Papers by Gustaf Arrhenius
The diagram above shows three populations: A, B, and C. The width of each block represents the nu... more The diagram above shows three populations: A, B, and C. The width of each block represents the number of people, and the height represents their lifetime welfare. These populations could consist of all the past, present and future lives, or all the present and future lives, or all the lives during some shorter time span in the future such as the next generation, or all the lives that are causally affected by, or consequences of a certain action or series of actions, and so forth. All the lives in the above diagram have positive welfare, or, as we also could put it, have lives worth living. 2 We shall also assume that all the people in the diagrams deserve their welfare equally much. Population A consists of one group of people with very high welfare and a same-sized group with very low positive welfare. B is a perfectly equal population with the same number of people, total, and average welfare as A. C consists of the B-people and an extra group of people with lower positive welfare than the B-people. One might ask how we should we rank these populations in terms of moral goodness or desirability, that is, how these populations are ordered by the relation "is at least as good as, all things considered". I take it that most of us would agree that B is better than A. 3 These two 2 We shall say that a life has neutral welfare if and only if it is equally good for the person living it as a neutral welfare component, and that a life has positive (negative) welfare if and only if it has higher (lower) welfare than a life with neutral welfare. A welfare component is neutral relative to a certain life x iff x with this component has the same welfare as x without this component. A hedonist, for example, would typically say that an experience which is neither pleasurable nor painful is neutral in value for a person and as such doesn't increase or decrease the person's welfare. The above definition can of course be combined with other welfarist axiologies, such as desire and objective list theories (see below for a discussion of the "currency" of egalitarian justice). For a discussion of alternative definitions of a neutral life, many of which would also work fine in the present context, see Arrhenius (2000a, 2012, ch. 2 and 9). See also ), and Parfit (1984, p. 357-8 and appendix G). Notice that we actually don't need an analysis of a neutral welfare in the present context but rather just a criterion, and the criterion can vary with different theories of welfare. 3 I'm assuming here that we can compare populations such as A and B without any further information. Some theorists would deny this since they think an outcome can only be better or worse if it is better or worse for somebody, which might not be the case if A and B consist of different people. To apply these so-called "person affecting views", we also need to know the identities of the individuals in the compared populations. I've discussed these approaches at length elsewhere (Arrhenius 2000a(Arrhenius , 2003(Arrhenius , 2009b(Arrhenius , 2012) ) and showed that, at best, they don't help much in solving problems in different number cases, so I won't dwell on them further here. For the purpose of the present paper, I'll assume that we can compare the value of populations without knowledge of the specific identities of the individuals in the compared populations (this approach is sometimes called, misleadingly in my view, the "impersonal view").
Tidskrift för politisk filosofi, Sep 15, 2005
Do people care much about future generations? Moral philosophers argue that we should, but it is ... more Do people care much about future generations? Moral philosophers argue that we should, but it is not clear that laypeople agree. Humanity's thus-far inadequate efforts to address climate change, for example, could be taken as a sign that people are unconcerned about the well-being of future generations. An alternative explanation is that the lack of action is due to public scepticism about climate policies' effectiveness, rather than the discounting of future lives per se. Based on surveys and survey experiments with representative samples of respondents in four countries-Sweden, Spain, South Korea, and China-we find that most people say they care
Frontiers in political science, May 11, 2021
Policy decisions, and public preferences about them, often entail judgements about costs people s... more Policy decisions, and public preferences about them, often entail judgements about costs people should be willing to pay for the benefit of future generations. Economic analyses discount policies' future benefits based on expectations about increasing standards of living, while empirical studies in psychology have found future-oriented people are more motivated to protect the environment. In this article, using original surveys and survey experiments in four countries-Sweden, Spain, South Korea, and China-we show that support for future-oriented policies also strongly reflects people's political trust. Focusing on policies for reducing either global warming or public debt, we find political trust operates on attitudes by shaping people's (a) confidence in policies' effectiveness and (b) willingness to sacrifice for others. The influence of political trust outweighs that of subjective concern, while discounting has so little impact that people who expect future generations to be richer are more, not less, willing to sacrifice.
