First, we want to respond to distant future peoples reasonable complaints, and we can only start from our own notion of what is reasonable. He defends this view by saying that we must accept that two people, whether friend or stranger, can have the same value, even as their value makes different demands upon people with whom they share different relationships. In other words: I act partially. Understanding the enhancement project, Acumen, 2013. 28The virtual future therefore does not remove the need for second-personal justification. Agar, N., Humanitys End: Why we should reject radical enhancement, MIT Press, 2010. 29-46. If I offer this justification to future people living in a broken future, they will reply that, in their world, there are no such guarantees. 57-73. Mulgan, T., How should utilitarians think about the future?, Canadian Journal of Philosophy 47, 2017, pp. Copy this link, or click below to email it to a friend. A Fresh Start for the Objective-List Theory of Well-Being, On Bentham's manuscript on "Religious Offences", A digital resources portal for the humanities and social sciences, https://doi.org/10.4000/etudes-benthamiennes.848, Second Difference: The disappearance or reimaging of rights, Third Difference: The incoherence of autarkism, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-018-3887-1, Catalogue of 592 journals. I focus on future peoples views about the distinction between self and other and its significance for broader debates about egoism, altruism, and partiality. (Chappell The future-person standpoint; Mulgan Replies to Critics.) The challenge is to explain why. Mulgan, T., The Demands of Consequentialism, Oxford University Press, 2001. 24 e.g., Agar, Humanitys End; Agar, On the prudential irrationality of mind uploading; Blackford and Broderick, Intelligence Unbound; Bostrom, Superintelligence; Hanson, The Age of EM ; Hauskeller, Better Humans?, p. 115-132. Or future people might be forced to move directly from a broken future to a digital one. 22These three differences reinforce one another. Agar, N., On the prudential irrationality of mind uploading, in Intelligence Unbound: the future of uploaded and machine minds, edited by R. Blackford and D. Broderick, Wiley-Blackwell, 2014, pp. Broken world philosophers thus have no need to cater to libertarian extremists, and their theories of justice will accordingly give less weight to both individual autonomy and to partiality. I might claim rights to use my own property as I choose, to travel, to experience nature, to access healthcare, to stay alive, and so on. Partiality is exceptionally clear and stimulating, and I am confident it will quickly be recognized as one of the most significant books on its topic. 350-368. Future people already inhabiting a virtual environment might upload to a fully digital virtual world, especially if their real-world alternative is broken. Mulgan, T., Moral Philosophy, Superintelligence, and the Singularity, draft manuscript. Broome, J., Climate Matters, WW Norton, 2009. Uploaded human minds are almost as fluid. 16Future people living in a broken world may have very different views about what is essential to a worthwhile human life. Therefore, their list of essentials will be drawn from items generally available in their own world. Darwall, S., The Second-Person Standpoint, Harvard University Press, 2009. 31The objective list theory easily captures both Nozicks reaction to the experience machine and our reaction to the virtual future. 15I begin with shallow disagreements, where future people accept our moral principles but disagree about their application. Singer, P., Practical Ethics, Cambridge University Press, 3rd edition, 2011. 10Second-personalism only works if the moral perspectives of actor and patient are mutually intelligible. We should be wary of breathless predictions of the imminent rise of super-intelligent machines.25 But confident pronouncements that artificial intelligence and digital uploading will forever remain engineering impossibilities are equally suspect. Consider a child who wants to play in the sand rather than go to school. Their rights will be structured by the just survival lottery. Human beings are fairly easy to individuate. This matters because the latter is the most likely virtual future, as well as the most ethically interesting. For discussion of the relationships between Darwalls work and my own, I am grateful to Sophie-Grace Chappell. 290-312. He is the author of The Limits of Loyalty. 18 The virtual future is based on Nozicks experience machine (Nozick Anarchy, State, and Utopia, pp. Online early: DOI: 10.1111/japp.12222. 24Suppose some not-too-distant future generation must choose between a broken future and a virtual future where people abandon the real world altogether and spend their entire lives plugged into experience machines that perfectly simulate any possible human experience.18 The virtual future seems to offer a perfect escape from the scarcity of a broken world into a world of effectively limitless virtual resources. The virtual future is therefore significantly more appealing to people who are already living in a broken world. I am grateful to Richard Rowland for organising a very enjoyable workshop, and to my fellow workshop participants for very helpful comments. Unfortunately, things are not so simple. If a connection to the natural world is intrinsically valuable, then human lives go better (and perhaps can only go well) when they instantiate that value. 251-272. 3-4, 493-502; Fletcher A Fresh Start for the Objective-List Theory of Well-Being; Crisp Well-being. . However, I also defend five additional constraints that limit the scope of legitimate partiality.2. 59-86. HomeNumros14Justifying Present Partiality to Cet article sinterroge sur la manire dont la distinction entre soi et autrui ainsi que les dbats associs sur la partialit, laltruisme et les exigences dune morale peut tre amene tre reformule dans les diffrentes configurations de futurs possibles. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Mulgan, T., Ethics for a broken world: reimagining philosophy after catastrophe, Acumen, 2011. ), URL =
