp. Uppsala. For the last thirty years or so, there has been a search underway for a theory that can accommodate our intuitions in regard to moral duties to future generations. The object of this search has proved surprisingly elusive. The classical moral theories in the literature all have perplexing implications in this area. Classical Utilitarianism, for instance, implies that it could be better to expand a population even if everyone in the resulting population would be much worse off than in the original. The main problem has been to find an adequate population theory, that is, a theory about the moral value of states of affairs where the number of people, the quality of their lives, and their identities may vary. Since, arguably, any reasonable moral theory has to take these aspects of possible states of affairs into account when determining the normative status of actions, the study of population theory is of general import for moral theory. A number of theories have been proposed in the literature that purport to avoid counter-intuitive implications such as the one mentioned above. The suggestions are diverse: introducing novel ways of aggregating welfare into a measure of value, revising the notion of a life worth living, questioning the way we can compare and measure welfare, counting people's welfare differently depending on the temporal location or the modal features of their lives, and challenging the logic of axiological and normative concepts. We investigate the concepts and assumptions involved in these theories as well as their implications for population theory. In our discussion, we propose a number of intuitively appealing and logically weak adequacy conditions for an acceptable population theory. Finally, we consider whether it is possible to find a theory that satisfies all of these conditions. We prove that no such theory exists.
... This new utilitarian theory, called 'discounted' or 'mild' utilitarianism, avoids the many demandingness problems faced by classical utilitarianism. 1 1 Other modified versions of utilitarianism that attempt to avoid the ...
... In the above example, discounted utilitarianism says that option No Farming is better than option Farming, even though there is no-one in option No Farming for whom No Farming is better. By putting option No Farming above option Farming, this conclusion violates the dominance addition condition [1], which says that adding an extra life with a positive utility (the farm animal) and increasing the happiness of the rest of the population (the human in option Farming), cannot make things worse. ...
... Can we refer to a future individual by using a name? What tells against this suggestion is that future individuals do not 57 See for example Gale (1968b);Teichmann (1991); Benn (1998);Arrhenius (2000). 58 When we say that their being alive is future, we ascribe the property of futurity not to the individuals, but to the states of affairs in which they feature, see 2.3 above. ...
philosophical jargon are called “Tenses”. To claim that Tenses are real is to claim that they are satisfied, i.e. that something in fact possesses them. The debate between realists and antirealists concerning Tense has so far been conducted in ontological terms. Realists about Tense (so-called A-theorists) claim that things really do have Tenses, antirealists (Btheorists) deny this. Most of them claim that Tenses can be reduced to tenseless properties. This book criticises the current debate between A-theorists like Quentin Smith and B-theorists like D. H. Mellor on methodological grounds. It suggests an alternative strategy for how the debate might proceed, where insights from other kinds of realism-debates are made useful for the debate about Tense. This book makes the original attempt to apply two general frameworks for realism-debates, developed by Michael Dummett and Crispin Wright, to the debate about Tense. Here the focus lies on the correct interpretation of the truth-predicate for statements of the disputed kind. The aim of this publication is to show that the debate about the reality of Tense should be reinterpreted as a debate about the truth and semantics of statements which ascribe Tenses.
... What is the meaning of intergenerational justice and how can it be done? (see, for instance, Andina, 2018;Arrhenius, 2000;Beyleveld, et al., 2015;Boonin-Vail, 1996;D' Amato, 1990;Davidson, 2008;De Young, 2000;Gheaus, 2016;Gündling, 1990;Jeurissen & Keijzers, 2004;Locke, 1987;Meyer, 2016;Mulgan, 2008;Ng, 1989;Norton, 1982;Parfit, 1982;Partridge, 2001;Reichenbach, 1992;Sikora & Barry, 1978;Thompson, 2010;Tremmel, 2006;Vanderheiden, 2006;Weiss, 1990;. Instead of looking at the issue from a rights approach, the perspective is proposed to consider it in terms of responsibilities for leaving a world to the future without a shortage of resources, without pollution, and with a healthy and viable environment, and without restricting their space for decision-making. ...
