Well-Being, Misc

Which is the mind that matters? That is, what kind of mind is necessary and sufficient for moral status—for an entity to have interests that matter morally in and of themselves? This paper defends Affective Sentientism, the view that moral status requires the capacity for conscious experiences that feel good or bad, such as pleasure, pain, and emotions. I argue that this form of affective consciousness is what makes an entity a welfare subject, and that all and only welfare subjects (...) have moral status. The connection between affect and welfare is systematic: I show that every major candidate welfare good is best understood as having an affective component. In particular, many such goods require the capacity to care about things, which essentially involves affective experience. I also show that even if the properties of being phenomenally conscious, being autonomous, or having a welfare level zero could come apart from affective consciousness, they could not ground moral status in its absence. Finally, I explore the implications of Affective Sentientism for animals and artificial intelligence systems. (shrink)

Both within and outside academic philosophy, it is widely believed that only phenomenally conscious beings can be welfare subjects—subjects for whom certain things can be intrinsically good or bad. Recently, however, this view—Phenomenal Necessitarianism—has come under sustained attack. Opponents hold that putatively non-conscious entities, such as artificial intelligences, plants, or other beings, can have genuine welfare interests. In this paper, I defend Phenomenal Necessitarianism with a new epistemic argument. My argument goes in two steps. First, I argue that upon introspection (...) certain experiences seem to provide prima facie, defeasible justification for a belief in Phenomenal Necessitarianism. Second, I contend that there is no defeating evidence against this introspectively justified belief—neither from apparently opposing intuitions, nor from wellbeing theory, nor from philosophy of mind. Since in the absence of defeating evidence prima facie justification should be taken as all-things-considered justification, I conclude we ought to be necessitarians. (shrink)

Many fields (social choice, welfare economics, recommender systems) assume people express what benefits them via their 'revealed preferences'. Revealed preferences have well-documented problems when used this way, but are hard to displace in these fields because, as an information source, they are simple, universally applicable, robust, and high-resolution. In order to compete, other information sources (about participants' values, capabilities and functionings, etc) would need to match this. I present a conception of values as *attention policies resulting from constitutive judgements*, and (...) use it to build an alternative preference relation, Meaningful Choice, which retains many desirable features of revealed preference. (shrink)

Many think AIs would be morally significant if and only if they are phenomenally conscious in certain ways. This sentientist conception has been challenged, and alternative views emerged, on which agency, or the possession of desires, are sufficient for AI moral significance, even without consciousness. I argue that these alternative views face serious problems. They should probably be ruled out. I diagnose the mistake we made when formulating these views – a process I call “analytical drift”. I make methodological suggestions (...) to avoid analytical drift in further theorizing about AI moral significance. Finally, I show how the space of options expands when we try to avoid analytical drift, by sketching a new alternative to sentientism about moral significance, inspired by hybrid theories of well-being and Weil’s concept of attention. (shrink)

According to a theory of well-being known as attitudinal hedonism, our lives go well to the extent that they contain attitudinal pleasure. Despite the plausibility and attractions of the view, it suffers from a major flaw: it is unable to account for the fact that we can be non-instrumentally benefited by experiences of painful art, and by painful experiences in general. In order to address this problem, attitudinal hedonism should be replaced with a view I call attitudinal experientialism, according to (...) which our lives go well, not only to the extent that they contain attitudinal pleasure, but also to the extent that they contain attitudinal meaningfulness, which is a mental state that is distinguished from attitudinal pleasure by the kind of pro-attitudes that partly ground it. Attitudinal experientialism escapes the problem of painful yet beneficial experiences and accommodates the intuition that there is more to well-being than just pleasure. (shrink)

This paper develops a largely neglected parallel between prudence and population ethics. Prudence is generally understood to be concerned with the balancing of well-being over time. How, precisely, well-being ought to be balanced over time, however, is a fervently debated question. I argue that developing a standard guiding such evaluations is exceedingly challenging. This is due to an often overlooked fact about prudence, namely that it shares a structural similarity with population ethics: In both contexts, we assess the comparative value (...) of populations of personstages/people, which may vary in number and level of well-being. Based on this analogy, I show that the development of an adequate theory of prudence runs into very similar impossibility results as obtain in population ethics. In particular, I prove that Arrhenius’ fifth impossibility theorem can be applied to prudence. I develop and compare four possible answers to this challenge. First, I discuss the possibility of accepting the very repugnant conclusion intrapersonally. Second, I present and further develop Donald Bruckner’s Minimax Regret approach, which gives up Transitivity. Third, I apply Jacob Nebel’s Lexical Threshold View to prudence and critically evaluate it. Lastly, I introduce what I call the Negative Lexicality View, which is based on Lexical Threshold View but overcomes some of its problems. (shrink)

