My book is out! https://www.amazon.co.uk/Wyclifs-Dust-Western-cultures-printing/dp/B0B5PPXSQH/
I’m a social scientist in an economics department in Britain. Two of my interests are experimental economics and the social causes of genetic variation. I have a newsletter at https://wyclif.substack.com.
The Scheidel review is worth reading, though it’s rather hurried. Their argument is quite complex and sometimes a bit fuzzy, and the book has a lot of detail; I think it’ll take some time for academics to chew through it and understand exactly what’s at stake.
Other academic reviews I’ve read haven’t been great—the typical stuff has been “how can they ignore [my narrow narrow subfield]”.
You might be interested in the concept of “license”, which was widely used until about the 18th century. License was like liberty, but license was bad, liberty was good, and the difference was that liberty presupposed self-restraint. So, liberty would be in the middle of your line, license on one end of it, and on the other maybe “tyranny”.
Sure, I find that take on moral intuitions plausible. But if society has to make a real choice of the order of “how much to tax carbon”, I think that collectively we would not want to make the decision based on people saying “meh, no strong opinions here, future world X just seems kinda prettier”. We need some kind of principled framework, and for that… well, I guess you need moral philosophy!
The point is whether they exist conditional on us taking a particular action. If we do X a set of people will exist. If we do Y, a different set of people will exist. There’s not usually a reason to privilege X vs. Y as being “what will happen if we do nothing”, making the people in X somehow less conditional. The argument is “if we do X, then these people will exist and their rights (or welfare or whatever) will be satisfied/violated and that would be good/bad to some degree; if we do Y then these other people will exist, etc., and that would be good/bad to some degree.” It’s a comparison of hypothetical goods and bads—that’s the definition of a moral choice! So saying, “all these good/bads are just hypothetical” is not very helpful. It’s as if someone said “shall we order Chinese or pizza” and you refused to answer, because you can’t taste the pizza right now.
Now I hear the Life of Brian playing in my head: “Always look on the bright side of life! De-duh, de-duh de-duh de-duh!”
Hume didn’t always take his own rhetoric or ideas too seriously. He said he couldn’t prove that his friends even existed, but when he played billiards with them, these doubts vanished.
Here’s another thought experiment for those convinced by this gloomy view… suppose you find a large red switch marked “Universe: on/off”. Flipping it will cause the immediate painless non-existence of everyone everywhere. Do you flip it? Think how much suffering you’ll save! This suggests an alternative perspective for AI alignment research: we need to bring forward the arrival of the Paperclip Maker, to put us all out of our misery.
Yes, I wouldn’t say suicide is the be-all and end-all indicator, though it is quite suggestive. I’d also lay weight on simple common sense and intuition here. Most people today like life. If you read about ordinary people from 200 years ago or before, it doesn’t seem like unremitting misery. (Piers Plowman, the “rude mechanicals” in Shakespeare, the peasants in the Georgics or in medieval Books of Hours, the ordinary people in the Old and New Testaments. Maybe these were just elites idealizing peasants? Hmm… up to a point.) Reporters and anthropologists who live with peasants and the poor today similarly paint a picture with light as well as shade.
Saying “it’s good to be alive” is not the same as saying people have a moral imperative to bring children into the world. It would probably improve human welfare if I gave all my assets to the poor and starved to death, but I don’t have a moral imperative to do it. Judgments of overall welfare are ways of deciding what to do collectively, but no individual has an absolute duty to maximize overall welfare at the expense of his own basic desires and life choices.
(This is my personal view, not especially carefully thought-out. Some people probably do think we have an absolute duty to maximize welfare. I think your example of having to have 10 children is a reductio ad absurdum of that view, not of the view that the marginal extra human life is a good thing.)
Well, he says he does. I think it would be very sad if he acted on the idea, and I bet you agree.
I don’t know about population sizes either. Maddison (cited at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estimates_of_historical_world_population#By_world_region) says that in 1500, Americans were only about 4% of global population, with 20% being in Europe and 68% in Asia.
Yup, definitely true that I haven’t considered the effect on non-humans. I think you’d have to be very pessimistic to say that agriculture was a mistake from this perspective. That might be true (1) if agriculture involved so much animal suffering that it outweighed the human good involved. Or (2) if from agriculture on, humans were set on a path that inevitably led to the destruction of life on earth, e.g. by runaway global warming or nuclear war. I think (1) might be true of modern factory farming, but is less likely true of traditional farming. (2) is as yet unknown, but I hope that it will not be so.
I don’t think this argument makes sense. Of course the people who will be born are “imaginary”. If I choose between marrying Jane and Judith, then any future children in either event are at present “imaginary”. That would not be a good excuse for marrying Jane, a psychopath with three previous convictions for child murder. More generally, any choice involves two or more different hypothetical (“imaginary”) outcomes, of which all but one will not happen. Obviously, we have to think “what would happen if I do X”? It would be silly to say that this question is unimportant, because “all the outcomes aren’t even real!” That doesn’t change if the outcomes involve different people coming into existence.
I think the technical term you’re looking for is “imagination”.
As a basis for purely personal morality that may be fine, but as a way of evaluating policy choices or comparing societies it won’t be enough. Consider the question “how much should we reduce global warming”? Any decision involves alternative futures involving billions of people who haven’t been born yet. We have to consider their welfare. Put another way, the word “imaginary” is bearing a lot of weight in your argument: people who are imaginary in one scenario become real in another.
The argument isn’t that simply having more people alive is better. That’s why I spend time arguing that people’s lives are worthwhile.
I mention two intuitions. The intuition that it’s good to be alive is quite widely shared, no? Even people who claim to disagree often act as if they agree. (My uncle repeatedly said he didn’t want to live any more, yet he carefully avoided Covid.)
The intuition that people’s lives have value in themselves, and not in relation to what else is going on, isn’t just a gut feeling. It relates to the idea that what has value is consciousness—feelings of joy or contentment, say—so that if someone experiences a lifetime reasonably worth living, then that life is reasonably worth living whatever else is going on, because the experiences are the same.
You may be right that adding up utilons is crazy, but my claims don’t depend on that. Any moral framework will do, if it positively values the fact of a person leading a reasonably good life.
Lastly, I’m surprised you see any aggression here.
It sounds as if you have a number of political positions you want to get across, but I’m not sure how they relate to my argument, which is about how discursive conflict takes place. If you don’t like my examples, of course you can just replace them in your mind with examples you prefer.
Sure. But the most interesting dependent variable isn’t usually “how many standard deviations of Y will I gain”, it’s e.g. “how many years of education will I gain”. In any case, on either scale, is there a PGS where a 1 s.d. change does something big? You might say the most recent EA is a candidate. In one dataset a 1 s.d. increase causes (i.e. within-siblings) about a 4.5 percentage point increase in the probability of university attendance.
For social science, here are some I’d throw in:
Are there questions nobody is asking?
Is there a real world phenomenon that nothing in the field addresses?
The best social science follows George Orwell’s dictum: it takes huge effort to see what is in front of your face.