Financing ecological and other grand global challenges is faced with intertwined issues at both the institutional side and the public side as elements of the tragedy of the quintuple horizons. These horizons are approached from a systemic perspective, with attention on the key players involved. Starting with (system) banks, their conservative attitude is explained in terms of the iron cage theory. Next, green challenges are pictured as 'very wicked' problems, varying in moral intensity. The conflicting roles of the public as citizens and as consumers are described in terms of Kohlberg's theory of cognitive moral development. Responsibilities for future generations are clarified by distinguishing the responsibility as accountability and the responsibility as virtue. Assignments for a green future are explored from the perspective of green financing with a focus on what should be expected from the public at large in multiparty democratic societies, keeping in mind that other societies are characterized by diverting economic and political dynamics, and hence, other modes of operating¹.
¹ See, for instance, for China: Macaire & Naef (2022) and Liu, Wang, Zhang & Zhang (2019).
... Mit Blick auf zukünftige Generationen kann es demnach -vor dem Hintergrund eines Schwellenwertansatzes -geboten sein, eine kleine Population, der es sehr schlecht geht, in die Welt zu bringen anstatt eine sehr viel größere, der es bedeutend besser geht (deren Wohlergehen aber unter dem Schwellenwert liegt). Und ebendies hält Arrhenius für eine sadistische Konsequenz (Arrhenius 2000: 73f., Huseby 2012 (Very Sadistic Conclusion). Die Rolle der Populationsgröße für die moralische Beurteilung einer Welt wird durch eine Adaption des Beispiels deutlich, in der für P 1* (wie für P 2 ) eine Größe von 10 Personen angenommen wird. ...
Population ethics studies the tradeoff between the total number of people who will ever live, and their quality of life. But widely accepted theories in modern cosmology say that spacetime is probably infinite. In this case, its population is also probably infinite, so the quantity/quality tradeoff of population ethics is no longer meaningful. Instead, we face the problem of how to ethically evaluate an infinite population of people dispersed throughout time and space. I argue that axiologies based on spatiotemporal Cesàro average utility are the most appropriate way to make this evaluation, because their unique properties make them superior to other axiologies that have been proposed.
In this paper I present an account of a distinctive form of ‘practical’ or ‘deliberative’ uncertainty that has been central in debates in both ethics and metaethics. Many writers have assumed that such uncertainty concerns a special normative question, such as what we ought to do ‘all things considered.’ I argue against this assumption and instead endorse an alternative view of such uncertainty, which combines elements of both metaethical cognitivism and non-cognitivism. A notable consequence of this view is that even if there are objective and irreducible truths about how we ought to act, all things considered, the ‘central deliberative question,’ as it’s sometimes called, doesn’t concern such truths. Instead, that question doesn’t have a true answer.
According to the person-affecting view, the ethics of welfare should be cashed out in terms of how the individuals are affected. While the narrow version fails to solve the non-identity problem, the wide version is subject to the repugnant conclusion. A middle view promises to do better – the Interpersonal Comparative View of Welfare (ICV). It modifies the narrow view by abstracting away from individuals’ identities to account for interpersonal gains and losses. The paper assesses ICV’s merits and flaws. ICV solves the non-identity problem, avoids the repugnant conclusion, and seems to accommodate the person-affecting intuition. But it cuts too many things along the way: ICV obstructs the advantage of the wide view to account for all future individuals’ welfare, abandons the intuitions that underlie the narrow view, and even violates its own presuppositions by turning out to be merely pseudo person-affecting.
Population axiology concerns how to rank populations by the relation “is socially preferred to”. So far, population ethicists have (with important exceptions) focused less on the question of how to rank population prospects, that is, alternatives that contain uncertainty as to which population they will bring about. Most public policy choices, however, are decisions under uncertainty, including policy choices that affect the size of a population (such as climate policy choices). Here, we shall address the question of how to rank population prospects by the relation “is socially preferred to”. We start by illustrating how well-known population axiologies can be extended to population prospect axiologies. And we show that new problems arise when extending population axiologies to prospects. In particular, traditional population axiologies lead to prospect-versions of the problems that they are praised for avoiding in the risk-free settings. Moreover, we show how the axiom of State-Wise Dominance allow us to extend any impossibility theorem in population axiology to impossibility theorems for non-trivial population prospects, that is, prospects that confer probabilities strictly between zero and one on different populations. Finally, we formulate impossibility results that only involve probabilistic axioms.