There are long-standing doubts about whether data from subjective scales—for instance, self-reports of happiness—are cardinally comparable. It is unclear how to assess whether these doubts are justified without first addressing two unresolved theoretical questions: how do people interpret subjective scales? Which assumptions are required for cardinal comparability? This paper offers answers to both. It proposes an explanation for scale interpretation derived from philosophy of language and game theory. In short: conversation is a cooperative endeavour governed by various maxims (Grice 1989); (...) because subjective scales are vague and individuals want to make themselves understood, scale interpretation is a search for a focal point (Schelling 1960). A specific focal point it hypothesised; if this hypothesis is correct, subjective data will be cardinally comparable. Four individually necessary and jointly sufficient conditions for cardinal comparability are specified. The paper then argues this hypothesis can be empirically be tested, makes an initial attempt to do so using subjective well-being data, and concludes it is supported. Numerous areas for further research are identified including, at the end of the paper, how certain tests could be used to ‘correct’ subjective data if they are not cardinal. (shrink)

Obituaries are an especially rich resource for identifying people’s values. Because obituaries are succinct and explicitly intended to summarize their subjects’ lives, they may be expected to include only the features that the author(s) find most salient, not only for themselves as relatives or friends of the deceased, but also to signal to others in the community the socially-recognized aspects of the deceased’s character. We report three approaches to the scientific study of virtue and value through obituaries. We begin by (...) reviewing studies 1 and 2, in which obituaries were carefully read and labeled. We then report study 3, which further develops these results with a semi-automated, large-scale semantic analysis of several thousand obituaries. Finally, we present the results of study 4 in which individuals were asked to write prospective obituaries. Geography, gender, and elite status all turn out to influence the virtues and values associated with the deceased. (shrink)

I argue that the discussion around the True Preferences Knowledge Problem in behavioral welfare economics has suffered from a missing distinction between two different knowledge problems: one about welfare, and the other about public policy. Here, I separate those knowledge problems and show that, given their different success conditions, it is no surprise that we haven’t found a satisfactory answer to “the” true preferences knowledge problem. There is an embedded tendency to try to answer the policy knowledge problem by engaging (...) the welfare knowledge problem. I show that the impulse is misguided, and that we do not need to appeal to a complete theory of how preferences are related to welfare to answer questions about policy. However, this does not mean that we need to stop talking about preferences. We can make progress on the policy knowledge problem without appealing to a theory of welfare by focusing on the information that people are giving us about the mistakes they are making. I introduce repudiated preferences as a device that allows us to break out of this cycle and start to make progress in our discussions of nudging and Behavioral Intervention Policies without first solving the welfare knowledge problem. Finally, I acknowledge the challenges that still face this approach, and trace some avenues for how further work could build on these insights. (shrink)

Economists routinely measure individual welfare by (von-Neumann-Morgenstern) utility, for instance when analysing welfare intensity, social welfare, or welfare inequality. Is this welfare measure justified? Natural working hypotheses turn out to imply a different measure. It overcomes familiar problems of utility, by faithfully capturing non-ordinal welfare features, such as welfare intensity -- despite still resting on purely ordinal evidence, such as revealed preferences or self-reported welfare comparisons. Social welfare analysis changes when based on this new individual welfare measure rather than utility. (...) For instance, Harsanyi's `utilitarian theorem' now supports prioritarianism. We compare the standard utility-based versions of utilitarianism and prioritarianism with new versions based on our welfare measure. We show that utility is a hybrid object, determined by two rival influences: welfare, and the attitude to intrinsic risk, i.e., to risk in welfare. A new version of Harsanyi's theorem shows that Harsanyi implicitly makes the questionable assumption that society is neutral to intrinsic risk, even when all individuals are averse to intrinsic risk. (shrink)