Ethics, politics & society, May 14, 2018
Who should have a right to take part in which decisions in democratic decision making? This "boun... more Who should have a right to take part in which decisions in democratic decision making? This "boundary problem" is a central issue for democracy and is of both practical and theoretical import. If nothing else, all different notions of democracy have one thing in common: a reference to a community of individuals, "a people", who takes decision in a democratic fashion. However, that a decision is made with a democratic decision method by a certain group of people doesn't suffice for making the decision democratic or satisfactory from a democratic perspective. The group also has to be the right one. But what makes a group the right one? The criteria by which to identify the members of the people entitled to participate in collective decisions have been surprisingly difficult to pin down. In this paper, I shall revisit some of the problems discussed in my 2005 paper in light of some recent criticism and discussion of my position in the literature, and address a number of new issues. Resumo. Quem deve ter direito a participar em que decisões no processo democrático? Este "problema da delimitação" é uma questão central para a democracia, e tem importância tanto teórica como prática. Todas as diferentes noções de democracia têm, pelo menos, uma coisa em comum: uma referência a uma comunidade de indivÃduos, "um povo", que toma decisões de forma democrática. No entanto, que uma decisão seja tomada de acordo com um método democrático por um determinado grupo de pessoas não é suficiente para que a decisão seja democrática ou satisfatória numa perspectiva democrática. O grupo tem também de ser o grupo certo. Mas o que é que faz com que um grupo seja o grupo certo? Tem sido surpreendentemente difÃcil determinar os critérios com os quais devemos identificar os membros do povo que têm o direito de participar em decisões colectivas. Neste artigo, irei revisitar alguns dos problemas discutidos no meu artigo de 2005 à luz de crÃticas recentes e da discussão da minha posição na literatura, e abordarei algumas questões novas.
Social Choice and Welfare, Mar 18, 2023
Population axiology concerns how to rank populations by the relation "is socially preferred to". ... more Population axiology concerns how to rank populations by the relation "is socially preferred to". So far, population ethicists have (with important exceptions) focused less on the question of how to rank population prospects, that is, alternatives that contain uncertainty as to which population they will bring about. Most public policy choices, however, are decisions under uncertainty, including policy choices that affect the size of a population (such as climate policy choices). Here, we shall address the question of how to rank population prospects by the relation "is socially preferred to". We start by illustrating how well-known population axiologies can be extended to population prospect axiologies. And we show that new problems arise when extending population axiologies to prospects. In particular, traditional population axiologies lead to prospect-versions of the problems that they are praised for avoiding in the risk-free settings. Moreover, we show how the axiom of State-Wise Dominance allow us to extend any impossibility theorem in population axiology to impossibility theorems for non-trivial population prospects, that is, prospects that confer probabilities strictly between zero and one on different populations. Finally, we formulate impossibility results that only involve probabilistic axioms.
Standard welfarist axiologies do not care who is given what share of the good. For example, givin... more Standard welfarist axiologies do not care who is given what share of the good. For example, giving Wlodek two apples and Ewa three is just as good as giving Wlodek three and Ewa two, or giving Wlodek five and Ewa zero. A common objection to such theories is that they are insensitive to matters of distributive justice. To meet this objection, one can adjust the axiology to take distributive concerns into account. One possibility is to turn to what I will call Meritarian axiologies. According to such theories, individuals can have a claim to, deserve, or merit, a certain level of wellbeing depending on their merit level, and the value of an outcome is determined not only by people's wellbeing but also by their merit level.
