Against population ethics

People love to have their cake and eat it too. They want to maintain that they have no preferences about how the future of the universe turns out (and therefore can't be called out on any particular of those preferences), and yet also spend resources affecting the future. As my tone suggests, I think this is wrong, and that arguments for such a position are rationalizations.

Why rationalize? To defend the way you currently make decisions against abstract arguments that you should change how you make decisions. But just because people use rationalizations to oppose those abstract arguments, doesn't mean the abstract arguments are right. 

I think the assumption that there is one correct population ethics is wrong, and that it's totally fine for each person to have different preferences about the future of the universe just like they have preferences about what ice cream is best, and it's fine if their preferences don't follow simple rules (because human preferences are complicated). But this is a somewhat unpalatable bullet to bite for many, and I think it isn't really the intuitive argument to hit on to defend yourself (realism/universalism is intuitive).

It sounds like you are rejecting utilitarianism and consequentialism, not just population ethics.

It sounds like your story is similar to the one that Bernard Williams would tell.

Williams was in critical dialog with Peter Singer and Derek Parfit for much of his career.

This lead to a book: Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline.

If you're curious:

• Williams talk on The Human Prejudice (audio)
• Adrian Moore on Williams on Ethics (audio)
• My notes on Bernard Williams.

In case you hadn't seen it, there's a post on the EA forum [EA · GW] which argues that if you accept both utilitarianism and try to resist scope insensitivity, there's no way to escape stuff like the Repugnant Conclusion.

I hope the reasoning is clear enough from this sketch. If you are committed to the scope of utility mattering, such that you cannot just declare additional utility de facto irrelevant past a certain point, then there is no way for you to formulate a moral theory that can avoid being swamped by utility comparisons. Once the utility stakes get large enough—and, when considering the scale of human or animal suffering or the size of the future, the utility stakes really are quite large—all other factors become essentially irrelevant, supplying no relevant information for our evaluation of actions or outcomes.

The post even includes a recipe for how to construct new paradoxes:

Indeed, in section five Cowen comes close to suggesting a quasi-algorithmic procedure for generating challenges to utilitarianism.^[9] [EA(p) · GW(p)] You just need a sum over a large number of individually-imperceptible epsilons somewhere in your example, and everything else falls into place. The epsilons can represent tiny amounts of pleasure, or pain, or probability, or something else; the large number can be extended in time, or space, or state-space, or across possible worlds; it can be a one-shot or repeated game. It doesn’t matter. You just need some Σ ε and you can generate a new absurdity: you start with an obvious choice between two options, then keep adding additional epsilons to the worse option until either utility vanishes in importance or utility dominates everything else.

In other words, Cowen can just keep generating more and more absurd examples, and there is no principled way for you to say ‘this far but no further’. As Cowen puts it:

Once values are treated as commensurable, one value may swamp all others in importance and trump their effects… The possibility of value dictatorship, when we must weigh conflicting ends, stands as a fundamental difficulty.

One way to get out of this predicament, while getting different problems, is via accepting incommensurable values:

If we accept a certain amount of incommensurability between our values, and thus a certain amount of non-systematicity in our ethics, we can avoid the absurdities directly. Different values are just valuable in different ways, and they are not systematically comparable: while sometimes the choices between different values are obvious, often we just have to respond to trade-offs between values with context-specific judgment. On these views, as we add more and more utility to option B, eventually we reach a point where the different goods in A and B are incommensurable and the trade-off is systematically undecidable; as such, we can avoid the problem of utility swallowing all other considerations without arbitrarily declaring it unimportant past a certain point.

I think you've mistitled this.  "Against universal ethics" or "against objective ethics" might be closer to the position you seem to espouse.  If you don't believe that people are ever morally homogeneous based on definable characteristics, and/or you don't believe there is any non-indexical preference to the state of the universe, you're going to have trouble engaging with most moral philosophers.  "What you like is good for you, what I like is good for me, there's no aggregation or comparison possible" doesn't get papers published.  Or, once you go Crowley, you never go back.  

For instance, if I choose to bring one more person into the world, by having a child (which, incidentally, we just did!), that decision is primarily about what kind of life I want to have, and what commitments I am willing to make, rather than about whether I think the world, in the abstract, is better or not with one more person in it.

Would you take into account the wellbeing of the child you are choosing to have? 

For example, if you knew the child was going to have a devastating illness such that they would live a life full of intense suffering, would you take that into account and perhaps rethink having that child (for the child's sake)? If you think this is a relevant consideration you're essentially engaging in population ethics.

Agree with this. I had a related comment here [LW(p) · GW(p)]; the brief summary of it would be that 

• it can be possible to set up population ethical dilemmas in which we reason according to an extremely decontextualized frame and only according to a couple of axioms that have been defined for that frame
• however, if we want to learn something from this that's relevant for real life, we need to re-contextualize the conclusions of that reasoning and indicate how they interact with all the other considerations we might care about
• without doing that recontextualization, it's impossible to know whether the results of population ethical experiments are any more weighty or relevant for anything than the results of much more obviously absurd decontextualized dilemmas, such as "other things being even, is it better for objects to be green or red". 
• at the same time, there's a tendency for some people to make a move that goes something like "but there might be situations where you really do have to make the population-ethical choice, and if you refuse to consider the question in isolation you can't decide where population levels are significantly influenced by your decision". which is a reasonable argument for trying out the decontextualization. but often there's a sleight of hand where the results of this decontextualized analysis are then assumed to be generally significant on their own, glossing over the fact that they are really only useful if you also do the re-contextualization step.

