Ah-ha. Okay. I hadn’t thought of the trolley problem in those terms before. It’s not very relevant to how I’m thinking, though; I’m thinking in terms of what actions are acceptable from a given starting point, not what end states are acceptable.
As to house elves: I don’t consider humanike values to be intrinsically better than other values in the relevant sense—I disagree with Clippy about the ideal state of the world, and am likely to come into conflict with em in relevant cases, but if the world were arranged in such a way that beings with clippylike values could exist without being in conflict with beings with other values, I would have no objection to said being existing, and that’s basically the case with house elves. (And I don’t think it’s intrinsically wrong for Clippy to exist, just problematic enough that there are reasonable objections.)
I would consider causing house elves to have humanlike values equally problematic as causing humans to have house-elf-like values, regardless of whether the house elves were human to begin with, assuming that house elves are satisfied with their values and do not actively want to have humanlike values. Two wrongs don’t make a right.
Ah-ha. Okay. I hadn’t thought of the trolley problem in those terms before. It’s not very relevant to how I’m thinking, though; I’m thinking in terms of what actions are acceptable from a given starting point, not what end states are acceptable.
As to house elves: I don’t consider humanike values to be intrinsically better than other values in the relevant sense—I disagree with Clippy about the ideal state of the world, and am likely to come into conflict with em in relevant cases, but if the world were arranged in such a way that beings with clippylike values could exist without being in conflict with beings with other values, I would have no objection to said being existing, and that’s basically the case with house elves. (And I don’t think it’s intrinsically wrong for Clippy to exist, just problematic enough that there are reasonable objections.)
I would consider causing house elves to have humanlike values equally problematic as causing humans to have house-elf-like values, regardless of whether the house elves were human to begin with, assuming that house elves are satisfied with their values and do not actively want to have humanlike values. Two wrongs don’t make a right.