All of Chris Meacham's Comments + Replies

Yeah, for sure. There are definitely plausible views (like pure consequentialism) that will reject these moral judgments and hold on to IIA.

But just to get clear on the dialectic, I wasn’t taking the salient question to be whether holding on to IIA is tenable. (Since there are plausible views that entail it, I think we can both agree it is!)

Rather, I was taking the salient question to be whether conflicting with IIA is itself a mark against a theory. And I take Pete’s example to tell against this thought, since upon reflection it seems like our ordinary mo... (read more)

I think the appeal of IIA loses some of its grip when one realizes that a lot of our ordinary moral intuitions violate it. Pete Graham has a nice case showing this. Here’s a slightly simplified version:

Suppose you see two people drowning in a crocodile-infested lake. You have two options:

Option 1: Do nothing.

Option 2: Dive in and save the first person’s life, at the cost of one of your legs.

In this case, most have the intuition that both options are permissible — while it’s certainly praiseworthy to sacrifice your leg to save someone’s life, it’s not oblig... (read more)

Sadly, I don’t have a firm stance on what the right view is. Sometimes I’m attracted to the kind of view I defend in this paper, sometimes (like when corresponding with Melinda Roberts) I find myself pulled toward a more traditional person-affecting view, and sometimes I find myself inclined toward some form of totalism, or some fancy variant thereof.

Regarding extinction cases, I’m inclined to think that it’s easy to pull in a lot of potentially confounding intuitions. For example, in the blowing up the planet example Arden presents, in addition to well-be... (read more)

I guess the two alternatives that seem salient to me are (i) something like HMV combined with pairing individuals via cross-world identity, or (ii) something like HMV combined with pairing individuals who currently exist (at the time of the act) via cross-world identity, and not pairing individuals who don’t currently exist. (I take it (ii) is the kind of view you had in mind.)

If we adopt (ii), then we can say that all of W1-W3 are permissible in the above case (since all of the individuals in question don’t currently exist, and so don’t get paired with an... (read more)

Thanks for the write up and interesting commentary Arden.

I had one question about the worry in the Addendum that Michelle Hutchinson raised, and the thought that “This seems like a reason why the counterpart relation really runs him into trouble compared to other [person-affecting] views. On other such views, bringing into existence happy people seems basically always fine, whereas due to the counterparts in this case it basically never is.”

I take this to be the kind of extinction case Michelle has in mind (where for simplicity I’m bracketing currently exi... (read more)