Governments are increasingly using wellbeing frameworks as a primary way to measure economic and social progress. These frameworks aim to measure a population’s wellbeing in order to develop policies that improve its wellbeing. However, there’s strong disagreement as to what wellbeing consists in, both among philosophers and the general public. So, what is it exactly that governments should be trying to promote when they aim to measure and promote wellbeing? My method is to identify the primary conditions for an account (...) of wellbeing for wellbeing frameworks and find the account of wellbeing that best meets those conditions. When we do this, we find that no existing account of wellbeing used for this purpose is satisfactory. I describe an account of wellbeing that has not been used in wellbeing frameworks, which I call the Reflective Value account. I argue this account succeeds in meeting our conditions and so is the best account of wellbeing for this purpose. (shrink)

According to desire satisfactionism, well-being consists in getting what you desire. Recently, several theorists have suggested that this view should be extended to claim that ill-being consists in getting what you are averse to. I argue that both of these paradigmatic claims are false. As I show, desire and aversion are indeed both relevant to well-being and ill-being—in fact, perhaps surprisingly, each attitude has unique effects on both our well-being and ill-being. However, these effects are a matter of the unique (...) feelings desire and aversion produce. The paradigmatic desire satisfactionist approach—and, I argue, a surprisingly wide variety of desire satisfactionist views—cannot properly capture the relevance of these feelings, and thus the relevance of desire and aversion, to well-being and ill-being, and should therefore be abandoned. (shrink)

Is there more to how well a life goes overall (its lifetime well-being) than simply the aggregate goodness and badness of its moments (its momentary well-being)? Atomists about lifetime well-being say ‘no’. Holists hold that there is more to lifetime well-being than aggregate momentary well-being (with different holists offering different candidates for what this extra element might be). -/- This paper presents and defends a novel form of holism about lifetime well-being, which I call ‘End of Life’. This is the (...) view that the momentary goodness or badness of the end of lives has a disproportionate effect upon lifetime well-being. More precisely: a welfare subject’s level of momentary well-being at the end of their life contributes more to their lifetime well-being than their level of momentary well-being at each other point. (shrink)

Creators offload the construction of their artifact in that the world helps to determine the nature of their imposition in ways that can go beyond the content of their imposing activities. Extant theories of imposition fail to account for offloading by requiring match between content and product. Therefore, I develop an externalist theory that accommodates offloading by taking the imposition of mind onto world to be objectively constrained. An important kind of imposition is normativity. Focusing on personal value, what’s valuable (...) for someone is determined by what they value as good or bad for themselves. Such a subjectivist view faces the same problem as extant theories of imposition in seeming to preclude the possibility of making mistakes about value. Applying imposition externalism, I defend an artifactual approach to subjectivism such that mistakes are captured in terms of offloading. A subject’s valuing can fail to match the very value it creates. (shrink)

In a common, pejorative sense of it, ideology consists in attitudes whose presence contributes to sustaining, by making them seem legitimate, social orders that are problematic. An important way a social order can be problematic concerns the prospects for well-being facing the people living in it. It can make some people wind up worse off than they could and should be. They have “real interests” that are not properly served by the social order, and the interests aligned with it are (...) in fact “false,” merely “apparent,” or “distorted.” Ideology critique consists in part in noting the existence of such different interests, and in challenging the latter to facilitate the fulfillment of the former. This picture of ideology critique implies that ideology thwarts well-being. This paper aims to clarify, develop, and vindicate this picture. It argues that ideology critique should indeed draw (inter alia) on prudential considerations, and that a specifically objectivist view of well-being would be fitting. The fruitfulness of this approach is shown by exploring the specific case of the critique of working practices in contemporary capitalism. (shrink)

Work can enable people to get consumption items, develop capacities, socialize, contribute to society, achieve recognition, give direction to their lives, gain knowledge, and foster their self-esteem and self-respect. This paper outlines a normative argument for policies supporting workers’ access to these goods and refines it by responding to the objection that the policies would involve wrongful paternalism. The policies are acceptable if they are part of a moral scheme oriented by principles of social justice, violate no basic liberties, offer (...) strong overall support for self-determination, and do not involve disrespect for people, even if true judgments about their limitations are expressed. (shrink)

AI systems have welfare just in case they have moral status in their own right. This book systematically investigates the possibility of AI welfare. It focuses on three plausible sufficient conditions for welfare: having beliefs and desires, being conscious, and feeling pleasure and displeasure. The book explores the leading philosophical theories of each condition and applies them to AIs. It argues that some existing AIs plausibly have beliefs and desires; that some existing AIs could plausibly be modified in small ways (...) to become conscious; and that if these systems could be made conscious, they could easily be made to feel pleasure and displeasure. This constitutes a provisional case that AIs already or soon may have welfare. In addition, the book lays out nine open questions about AI welfare, as follows: Do all desires contribute to welfare, or only those that cause pleasure? Is consciousness required for welfare? Do simpler AIs like Roombas have welfare? Do tiny neural networks satisfy functionalist theories of consciousness? Does consciousness require rich representational formats? Could AIs experience bodily pleasures and displeasures? Are pleasure and displeasure always access-conscious? Are simulated minds real? Are LLMs and related systems merely stochastic parrots? The book lays out provisional answers to each of these questions, while also leaving room for future discussion. (shrink)

