[...] I think the “not-just-life-count” benefits generally look like they make “saving existing lives” a better idea than “enabling more future lives”. The question might then become “How much should one be preferred over the other? At what ratio?”
[...] then the question seems to me like “Is it better to save your children’s lives or enable future births? Ignore the grief, disruption, failed hopes, etc. that would make you prefer to save your children’s lives”—it’s assuming away what may be the whole point.
(Agreed!) I find it very counterintuitive how the standard framework of population ethics recommends that we ignore all the instrumental (or extrinsic / relational / non-independent) value of various lives and experiences.
After all, I would argue that our practical intuition is mostly tracking the positive roles of those things, which may in part explain our intuitive disagreement with thought experiments that attempt to draw sharp boundaries around the supposedly fundamental bits.
(I also explored this in the context of population ethics here. Those essays are framed in suffering-focused and minimalist terms respectively, but the main points seem applicable to all impartial consequentialist views, so perhaps people would find them useful more broadly.)
(Agreed!) I find it very counterintuitive how the standard framework of population ethics recommends that we ignore all the instrumental (or extrinsic / relational / non-independent) value of various lives and experiences.
After all, I would argue that our practical intuition is mostly tracking the positive roles of those things, which may in part explain our intuitive disagreement with thought experiments that attempt to draw sharp boundaries around the supposedly fundamental bits.
(I also explored this in the context of population ethics here. Those essays are framed in suffering-focused and minimalist terms respectively, but the main points seem applicable to all impartial consequentialist views, so perhaps people would find them useful more broadly.)