The repugnant conclusion can be formulated as follows: For any population consisting of people with very high positive welfare, there is a better population in which everyone has a very low positive welfare, other things being equal. As the name indicates, this conclusion appears unacceptable. Yet it has proven to be surprisingly difficult to find a theory that avoids it without implying other very counterintuitive conclusions. Moreover, the conclusion is a problem not just for total utilitarians or those committed to welfarism but for all moral theories according to which welfare matters at least when all other things are equal, which arguably is a minimal adequacy condition for any moral theory. And, not the least, how to deal with it has implications for the present generations’ duties to future generations and intergenerational justice. The question as to how the repugnant conclusion should be dealt with has thus become one of the cardinal challenges of modern ethics, and the inquiry into what it shows about the nature of ethics has opened up many new avenues for research. This chapter covers the different suggestions in the literature on how to do deal with the conclusion, both on the axiological and on the normative levels. Moreover, the conclusion and different ways of deriving it are explained in detail.
This is my PhD thesis in practical philosophy. The main text is in Swedish, with an English 15 pp. summary at the end.
Arguments put forward for five positions on the moral status of abor- tion are discussed. The positions range from the view that abortion may be right only if it is necessary to save the woman's life, to the claim that while most safe abortions requested by the woman are right, some abortions would be wrong not to perform and there are ca- ses where it is right to perform abortion even if the woman does not want it. The arguments are found invalid and/or irrelevant. It is argued that a tenable position on the moral status of abortion has to be supported by an act-utilitarian moral theory called BHU.
Application of BHU yields that it is impossible to obtain good reasons for any of the positions. However, this is also true of most other moral theories. Four tentative conclusions seem plausible: 1) Abortion is sel- dom right in countries where most women lack opportunities to have cheap, safe legal abortions. In other countries, however, many abor- tions can be right. 2) In many of the justifiable cases of abortion, the woman faces a moral dilemma where she cannot avoid acting wrongly even if she acts rightly. 3) It is in general wrong to omit abortion if the foetus is so severly deformed that it would develop into a person with a life worth not living. It is also in general wrong to omit abortion if this results in abortion being performed at a later time. 4) In very rare cases it may be right to perform abortion even if the woman does not want it, but in practice we lack all means of identifying these cases
Act Utilitarianisms divide into Total and Average versions. Total versions seem to imply Part’ s “Repugnant Conclusion”. Average versions are proposed in part to avoid the Repugnant Conclusion, but these are subject to “Mere Addition” arguments as detailed by Hudson in “The Diminishing Marginal Value of Happy People”. Thus, various intermediate versions of utilitarianism, such as the one investigated by Hurka in “Value and Population Size”, take on interest. But Hudson argues that such compromise theories are subject to the mere addition arguments, and are therefore no improvement over Average Utilitarianism. I disagree: some such compromise solutions escape Hudson’s Mere Addition arguments.
Kevin Sauvé has recently argued in this journal that David Gauthier's conception of ‘morals by agreement’ is inimical to the development of long-term productive investment and sustainable levels of resource exploitation. According to Sauvé, this is because society is confronted with an intergenerational interaction problem whose strategic equilibrium is suboptimal (a ‘Prisoner's Dilemma’). However, unlike the ‘contemporaneous Prisoner's Dilemma’ that Gauthier analyzes, the intergenerational version cannot be solved by an appeal to constrained maximization. As a result, Sauvé claims, Gauthier cannot effectively address the question of intergenerational justice.
The portion of Sauvé's argument that concerns me is the following:
Gauthier solves the contemporaneous Prisoner's Dilemma by ensuring that each person will cooperate only if all others cooperate, and indeed his conception of morality is aimed at ensuring that all individuals incur the costs as well as the benefits of social cooperation. But the contemporaneous solution cannot be applied to the Intergenerational Dilemma: if each generation will save for the next only if the previous generations have also saved, none will ever save. (170)