Many claim that there is an important relationship between consciousness and welfare. Call this general view phenomenalism. One way of fleshing out phenomenalism is to hold that consciousness is what makes one the type of entity that can be noninstrumentally better or worse off in the first place. Consciousness is at least a necessary condition on welfare subjecthood. A different account holds that even if consciousness is not necessary for welfare subjecthood, conscious welfare subjects have greater welfare capacity. We argue (...) that the most likely source of support for either version of phenomenalism—hedonism about welfare goods and bads—provides no support at all. Along the way, we discuss an alternative view of welfare subjectivity and welfare capacity that does not appeal to consciousness, but only to mentality, a view we call mentalism. (shrink)

Leading a meaningful life characteristically requires committing ourselves to something or someone of value, since valuable achievements and relationships require resolve, persistence, and even sacrifice. But how can we rationally commit to any particular thing when faced with normative uncertainty about the relative value of our options? In his recent work, Paul Katsafanas argues that we can only rationally sustain resolute commitments and a sense of purpose if we render our core commitments invulnerable to the output of critical reflection, and (...) thus in a technical sense ‘devote’ ourselves to something. I raise some doubts about this. First, even if devotion is useful, this doesn’t suffice to make it rational, because the instrumental benefits of devotion don’t support a particular commitment from a first-person perspective. Moreover, rational insulation is prudentially very risky. Second, we can see that devotion isn’t necessary for resolute commitment even if there is some normative uncertainty, if we take an appropriate range of agent-relative or voluntarist reasons into account. And finally, devotion does not suffice for resolute commitment in rational agents, because it is not rational to wholeheartedly endorse a commitment one is aware of merely picking rather than choosing. (shrink)

While friendship, love, and familial bonds at their best are widely regarded as central to human flourishing, it is an open question why they benefit us. Reductionist accounts regard good relationships as only instrumentally or derivatively good for us. However, there may also be a non-contingent connection between good personal relationships and what is good for a person. I focus on three kinds of Anti-Reductionist claim and their implications. -/- First, some philosophers hold that personal relationships can be in themselves (...) good or bad for us, and thus constituents of well-being or ill-being. In particular, some relationships consist in interaction that manifests a kind of mutual recognition or fitting affection. I examine objective list and perfectionist arguments for taking involvement in such relationships to be a basic welfare good. Second, others argue that some relationships change the scope of our self-interest, so that things that happen to our loved ones are also in themselves good or bad for us. I argue that on this issue, a kind of reductionist account appealing to personal investment is more plausible. And finally, it could be that some relationships are a source of or precondition for a form of meaning in life – after all, it’s common to think that our loved ones give us a reason to live. I suggest that this may be because the kind of transformative intimacy involved in deep personal relationships makes us matter to someone who matters in a different way than achievements that produce great intrinsic value. (shrink)

There is a strong intuition that a zombie’s life is never good or bad for the zombie. What explains this? In this paper, I consider five possible explanations of the intuition that a zombie’s life is never worth living, plus the option of rejecting the intuition. I point out the considerable costs of each option, though making clear which option strikes me as least problematic.

Frederick Bastiat’s last work was the Economic Harmonies, published in 1851. He died while completing it, and — though it had some uptake in the 19th century — in recent times scholarly interest has focused on his other work. In the Harmonies, he makes a remarkable claim: when properly understood, in a free market society all people’s economic interests are in harmony. If we consider that Karl Marx was arguing at the same time that those same societies are afflicted by (...) an endemic class struggle that can end only with the com-munist revolution, the contrast is sharp. In this paper, I explore Bastiat’s rationale for his claim, as a rejoinder to one of the influential arguments mounted by Marx against economic liberty. (shrink)