Simply put: Utilitarianism is wrong. 

Slightly more wordy: The adherents of utilitarianism take as an article of faith that only these final world states matter. Just about everyone acts as if they don't actually believe only final world states matter. These disagreements you are having here are pretty much entirely with said idea. Basically the entirety of humanity agrees with you.

Technically, that means utilitarians should change that view since humans actually value (and thus have utility for) certain paths, but they don't and they keep writing things that are just wrong even by the coherent version of their own standards. Utilitarians are thus wrong.

Your speculation that your professed beliefs are incompatible with altruism is also wrong, though it's trickier to show. Improving the world as you see it to be by your own lights is, in fact, the very basis of a large portion of altruism. There's nothing about altruism that is only about world-states.

For instance, if someone likes the idea of orphans being taken care of, they could be against taxing people to pay for orphanages, but instead founds some (good ones) with their own money for that purpose, that is both an improvement to the world by their standards, and clearly altruistic.

I'm copy-pasting a comment I made on the EA forum version of this post [EA · GW]: 

Hey, you might enjoy this post ("Population Ethics Without Axiology") [EA · GW] I published just two weeks ago – I think it has some similar themes.

What you describe sounds like a more radical version of my post where, in your account, ethics is all about individuals pursuing their personal life goals while being civil towards one another. I think a part of ethics is about that, but those of us who are motivated to dedicate our lives to helping others can still ask "What would it entail to do what's best for others?" – that's where consequentialism ("care morality") comes into play.

I agree with you that ranking populations according to the value they contain, in a sense that's meant to be independent of the preferences of people within that population (how they want the future to go), seems quite strange. Admittedly, I think there's a reason many people, and effective altruists in particular, are interested in coming up with such rankings. Namely, if we're motivated to go beyond "don't be a jerk" and want to dedicate our lives to altruism or even the ambitious goal of "doing the most moral/altruistic thing," we need to form views on welfare tradeoffs and things like whether it's good to bring people into existence who would be grateful to be alive. That said, I think such rankings (at least for population-ethical contexts where the number of people/beings isn't fixed or where it isn't fixed what types of interests/goals a new mind is going to have) always contain a subjective element. I think it's misguided to assume that there's a correct world ranking, an "objective axiology," for population ethics. Even so, individual people may want to form informed views on the matter because there's a sense in which we can't avoid forming opinions on this. (Not forming an opinion just means "anything goes" / "this whole topic isn't important" – which doesn't seem true, either.)

Anyway, I recommend my post for more thoughts!

Your view here sounds a bit like preference presentism:

For instance, if I choose to bring one more person into the world, by having a child (which, incidentally, we just did!), that decision is primarily about what kind of life I want to have, and what commitments I am willing to make, rather than about whether I think the world, in the abstract, is better or not with one more person in it.

Compare:

Apart from comparativists, we have presentists who draw a distinction between presently existing people and non-existing people (Narveson 1973; Heyd 1988); necessitarians who distinguish between people who exist or will exist irrespective of how we act and people whose existence is contingent on our choices (Singer 1993); and actualists who differentiate between people that have existed, exist or who are going to exist in the actual world, on the one hand, and people who haven’t, don’t, and won’t exist, on the other [...]

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/repugnant-conclusion/#:~:text=apart from,on the other

You would be in good company. Scott Alexander sympathizes [LW(p) · GW(p)] with presentism as well, and according to the latter source also Peter Singer (though not according to the SEP quote above). Eliezer Yudkowsky also flirts with it.

If it were by force or conquest, I would reject the idea, not necessarily because of the end, but because I don’t believe that the ends justify the means.

In ideal utilitarianism, you have to tally up all the effects. Doing something by force usually implies a side effect of people getting hurt, and various other bad things. 

(Although, does this mean you are against all re-distributive taxation? Or just against robin hood? )

This is an old dilemma (as I suppose you suspect).

Part of the difficulty is the implicit assumption that all possible world-states are achievable. (I'm probably expressing this poorly; please be charitable with me.)

In other words, suppose we decide that state A, resulting from "make the lives of some people worse, in order to make the lives of some less-well-off people better" is better (by some measure) than state B, where we don't.

If the only way to achieve state A is "by force or conquest" (and B doesn't require that), the harm that results from those means must be taken into account in the evaluation of state A. And so, even if the end-state (A) is "better" than the alternative end-state (B), the harm along the path to A makes the integrated goodness of A in fact worse than B.

In yet other words, liberty + human rights may not lead to an optimal world. But the harm of using force and conquest to create a more-optimal outcome may make things worse, overall.

This is an old argument, and none of it is original with me.