Feldman, F., What we learn from the experience machine, in The Cambridge Companion to Nozick's Anarchy, State, and Utopia, edited by R. M. Bader and J. Meadowcroft, Cambridge University Press, 2011, pp. These future people are thus especially likely to regard solipsist experience machines as an abandonment of what is most essential to human life, and to insist that any virtual future must be interpersonal. No-one can reasonably be confident that it wont happen. No one can reasonably be confident it wont happen. Nozick, R., Anarchy, State, and Utopia, Blackwells, 1974. One is that it could well lead to a digital future, whose problems we address in section 4. On contractualism and future people, see Kumar, Who can be wronged?, Kumar, Wronging future people: a contractualist proposal, Parfit, On What Matters, volume 2, chapter 22, and Mulgan, Future Worlds. 11In this paper, I assume a sympathetic future audience who share our basic moral framework. [T]his is an excellent and engaging book. Even Peter Singer, the most prominent contemporary defender of preference utilitarianism, has recently acknowledged, on the basis of very similar examples, that we need a more objective account of well-being to make sense of our obligations to distant future people (Singer Practical Ethics, p. 244). Mulgan, T., Corporate Agency and Possible Futures, Journal of Business Ethics. 23Take a stark example. 36Metaphysical disagreement between present and future people could thus lead to disagreement about the separateness of persons leading in turn to disagreement about the permissibility (or even the coherence) of partiality. A theme of my recent work is that only the objective list theory captures the full range of our obligations to future people.23 The more importance we attach to those obligations, the more serious this comparative advantage becomes. Simon Keller explains that in order to understand why we give special treatment to our family and friends, we need to understand how people come to matter in their own rights. However, broken world liberals, egalitarians, or contractualists, who all seek a fair redistribution of the burdens imposed by scarce resources and chaotic climate, probably do need literal lotteries. If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian. 42-45; Feldman, What we learn from the experience machine. I apply second-person justification to future people in Mulgan Answering to Future People. 6 Discount rates are especially relevant in debates about the optimal response to climate change. To justify my present self-regarding choice to future people in terms that they would accept, I must imagine their ethical views. A guarantee of survival might be replaced by a right to participate in deliberation about lottery design, and then a right to a fair chance of obtaining various goods (including survival). 19 E.g., Finnis Natural Law and Natural Rights, pp. Some preferences improve your life, while others do not. 6If we adopt a high pure temporal discount rate, then the fate of distant future people fades into irrelevance.6 But moderate utilitarians cannot set the distant future aside, because a fundamental utilitarian commitment is that well-being matters equally no matter whose it is or when it occurs.7, 7Most decisions affecting the distant future are different people choices where different present actions bring different sets of possible people into existence.8 Parfits non-identity problem then threatens to render the demand for justification to future people either incoherent (because we cannot compare existence with non-existence) or trivial (because no one can possibly have any complaint about our actions if her life is worth living and she would not otherwise have existed). 23 Mulgan Ethics for Possible Futures, Answering to Future People. 133-155. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/etudes-benthamiennes/848; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/etudes-benthamiennes.848, Auckland University (New Zealand) and St Andrews University (Great Britain), OpenEdition Journals member Published with Lodel Administration only, You will be redirected to OpenEdition Search, Justifying Present Partiality to Possible Future People, Justifier dune partialit prsente auprs des peuples venir, This paper was first presented to a workshop on partiality at the Australian Catholic University in, What we learn from the experience machine, A Fresh Start for the Objective-List Theory. Hooker, B., Ideal Code, Real World, Oxford University Press, 2000. As no broken world society will endure unless most citizens regard its actual survival lottery as (at least reasonably) just, the central challenge for broken world ethics is to design a just survival lottery.16. Larticle sintresse plus particulirement aux cas o largumentation en faveur dune partialit prsente pourrait tre remise en cause. Could I justify these partial choices to future people in a broken world? Future people might then (a) agree that I can legitimately privilege my own interests if (but only if) an essential component of a worthwhile human life is at stake, but also (b) reject my claim that what is at stake for me now is essential. 8 Parfit Reasons and Persons, chapter 16. Keller develops a novel account of these reasons, nested in an elegant taxonomy of rival perspectives and illustrated by a series of terrific examples that effectively distill the distinctive arguments under consideration. 58-92. 