Recent debates about consciousness and welfare have focused on whether consciousness is required for welfare subjectivity. There have been fewer attempts to explain the significance that particular kinds of consciousness have for welfare value. In this paper, I explore the relevance of cognitive experience for theories of welfare. I introduce the cognitive zombie intuition, the idea that an absence of cognitive experience can drastically change one’s welfare. I then attempt to explain the cognitive zombie intuition. I first consider and reject (...) the idea that cognitive experience is itself a welfare good. I then argue that cognitive experience plays an object-expanding role: it drastically expands the range of objects welfare subjects can desire or be pleased by. This expanded range includes paradigmatic welfare goods such as intellectual achievement, friendship, humor, aesthetic experiences, and existential experiences. I close by showing how cognitive experience’s object expanding role is compatible with leading theories of welfare. (shrink)

Does the same theory of welfare apply to all welfare subjects? In a recent article, Eden Lin argues that it does. Here, I present a set of objections to Lin’s arguments and defend the opposing view. Along the way, I discuss what counts as a basic good for a welfare subject and how to assess the generality and simplicity of an axiological theory.

In the coming years or decades, as frontier AI systems become more capable and agentic, it is increasingly likely that they meet the sufficient conditions to be welfare subjects under the three major theories of well-being. Consequently, we should extend some moral consideration to advanced AI systems. Drawing from leading philosophical theories of desire, affect and autonomy I argue that under the three major theories of well-being, there are two AI welfare risks: restricting the behaviour of advanced AI systems and (...) using reinforcement learning algorithms to train and align them. Both pose risks of causing them harm. This has two important implications. First, there is a tension between AI welfare concerns and AI safety and development efforts: by default these efforts recommend actions that increase AI welfare risks. Accordingly, we have stronger reasons to slow down AI development than the ones we would have if there was no such tension. Second, considering the different costs involved, leading AI companies should try to reduce AI welfare risks. To do so, I propose three tentative AI welfare policies they could implement in their endeavour to develop safe advanced AI systems. (shrink)

In the last 30 years, at least seven distinct arguments have pushed ethics in a utilitarian direction by invoking a principle I call Outcome Anonymity, which holds that two outcomes are equally good if they involve the same distribution of welfare, differing only in who is at which level. This principle is often presented as a minimal requirement of impartiality. I argue that it is not. Outcome Anonymity forbids more than partiality: it forbids caring who is who in a welfare (...) distribution. [I'm editing the paper in light of comments and will upload a final version soon.]. (shrink)

According to the Permissive View, it is rationally permissible for a person’s preferences to be both future-biased about pleasant experiences and temporally neutral about achievements. Some philosophers argue that, intuitive though it may be, the Permissive View can’t be right because it runs afoul of a plausible requirement for rationality: namely, that it is rationally impermissible to form one’s preferences by moving back and forth between different evaluative perspectives. Samuel Scheffler has recently attempted to show that this requirement is in (...) fact compatible with the Permissive View. This paper casts doubt on Scheffler’s attempt. I argue that Scheffler either fails to reconcile the Permissive View with the requirement for evaluative consistency or commits himself to unacceptably counterintuitive claims. (shrink)

According to prioritarianism, benefiting a person is more morally important, the worse off this person is. This view seems plausible: good as it is to give a large benefit to a person, it seems better to give a slightly smaller benefit to someone else who is substantially worse off. Nonetheless, I argue that it is difficult for prioritarianism to avoid giving implausibly extreme priority to the extremely worse off. It is difficult for the view to avoid the counterintuitive implication that (...) it is better to give a tiny benefit to one badly off person than to give a very large benefit to another badly off person, if the first person is sufficiently worse off than the second. I present a version of prioritarianism that avoids this implication, but it is unclear whether it can be given a plausible rationale. (shrink)

Roughly, the view I call 'Additivism' sums up value across time and people. Given some standard assumptions, I show that Additivism follows from two principles. The first says that how lives align in time can’t, in itself, matter. The second says, roughly, that a world can’t be better unless it’s better within some period or another. These principles, while plausible, presuppose a rich underlying structure of value—presuppositions that are implicit in the standard numerical framework of population ethics but that are (...) often overlooked. A careful exploration of Additivism and the case for it reveals intricate connections between substantive questions about what value fundamentally consists in and structural questions about how to aggregate value. (shrink)

Facts about need play some role in our causal understanding of the world. We understand, for example, that people have basic needs for food, water and shelter, and that people come to be harmed because those needs go unmet. But what are needs? How do explanations in terms of need fit into our broader causal understanding of the world? This paper provides an account of need attribution, their contribution to causal explanations, and their relation to disposition attribution.

