News

• Samuel Scheffler's main argument in Death and the Afterlife is fallacious. 

  • Specifically, Scheffler argues that we do not regard the impending death of the present generation as catastrophic, but we would regard the absence of future generations as catastrophic. However, the thought experiment used by Scheffler (the book/movie The Children of Men) is a case where both the present and future generations will soon not exist, and it is that conjunction that is catastrophic.

  • Thus this thought experiment does not tell us whether we value the present or future generations more.

• It is a significant challenge to discern what our underlying values are when some of our surface-level value reports/behavior conflict with what we might take to be our values.

• This concern applies to classic arguments (such as in Feinberg 1948) regarding psychological egoism.

• While this paper does not solve the deep problem of finding a method for discerning underlying values, it points in some directions to help us understand our own values regarding future generations.

• It would be better for philosophers and social scientists to work together to judge empirical claims regard our moral psychological attitudes towards future generations. 

• How does this paper fit within my own research programs? I am interested in both environmentalism and consequentialism, and both have much to say about our valuing of future generations. This paper is an exercise in moral psychology whose results are mixed. On the one hand, Scheffler's argument that we in fact care deeply about future generations fails, but there may be other reasons to think that we ought to, and do, significantly value the future. 

1.      (tl;dr overview) We diagnose issues at the core of Pascal’s Mugging (as discussed by Nick Bostrom) and offer the “many Muggers” solution to it (analogous to the “many Gods” response to Pascal’s Wager).

2.      If Pascal refuses to answer the Mugger’s ultimatum question, Pascal still ought to give the Mugger a probability distribution for each of the possible promises the Mugger might make, and then do a utility calculation.

3.      As such, Pascal’s Mugging is equivalent to a St. Petersburg situation, and thus, seemingly, Pascal ought to give the Mugger his wallet.

4.      In fact, Pascal’s Mugging is a greater challenge than St. Petersburg, for two reasons:.

a.  The Mugger’s offer is ever-present to everyone in a way that St. Petersburg is not.

b.  The St. Petersburg problem has two levels of uncertainty (as highlighted by Richard Jeffrey in his response to it): (1) what the outcome of the coin flips will be, and (2) whether the house will come through on their side of the promise. Pascal’s Mugging only has the analogue of (2), since the analogue of (1) is already baked into the utility function of accepting the Mugger’s offer.

5.      Alternatively, Pascal could repeatedly change his probability distribution to avoid falling into the Mugger’s trap, but that would be an ad hoc, unstable, strategy.

6.      Given the outlandishness of the offer, there is just as likely to be another “Mugger” (or, perhaps “anti-Mugger”) who will give Pascal an equally amazing reward only on the condition that Pascal turns down the original Mugger’s offer. This is the reason why Pascal should not give the Mugger his wallet. It is analogous to the “many Gods” response to Pascal’s Wager.

7.      However, discounting tiny probabilities is not appropriate in most situations. Discounting is rational when the tiny probabilities that are salient parts of the option being considered in the choice are symmetrical with previously non-salient tiny probabilities that are parts of other options in the choice.

8.      Speculative final suggestion (that we are exploring in other work): This same reasoning can apply to the St. Petersburg paradox. Specifically, there are “many games” that are possible and have infinite expected utilities, including a game that arises only if one chooses not to play the original St. Petersburg game if offered. The inference from the St. Petersburg game having infinite expected value to a claim that it is rational to pay any finite amount of money to play it is thus invalid.

• I conduct a literature review of the effect of disability on wellbeing. The results are:

  • Disabled people, on average, live good lives.

  • However, the average level of wellbeing among disabled people is less than that of those without disabilities.

  • It is likely that this decrement can partially, and not fully, be explained by ableist social factors.

  • The negative effect on wellbeing is less for those with congenital disabilities as opposed to those with acquired disabilities.

• There are a number of hurdles in conducting a scientific study of the effects of disability on wellbeing, including: 

  • Different studies use different measures (including wellbeing, quality of life, and life satisfaction).

  • Different studies define disability in different ways.

  • Disability studies are observational, with all their attendant complications.

  • However, despite these hurdles, the literature is fairly consistent in what it shows (as noted above).

• I raise a number of further philosophical considerations:

  • What matters is not whether disability is intrinsically bad in some very thin sense, and instead what matters is how disability affects ordinary people, with our already-present set of desires and preferences.

  • It may be better to not make empirical generalizations regarding disability as a whole, and instead generalize at the level of particular disabilities.

• Although the results of this paper reject the view that disabilities are mere differences (as is argued by Elizabeth Barnes), they are still consistent with both (a) an affirmative view of disability, and (b) a rejection of much of what Peter Singer says regarding disability.

• How does this paper fit within my own research programs? (1) I have been developing a pluralistic account of disability, and the idea that outcomes of disability are highly variable across disabilities is a core part of it. Additionally, I have other ongoing work about the nature of disability and testimonial injustices against disabled people (see here for a talk that gives the broad contours of the program); (2) In other ongoing work, I argue for a complex form of consequentialism. Sometimes, people reject what Singer says about disability, and take the flaws in Singer's work to undermine utilitarianism. Although this paper criticizes Singer, it does so on grounds that are consistent with utilitarianism. So one upshot of this paper is that utilitarianism is not as flawed as one might believe. 

• It is rational in some cases to ignore/discount small risks.

• That’s because our cognitive capacities are bounded (in a way discussed by psychologists/behavioral economists), and so we can’t take every little detail into account in our decision-making. Instead, we (rationally) use heuristics.

• This is not contrary to classical expected utility theory; it is just a kind of “two-level” view.

• However, this use of heuristics does not justify a general ignoring of climate-related risks stemming from one’s greenhouse gas emissions.

• This approach also gives an elegant explanation of why other small things that comprise the nitty-gritty of life, like adding one more shake of garam masala to one’s lentils, smoking a single cigarette, and carrying a protest sign, all should be viewed as making *some* expected difference.

• Added bonus #1: This approach can also be used to defend classical expected utility theory against the “small improvements" argument.

• Added bonus #2: I use the quote “Dès qu’il y a vie, il y a danger” from Madame de Staël as an epigraph, which, especially because it is in French, gives the paper quite a bit of mystique.