13 Rawls A Theory of Justice, p. 178. Floridi. He presents a tremendously succinct presentation of the views. If future people embrace any virtual future, it is thus most likely that it will be an interpersonal one. In Reasons and Persons, Derek Parfit defended a reductionist account of personal identity, where what ultimate matters are individual experiences and the connections between them, and where there are no further metaphysical facts about the identity of persons across time. Keller then argues that neither view is satisfactory because neither captures the experience of acting well within special relationships. Instead, Keller defends the individuals view, on which reasons of partiality arise from the value of the individuals with whom our relationships are shared. Consider two examples: 3Partiality is justified if (and only if) it would be permitted in my situation under the ideal moral code or outlook, which is (roughly) the code whose internalisation by everyone would produce the best consequences.3, 4Partiality is justified if (and only if) it would be permitted in my situation by a set of moral rules that no one could reasonably reject as a basis for what we owe to each another.4. "Partiality is about the nature and source of our reasons for partialitya central but controversial area of the moral domain. When we seek a future-oriented second-personal justification, we must consider the possibility that future people will inhabit a broken world. Hauskeller, M., Better Humans? Mulgan, T., Purpose in the Universe: The moral and metaphysical case for Ananthropocentric Purposivism, Oxford University Press, 2015. Some pleasures are good, some are bad, others are neutral. Your purchase has been completed. Suppose I sacrifice your interests to promote some permissible but optional goal that you also share. Stories such as The Matrix and The Truman Show are so unsettling precisely because we regard friendship as an end-in-itself, not merely an in-principle-replaceable means to produce a valuable experience. These familiar ethical ideas must all be re-imagined to fit a broken world.
And we can offer that justification to future people by imagining specific future people who represent, and complain on behalf of, the much broader class of future people whose world is affected by us. It may not involve any actual lottery. 16 Survival lottery is a term of art. Individuating digital beings is much harder. Mulgan, T., Utilitarian Future Ethics, Cambridge University Press, forthcoming. "Sarah Stroud, McGill University, Simon Keller's slim but lively book Partiality is a novel and original attempt to provide a justification for limited partiality within an otherwise impartial moral theory.---Michael Gibb, Oxford Journals, Keller's treatment of partiality is original and valuable for getting a clearer picture on one's own commitments, both in the social and the philosophical meaning.---Simon Derpmann, Ethical Theory and Moral Practise, "Keller's engaging book makes an important contribution to a critical issue in ethical theory.
I argue elsewhere that non-identity alone does not make future-oriented second-personal justification impossible; that it does not remove the need for such justification; and that future-oriented second-personal justification can reasonably appeal to independently credible person-affecting moral principles even in different people choices.9, 8I also argue elsewhere that, while uncertainty complicates our obligations to future people, it does not give us a blanket permission to gamble with the lives of others.10 We must still justify any present decision to impose a risk of harm on future people. 146-160. 9Suppose I do something now such that (a) I promote my own interests; but also (b) my choice is bad for (some) future people; (c) my choice does not promote the common or aggregate good; and (d) the cost to future people exceeds the benefit to myself. Partiality presents a theory of the reasons supporting special treatment within special relationships and explores the vexing problem of how we might reconcile the moral value of these relationships with competing claims of impartial morality. This justification wouldnt satisfy everyone, but our common ground means that I can offer it to you. Kurzweil, R., The Singularity is Near, Duckworth, 2005. This paper was first presented to a workshop on partiality at the Australian Catholic University in Melbourne in April 2017. All Rights Reserved. 5Ethics has an irreducibly second-personal element.5 If I sacrifice your life (whether for the common good, or to save my own life, or to protect myself from some lesser harm), then I must provide some moral justification that is addressed to you. Mulgan, T., Theory and intuition in a broken world, in Intuition, theory, and anti-theory, edited by Sophie-Grace Chappell, Oxford University Press, 2015, pp. 4 Cf. (The sacrifice might be indirect: perhaps my survival depends on cutting-edge medical treatment or research, but the best available collective environmental policy would require us to remove the necessary resources from the healthcare budget.) 88, 141-144; Griffin Well-Being, pp. 15-32. Keller first presents two main accounts of partiality: the projects view, on which reasons of partiality arise from the place that people take within our lives and our commitments, and the relationships view, on which relationships themselves contain fundamental value or reason-giving force. Kumar, R., Defending the moral moderate: Contractualism and Commonsense, Philosophy and Public Affairs 28, 2000, pp. ethics, demandingness, historical, impartiality, partiality. 17Suppose I sacrifice future interests to secure a level of personal healthcare that is unimaginable to future people, or to fly around the world to experience natural wonders that will not survive future climate change, or to extend my lifespan beyond anything future people could hope for. 20 Nozick 1974, pp. Finally, precisely because it makes our task easier, my assumption of a sympathetic audience will render any negative result even more disturbing. 92-114. 141-166. Education doesnt simply help people to satisfy their existing preferences. Clearly, we make this childs life go better if we send them to school. Keywords: Bostrom, N., Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies, Oxford University Press, 2014. But in a broken world, where nothing (not even bare survival) can be guaranteed to everyone, rights must either be abandoned or radically reinvented.17 This is why the broken world is so ethically unsettling. An individual can only insist on a right to have her chance of survival determined by a fair lottery. I must then provide both impersonal and second-personal justifications.
