Abstract
The quality of a life is typically understood as a function of the actual goods and bads in it, that is, its actual value. Likewise, the value of a population is typically taken to be a function of the actual value of the lives in it. We introduce an alternative understanding of life quality: adjusted value. A life’s adjusted value is a function of its actual value and its ideal value (the best value it could have had). The concept of adjusted value is useful for at least three reasons. First, it fits our judgments about how well lives are going. Second, it allows us to avoid what we call False Equivalence, an error related to the non-identity problem. Third, when we use adjusted value as an input for calculating the value of a population, we can avoid two puzzles that Derek Parfit calls the “Repugnant Conclusion” and the “Mere Addition Paradox.”
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Notes
The example of a goat comes from Greene and Augello (2011).
By “goods” we mean states of affairs that are good for an individual, and by “bads” we mean states of affairs that are bad for an individual. See McMahan (2009).
The closest mention to something like adjusted value is a concept that Jeff McMahan (1996) calls “fortune.” He uses the concept of fortune to express a relation between how well an individual’s life is going and some standard against which the individual’s well-being is to be assessed. However, the standard McMahan uses for determining fortune is different from our standard of ideal value, and McMahan does not relate the concept of fortune to the non-identity problem, the Repugnant Conclusion, or the Mere Addition Paradox.
The sense of “could have” used in this idea will be explained later.
There are many possible alternative heuristics. For example: subtract two times the life’s shortfall from three times its actual value. It may be that such an alternative better captures our intuitions about various cases, despite its added complexity. We leave the exploration of such alternatives aside in this paper, sticking with the simplest formulation, but are open to its improvement or replacement.
This example and the ensuing argument against Parfit’s “no-difference view” is based on the deafness cases from Weinberg, “Non-Identity Matters, Sometimes” (unpublished manuscript).
This judgment is based on various conversations and presentations in which this kind of example was discussed.
False Equivalence is a problem for what Derek Parfit calls the “no-difference view,” that is, the view that the non-identity problem never makes a difference to our evaluative judgments (Parfit 1984, p. 367).
This is a simplified version of Parfit’s Mere Addition Paradox. In the original version, Parfit includes a fourth world, Divided B, that has the same number of people and average well-being as B. See Parfit 1984, p. 419.
Recall the caveats expressed in Section 2 of the paper, especially fn. 5.
Before proceeding, it might be useful to contrast our distinction between actual and adjusted value with some other distinctions in the literature. One widely recognized distinction is that which is drawn between personal value and impersonal value. Personal value is commonly taken to be value that makes a person’s life go better, whereas impersonal value is that which is good or bad without being good or bad for anyone (see, for example, McMahan 2009). Such a distinction does not correspond to our distinction between actual value and adjusted value; on our view, both actual value and adjusted value are kinds of personal value. If you cause someone pain, you make her life go worse, so a decrease in actual value is a decrease in personal value. Likewise, if you deprive someone of pleasure, you are making her life go worse (even if you are not making it less worth living), so a decrease in adjusted value is also a decrease in personal value. Nevertheless, we think that the way of valuing a life that is relevant to calculating the value of a state of affairs is adjusted value, not actual value. That is, the impersonal value of a life—the amount that a life contributes to the value of a state of affairs—is equal to the adjusted value of the life.
Another distinction that is related to our view is David Benatar’s distinction between a life worth starting and a life worth continuing (Benatar 2006). It is not clear to us whether all and only the lives of negative adjusted value are those that are not worth starting, so we leave it as an open question whether Benatar’s distinction tracks the distinction that can be made on our view between a life of positive adjusted value and a life of positive actual value.
A third distinction is one that Melinda Roberts draws between how things would have been for an individual, had an agent behaved differently; and how things could have been for the same individual, given all the agent’s alternatives (see Roberts 2003). Roberts argues that the notion that is relevant to whether an agent wrongs an individual is the latter one. Since claims about what would have been abound in the non-identity literature, we want to stress the importance of Roberts’s distinction. Although our concern is with the value of a life, rather than with whether an individual has been wronged, we agree with Roberts that how an individual could have been is the most appropriate notion, in both non-identity cases and in population ethics, for moral comparison.
David Lewis offers the following example:
To say that something can happen means that its happening is compossible with certain facts. Which facts? That is determined, but sometimes not determined well enough, by context. An ape can’t speak a human language—say, Finnish—but I can. Facts about the anatomy and operation of the ape’s larynx and nervous system are not compossible with his speaking Finnish. The corresponding facts about my larynx and nervous system are compossible with my speaking Finnish. But don’t take me along to Helsinki as your interpreter: I can’t speak Finnish. My speaking Finnish is compossible with the facts considered so far, but not with further facts about my lack of training (Lewis 1976, p. 77).
Indeed, we think that the awfulness of the thought that each person in the Z world could have had a life like that of an A person, but does not, is partly what explains the repugnancy of the Repugnant Conclusion. Note, also, that we are not saying that all individuals in the Z world could have a life like an A person, but that each could.
As in Fig. 4, the encircled numbers and white boxes depict, respectively, the adjusted value of each life and the value, according to the Adjusted Value View, of each population, while the grey numbers and boxes depict, respectively, the actual value of each life and the value, according to the Actual Value View, of each population. As in Table 1, “p” stands for population size, “d” for the adjusted value of a life, and “t” for the value of the population.
With different numbers, it may have turned out that A+ is better than B. But that would have been acceptable. Sometimes, a state of affairs in which a high number of people have lives that are as good as they can be will be better than a state of affairs in which a smaller number of people have lives that are well worth living, but not quite as good. Some egalitarians may find this result unsatisfactory. However, they need not reject every component of the Adjusted Value View. They are instead invited to reject the Ad6, which holds that the value of the world is simply the sum of the contributions that each life makes to the world. Instead, they can claim that there is a more complicated function for determining the value of the world. That function might take as arguments (1) the contribution that each life makes to the world, and (2) the degree of inequality in the world. A function along these lines would presumably result in the B world’s being better than A+.
References
Benatar, D. (2006). Better never to have been: The harm of coming into existence. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Greene, M., & Augello, S. (2011). Everworse: what’s wrong with selecting for disability? Public Affairs Quarterly, 25(2), 131–139.
Lewis, D. (1976). The paradoxes of time travel. American Philosophical Quarterly, 13, 145–152.
McMahan, J. (1996). Cognitive disability, misfortune, and justice. Philosophy & Public Affairs, 25(1), 3–35.
McMahan, J. (2009). Asymmetries in the morality of causing people to exist. In M. A. Roberts & D. T. Wasserhman (Eds.), Harming future person (pp. 49–68). New York: Springer.
Parfit, D. (1984). Reasons and persons. New York: Oxford University Press.
Roberts, M. (2003). Is the person-affecting intuition paradoxical? Theory and Decision, 55, 1–44.
Acknowledgments
An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 2012 Bled Philosophical Conference, “Ethical Issues: Theoretical and Applied.” The authors are grateful to Alastair Norcross and Matjaž Potrč for the invitation to the conference, and we thank the members of the audience there for many useful criticisms and suggestions.
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Gardner, M., Weinberg, J. How Lives Measure Up. Acta Anal 28, 31–48 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12136-012-0184-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12136-012-0184-y