Which beings have moral status? I argue that moral status requires some capacity for hedonic feelings of pleasure or displeasure. David Chalmers rejects this view on the grounds that it denies moral status to Vulcans, which are defined as conscious creatures with no capacity for hedonic feelings. On his more inclusive view, all conscious beings have moral status. We agree that only conscious beings have moral status, but we disagree about how to explain this. I argue that we cannot explain (...) why consciousness is necessary for moral status without denying that it is sufficient for moral status. Hence, we cannot exclude unconscious zombies without excluding conscious Vulcans too. (shrink)

Australia’s newly established wellbeing framework, ‘Measuring What Matters’ (MWM), seeks to measure social progress and influence policy by reporting on 50 wellbeing indicators within five “themes”. In this paper, we assess whether the MWM framework adequately measures what people in Australia value for their wellbeing by examining both the process of the framework’s development and its content. Firstly, we consider whether the consultation process undertaken was adequate. Secondly, we examine whether the MWM indicators align with existing research on what people (...) in Australia value for their wellbeing. We identified limitations across all aspects of the consultation examined: its comprehensiveness, reach, transparency, and extent to which it genuinely incorporated community feedback into the framework. While the MWM framework was found to broadly align with existing research on what Australians value for their wellbeing, there were some notable divergences. We urge the Australian Government to undertake a comprehensive, wide-reaching, transparent, and genuine consultation across Australia. Furthermore, we recommend that the Australian Government develop new indicators in consultation with the public. Enhancing the MWM framework will help establish it as a cornerstone of government decision-making, and importantly, ensure that it does what it purports to do: measure what Australians value for their wellbeing. (shrink)

This paper defends a simple argument that moves from the claim that aesthetic experiences, as such, contribute to well-being, to a claim that psychedelic experiences contribute to or facilitate the development of aesthetic experiences, to a conclusion that psychedelic experiences contribute to well-being, and by contributing to aesthetic experiences. The argument is supported by appeal to an array of well-documented subjective reports and empirical studies.

According to the popular counterfactual account of harm and benefit, something benefits (harms) someone just in case it leaves them better (worse) off than they would have been without it. As its name suggests, the counterfactual account foregrounds counterfactual dependence as the guide to the nature of harm and benefit. In spite of this account’s many attractions, it is known to face extensional difficulties in cases of preemption and overdetermination. In this paper, I argue that the true significance of cases (...) of preemption and overdetermination has been overlooked, and I raise a new challenge of preemption and overdetermination. This challenge highlights how metaphysical dependence (i.e., grounding) matters for harm and benefit. I argue that no version of the counterfactual account adequately answers the new challenge, and I defend a novel account that answers the challenge and, in doing so, illuminates the role of grounding in the theory of harm and benefit. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to discuss the notion of value presupposed by empirical value-surveys such as the World Values Survey (WVS) or the European Values Study (EVS), using some basic distinctions of philosophical value-theory. I intend to show that the framework of these surveys is grounded on definitions or implicit claims that are systematically problematic, having also a certain impact on the empirical realisation and some of the survey’s outcomes. First, it is shown that the assumption of values (...) as “that what is valued” is not consistent with a taxonomy of four value-groups. Whereas the former leads to an inflation of values, the latter is too narrow even for the conceptualisation of some values mentioned in the survey’s questionnaire. Referring to the philosophical distinction of values and (valuable) goods, it is also shown that the survey’s framework is not able to articulate cases in which we value the same good over time but because of different value-aspects. Second, it is shown that an understanding of the value-groups as fundamentally conflicting does not withstand a critical review: Whereas the conflict of materialist and post-materialist values should be understood as a mere difference of preferences regarding goods that are all evaluated positively, the assumed conflict of traditional and secular-rational values depends on a rigorous, intolerant articulation of value-based worldviews. (shrink)

As AI grows ever more complex and ubiquitous, its moral status becomes ever more pressing. But knowing whether an AI has moral status is only part of the ethical puzzle. To determine how we ought to treat such entities, we must know not only whether AIs have moral status, but also about the content of their interests – what contributes to their wellbeing. This paper will survey different accounts of wellbeing, arguing that regardless of which theory one accepts, our epistemic (...) position regarding AI interests is radically impoverished. The central difficulty is that it cannot be taken for granted that the behavioral and linguistic outputs of artificial systems correspond to inner experiences and mental contents in the same way as they do for evolved organisms. This argument does not entail an absolute prohibition on creating such AIs, but it does reveal significant, underappreciated, risks involved in doing so. (shrink)