In this paper we shall consider problems in population ethics for Scanlonian Contractualism. As w... more In this paper we shall consider problems in population ethics for Scanlonian Contractualism. As we shall see, there are features of this view that make it difficult for it to satisfy rather obvious intuitive desiderata in population ethics. Rahul Kumar has suggested that his idea of "standpoints" offers help with some of these cases. We shall discuss different interpretations of this idea, and argue that it unfortunately fails. Scanlonian Contractualism cannot, it seems, avoid the aggregation problems that standard "impersonal" theories face without running into other problems that are at least as troublesome.
Value Incommensurability, 2021
According to Positive Egalitarianism, not only do relations of inequality have negative value, as... more According to Positive Egalitarianism, not only do relations of inequality have negative value, as Negative Egalitarians claim, but relations of equality also have positive value. The egalitarian value of a population is a function of both pairwise relations of inequality (negative) and pairwise relations of equality (positive). Positive and Negative Egalitarianism diverge, especially in different number cases. Hence, an investigation of Positive Egalitarianism might shed new light on the vexed topic of population ethics and our duties to future generations. We shall here, in light of some recent criticism, further develop the idea of giving positive value to equal relations.
resumen ¿Puede ser mejor (o peor) para mà existir que no existir? Diversos filósofos lo han negad... more resumen ¿Puede ser mejor (o peor) para mà existir que no existir? Diversos filósofos lo han negado, en razón de que si lo fuera, entonces, si yo no existiera, habrÃa sido peor (mejor) para mÃ, lo cual es un absurdo. En este artÃculo argumentamos que dichos filósofos están equivocados: las afirmaciones sobre el valor o la falta de valor comparativo de la existencia no tienen por que implicar un absurdo. Estas afirmaciones, que son de vital importancia para la ética de las poblaciones, asà como para el status de la denominada "restricción de la persona que afecta" pueden racionalizarse si nos adherimos al llamado análisis de valor de las actitudes que se acondicionan. palabras claVe relación de mejor condición, persona que afecta la restricción, mejor condición personal, análisis de valor de las actitudes que se acondicionan, valor de la existencia.
Oxford Handbooks Online, 2015
Let's say that A and B are two types of goods such that more of A or B is better than less. A is ... more Let's say that A and B are two types of goods such that more of A or B is better than less. A is strongly superior to B if and only if any amount of A is better than any amount of B. It is weakly superior to B if and only if some amount of A is better than any amount of B. We shall first discuss some different ways in which these relations of superiority can be relevant to the aggregation of welfare. We shall then give a precise and generalised statement of Strong and Weak Superiority. Lastly, we shall prove a number of general results concerning these two relations, one of which can be used as an argument against the existence of value superiority or, alternatively, as an argument against superiority being a radical difference in value. The result in 1 This paper draws on Arrhenius (2005) and . We would like to thank
Oxford University Press eBooks, Apr 1, 2021
Choosing a policy response to climate change seems to demand a population axiology. A formal lite... more Choosing a policy response to climate change seems to demand a population axiology. A formal literature involving impossibility theorems has demonstrated that all possible approaches to population axiology have one or more seemingly counterintuitive implications. This leads to the worry that because axiological theory is radically unresolved, this theoretical ignorance implies serious practical ignorance about what climate policies to pursue. This chapter offers two deflationary responses to this worry. First, it may be that given the actual facts of climate change, all axiologies agree on a particular policy response. In this case, there would be a clear dominance conclusion, and the puzzles of axiology would be practically irrelevant (albeit still theoretically challenging). Second, despite the impossibility results, the authors prove the possibility of axiologies that satisfy bounded versions of all of the desiderata from the population axiology literature, which may be all that is needed for policy evaluation.
