On the other hand, it seems a bit arbitrary to say that something should count as CEV if two human beings are involved, but shouldn’t count as CEV if one human being is involved, given that human individuals aren’t perfectly rational, integrated, unitary agents. (And if two humans is too few, it’s hard to say how many humans should be required before it’s “really” CEV.)
Conversely, it seems odd to me to select / construct our terminology on the basis of questionable—and, more importantly, controversial—frameworks/views like the idea that it makes sense to view a human as some sort of multiplicity of agents.
The standard, “naive” view is that 1 person = 1 agent. I don’t see any reason not to say, nor anything odd about saying, that the concept of “CEV” applies when, and only when, we’re talking about two or more people. One person: personal extrapolated volition. Two people, three people, twelve million people, etc.: coherent extrapolated volition.
You could think of CEV applied to a single unitary agent as a special case where achieving coherence is trivial. It’s an edge case where the problem becomes easier, rather than an edge case where the concepts threaten to break.
Although this terminology makes it harder to talk about several agents who each separately have their own extrapolated volition (as you were trying to do in your original comment in this thread). Though replacing it with Personal Extrapolated Volition only helps a little, if we also want to talk about several separately groups who each have their own within-group extrapolated volition (which is coherent within each group but not between groups).
Yes, as you noted, I used “personal extrapolated volition” because the use case called for it. It seems to me that the existence of use cases that call for a term (in order to have clarity) is, in fact, the reason to have that term.
Conversely, it seems odd to me to select / construct our terminology on the basis of questionable—and, more importantly, controversial—frameworks/views like the idea that it makes sense to view a human as some sort of multiplicity of agents.
The standard, “naive” view is that 1 person = 1 agent. I don’t see any reason not to say, nor anything odd about saying, that the concept of “CEV” applies when, and only when, we’re talking about two or more people. One person: personal extrapolated volition. Two people, three people, twelve million people, etc.: coherent extrapolated volition.
Anything other than this, I’d call “arbitrary”.
You could think of CEV applied to a single unitary agent as a special case where achieving coherence is trivial. It’s an edge case where the problem becomes easier, rather than an edge case where the concepts threaten to break.
Although this terminology makes it harder to talk about several agents who each separately have their own extrapolated volition (as you were trying to do in your original comment in this thread). Though replacing it with Personal Extrapolated Volition only helps a little, if we also want to talk about several separately groups who each have their own within-group extrapolated volition (which is coherent within each group but not between groups).
Yes, as you noted, I used “personal extrapolated volition” because the use case called for it. It seems to me that the existence of use cases that call for a term (in order to have clarity) is, in fact, the reason to have that term.