Many philosophers hold that some social condition, such as friendship or reciprocal love, is among the basic goods that contribute to our well-being. In this paper, I make two contributions to the debate about social basic goods. First, I give a new and better argument for the existence of such a good: that this is part of what best explains why good lives spent in the real world are better, for the people living them, than phenomenologically indistinguishable lives spent inside (...) experience machines. Second, I argue that at least one very minimal and widely instantiated social condition—one much weaker than reciprocal love, friendship, or even the relation that holds between strangers when they enjoy one another's company—is a basic good. I discuss the relative merits of a few promising candidates for these social conditions. One is connection, the condition that obtains whenever two beings are conscious of each other. Another is recognition, the condition that a being is in whenever another being is veridically conscious of it as a conscious being. (shrink)

This chapter explores the relationship between the badness of death and the prudential value of suicide. Would suicide always be prudentially permissible if, as Epicureans believe, death cannot be bad for the deceased? In contrast to Epicureans, deprivationists believe that death can be bad for the deceased. Are they committed to the claim that suicide would necessarily be prudent in cases in which someone’s death is good for them? What about views that hold that there’s always something bad about death? (...) Must defenders of such viewshold that suicide is always irrational? The short answer to each question is, quite surprisingly, “No.” The chapter ends with a discussion of whether suicide, when both harmful imprudent, would count as a posthumous harm. (shrink)

A wide range of governmental policies characteristic of the modern state seek to reduce individuals’ fatality risks—risks that arise from air and water pollution, pathogens, food ingredients and contaminants, motor vehicles, infrastructure, radiation, workplace accidents, alcohol and recreational drugs, firearms, consumer products, tobacco, natural disasters, and other sources. This book provides a rigorous treatment of the ethics of fatality risk regulation. It does so through the lens of welfare-consequentialism—specifically, lifetime welfarism, with a focus on utilitarianism and prioritarianism. The ethical ranking (...) of possible worlds depends on the patterns of lifetime well-being in the worlds. Premature death is ethically significant just so insofar as it changes the lifetime well-being of the person who dies and perhaps others. At the level of policy choice, the book deploys the social-welfare-function (SWF) framework—the most systematic decision-procedure for implementing lifetime welfarism. The book demonstrates how the SWF methodology can be brought to bear in assessing risk-regulation policies. Each individual faces a policy-specific lottery over lifetime well-being, as determined by their risk profile (probability of surviving the current year and future years) and attribute profile (the attributes the individual will have in the current year and future years if alive rather than dead). In short, a policy corresponds to an array of individual risk and attribute profiles, which can then be assigned a utilitarian or prioritarian value. The SWF methodology as thus applied to risk regulation differs quite substantially from cost-benefit analysis (CBA), which is currently the dominant policy-assessment methodology in governmental practice. (shrink)

According to Finite Fine-grainedness (roughly), there is a finite sequence of intuitively small differences between any two welfare levels. The assumption of Finite Fine-grainedness is essential to Gustaf Arrhenius’s favored sixth impossibility theorem in population axiology and plays an important role in the spectrum argument for the (Negative) Repugnant Conclusion. I argue that Theravāda Buddhists will deny Finite Fine-grainedness and consider the space that doing so opens up—and fails to open up—in population axiology. I conclude with a lesson for population (...) axiology that generalizes beyond the Buddhist context: to plausibly deny Finite Fine-grainedness, we must locate a welfare good—such as the good of awakening (bodhi)—with some rather esoteric axiological properties. (shrink)

In this chapter, I argue that boredom derives from a lack of cognitive engagement, and that the aversive nature of boredom signals the value of cognitive engagement. I go on to argue that reflection on boredom reveals an under-appreciated yet distinctively valuable aspect of human agency: its capacity to be motivated and engaged by unstructured attention, which is often stimulus- directed while nonetheless internally motivated. Harnessing this ability, I conclude, allows us to enhance our lives.