Do people care much about future generations? Moral philosophers argue that we should, but it is ... more Do people care much about future generations? Moral philosophers argue that we should, but it is not clear that laypeople agree. Humanity’s thus-far inadequate efforts to address climate change, for example, could be taken as a sign that people are unconcerned about the well-being of future generations. An alternative explanation is that the lack of action is due to public scepticism about climate policies’ effectiveness, rather than the discounting of future lives per se. Based on surveys and survey experiments with representative samples of respondents in four countries—Sweden, Spain, South Korea, and China—we find that most people say they care about future generations, and would even be willing to reduce their standard of living so that people can enjoy better lives in the future. Many do not, however, support policies for reducing either global warming or the national debt—both of which would impose a net cost on current generations for the benefit of future generations. We sho...
Journal of the Endocrine Society, 2020
Utilitas, 2005
Suppose one sets up a sequence of less and less valuable objects such that each object in the seq... more Suppose one sets up a sequence of less and less valuable objects such that each object in the sequence is only marginally worse than its immediate predecessor. Could one in this way arrive at something that is dramatically inferior to the point of departure? It has been claimed that if there is a radical value difference between the objects at each end of the sequence, then at some point there must be a corresponding radical difference between the adjacent elements. The underlying picture seems to be that a radical gap cannot be scaled by a series of steps, if none of the steps itself is radical. We show that this picture is incorrect on a stronger interpretation of value superiority, but correct on a weaker one. Thus, the conclusion we reach is that, in some sense at least, abrupt breaks in such decreasing sequences cannot be avoided, but that such unavoidable breaks are less drastic than has been suggested. In an appendix written by John Broome and Wlodek Rabinowicz, the distincti...
Philosophical Studies, 2005
Population axiology concerns how to rank populations by the relation "is socially preferred to". ... more Population axiology concerns how to rank populations by the relation "is socially preferred to". So far, population ethicists have (with important exceptions) focused less on the question of how to rank population prospects, that is, alternatives that contain uncertainty as to which population they will bring about. Most public policy choices, however, are decisions under uncertainty, including policy choices that affect the size of a population (such as climate policy choices). Here, we shall address the question of how to rank population prospects by the relation "is socially preferred to". We start by illustrating how well-known population axiologies can be extended to population prospect axiologies. And we show that new problems arise when extending population axiologies to prospects. In particular, traditional population axiologies lead to prospect-versions of the problems that they are praised for avoiding in the risk-free settings. Moreover, we show how the axiom of State-Wise Dominance allow us to extend any impossibility theorem in population axiology to impossibility theorems for non-trivial population prospects, that is, prospects that confer probabilities strictly between zero and one on different populations. Finally, we formulate impossibility results that only involve probabilistic axioms.
It seems to be a widespread opinion that increasing the length of existing happy lives is better ... more It seems to be a widespread opinion that increasing the length of existing happy lives is better than creating new happy lives although the total welfare is the same in both cases, and that it may be better even when the total welfare is lower in the outcome with extended lives. I shall discuss two interesting suggestions that seem to support this idea, or so it has been argued. Firstly, the idea there is a positive level of well-being above which a life has to reach to have positive contributive value to a population, so-called Critical Level Utilitarianism. Secondly, the view that it makes an outcome worse if people are worse off than they otherwise could have been, a view I call Comparativism. I shall show that although these theories do capture some of our intuitions about the value of longevity, they contradict others, and they have a number of counterintuitive implications in other cases that we ultimately have to reject them.
It seems to be a widespread opinion that increasing the length of existing happy lives is better ... more It seems to be a widespread opinion that increasing the length of existing happy lives is better than creating new happy lives although the total welfare is the same in both cases, and that it may be better even when the total welfare is lower in the outcome with extended lives. I shall discuss two interesting suggestions that seem to support this idea, or so it has been argued. Firstly, the idea there is a positive level of well-being above which a life has to reach to have positive contributive value to a population, so-called Critical Level Utilitarianism. Secondly, the view that it makes an outcome worse if people are worse off than they otherwise could have been, a view I call Comparativism. I shall show that although these theories do capture some of our intuitions about the value of longevity, they contradict others, and they have a number of counterintuitive implications in other cases that we ultimately have to reject them.
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Papers by Gustaf Arrhenius