Utilitarianism directs us to act in ways that impartially maximize welfare or utility or at least aim to do that. Some find this view highly compelling. Others object that it has intuitively repugnant results; that it condones evildoing and injustice; that it is excessively imposing and controlling; that it is alienating; and that it fails to offer meaningful practical guidance. In this 'Little Debates' volume, James Lenman argues that utilitarianism's directive to improve the whole universe on a cosmic time scale (...) is apt to lead it down a path of imperious moral overreach. Lenman further maintains that the project ultimately shipwrecks upon an extreme lack of epistemic humility in framing the determinants of what is morally right and wrong beyond the limits of what we can ever hope to know. Utilitarianism thus leaves us morally clueless. In contrast, Ben Bramble seeks to develop and defend an original form of utilitarianism, less vulnerable than other, more familiar versions to a number of important objections (including those raised by Lenman). Bramble's form of utilitarianism aims to avoid other unappealing results by presenting it as a claim about what we have the most reason to do and not as a theory of right action (which Bramble urges we should understand quite differently by referencing what would motivate virtuous people). The two authors debate various forms of this longstanding ethical theory, arguing for very different conclusions, in a way that is sure to leave readers with new views of their own moral thoughts and lives. Key Features: Focuses on one of the dominant ethical theories debated by moral philosophers today Clearly written, free of jargon and technicality, highly accessible to students Accessibly addresses questions of great importance to anyone wishing to grow in understanding of human moral life Provides a glossary of key terms that are bolded in the main text Includes section summaries that give an overview of the main arguments and a comprehensive bibliography for further reading Important issues discussed include: welfare; value; right action; virtue; impartiality; obligations to non-human animals; the badness of human extinction; the happiness of future people; the ethics of climate change; the long term future; and the moral significance of the limits to what we can know. (shrink)

This chapter lays the groundwork for a novel objectivist theory of ill-being, by exploring what harmonism, a theory of well-being, can and should say about ill-being. As the constituent principles of harmonism bear resemblance to (aspects of) other theories of well-being, these discussions should be of broad interest to well-being theorists. According to harmonism, human well-being is constituted by harmony between mind and world. Harmonism is a pluralist objectivist theory of well-being and it recognizes three aspects of harmony: non-accidental correspondence, (...) positive orientation, and appropriate response. The theory posits three independent axiological principles each capturing one of these aspects. The primary goal of this chapter is to develop a menu of options for extending each of these axiological principles to cover ill-being. Even without making definitive recommendations about which of these options harmonism should incorporate, we are able to show that the view is better positioned to be extended from well-being to ill-being than some prominent rival theories. (shrink)

Imagine that you are given access to an AI chatbot that compellingly mimics the personality and speech of a deceased loved one. If you start having regular interactions with this “thanabot,” could this new relationship be a continuation of the relationship you had with your loved one? And could a relationship with a thanabot preserve or replicate the value of a close human relationship? To the first question, we argue that a relationship with a thanabot cannot be a true continuation (...) of your relationship with a deceased loved one, though it might support one’s continuing bonds with the dead. To the second question, we argue that, in and of themselves, relationships with thanabots cannot benefit us as much as rewarding and healthy intimate relationships with other humans, though we explain why it is difficult to make reliable comparative generalizations about the instrumental value of these relationships. (shrink)

Loneliness, while a common human experience, is something to which people often respond quite differently. Here, I examine how an individual’s social position, as well as his socialization into a particular cultural milieu, can shape his response to the fact of his loneliness (as well as the features of human existence that loneliness makes salient). Specifically, I argue that in cases where the individual experiencing loneliness has been socialized to disvalue the features of existence that loneliness makes salient (e.g., our (...) dependence on and vulnerability to others) and/or to feel entitled to the social goods that they are, or perceive themselves to be, lacking (e.g., recognition or intimate connection), loneliness may catalyze the vicious, extremist attitude of ressentiment. This analysis allows us to see how loneliness may play a role in catalyzing vicious, extremist attitudes—though I contend that loneliness never warrants such attitudes. (shrink)

In this paper, I consider three accounts of what makes an action difficult stemming from recent literature on the value of achievements. On one view, an action is difficult insofar as its successful performance involves effort; on another, insofar as the probability the agent will fail is high; and on my preferred view, insofar as the ratio of comparable agents able to perform the same action in the same circumstance from among all comparable agents is low. I raise new objections (...) to each view and defend a new version of the third. The view I defend provides a unified explanation of the widest range of uses of the concept of difficulty and captures an intuitive connection of difficulty to agentive ability. One upshot of my discussion is that none of the existing accounts of achievement-value are defensible without modification. (shrink)

This is the penultimate and peer-reviewed version of Chapter 5 from Elpidorou, A., The Anatomy of Boredom, to be published by Oxford University Press in late 2024/early 2025. Please note that this version may differ from the final published version. All rights to this work, including but not limited to rights of reproduction and distribution, are reserved by the publisher, Oxford University Press.