Indeed, Robert Nozick introduced his experience machine thought experiment as a reductio ad absurdum of hedonism.20 If their real-life alternative has abundant resources, these non-hedonists will reject all virtual futures. 144-161. Future people or, more neutrally, future inhabitants of digital futures may either fail to understand this use of the personal pronoun, or refuse to grant it any moral significance. Cowen, T, and Parfit, D., Against the social discount rate, in Justice Between Age Groups and Generations, edited by P. Laslett and J. Fishkin, Yale University Press, 1992, pp. L., The Fourth Revolution: How the infosphere is reshaping human reality. In a survival-lottery-based society, where cooperation is much more central, nothing can be universally guaranteed, and autarkic survival is impossible, philosophers seeking a new reflective equilibrium will attach far less weight to individual projects and/or individual autonomy. 19In a broken world, scarcity of material resources (especially water) and an unpredictable climate create periodic population bottlenecks where not everyone can survive. 2 The Demands of Impartiality and the Evolution of Morality, 6 Permissible Partiality, Projects, and Plural Agency, 8 Which Relationships Justify Partiality? We can count the number of people in a room, a country, or even a possible future. In a digital future, however, it could emerge as the only intelligible position.29 As Parfit himself argued, reductionism has very radical implications for the moral significance or even the coherence of familiar defences of partiality.30. Hooker, Ideal Code, Real World; Mulgan, Future People, chapters 5 and 6; Mulgan, How should utilitarians think about the future?; Mulgan, Utilitarian Future Ethics. To troubleshoot, please check our I justify my partiality by claiming that I am (simply) exercising my own rights. Rawls, J., A Theory of Justice, Harvard University Press, 1971. These differences will affect their response to our attempts to justify ourselves to them. Jackson, F., From metaphysics to ethics, Oxford University Press, 1999. Any justification for present partiality must include the claim that I am permitted to act in a way that prioritises my own interests. It also teaches them what to desire, and which pleasures to seek. 21 I argue in Corporate Agency and Possible Futures that future people living in a broken world will emphasise interpersonal relations and cooperation, and that they will be suspicious of anyone who is too individualistic. Scanlon, What we owe to each other, Kumar, Defending the moral moderate. Or perhaps we should say that I only have a plausible impersonal justification if I can also use it to ground an acceptable second-personal justification. Political philosophers since John Locke have gone to enormous lengths to appease these recalcitrant individualists, with the result that contemporary theories of justice are skewed in favour of individual autonomy. 2Departures from impartiality must be justified. Can I reasonably insist on elements of well-being that future people themselves cannot hope to enjoy? 26 Cf. 32Imagine a digital future where flesh-and-blood humans have been replaced by digital beings intelligent machines and/or digital copies of human brains.24 This is another credible future. It is important to satisfy peoples desires only because what they value is independently worthwhile. Future people might argue that, in our affluent present, instead of insisting on guaranteed rights, we should institute an intergenerational lottery to spread the burden of avoiding the broken future equitably across the generations. (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2022. That justification could be directly impartial (e.g., my need was greater than yours or I maximised aggregate wellbeing) or indirectly impersonal (e.g., I could offer you a rule utilitarian or contractualist story). Singer, P., Famine, Affluence and Morality, Philosophy and Public Affairs 1, 1972, pp. 27Many non-hedonists worry that some essential component of a flourishing human life is missing in any virtual future. 13In my book Ethics for a Broken World, I imagine a future broken by climate change (or some other disaster), where a chaotic climate makes life precarious, Rawlsian favourable conditions13 no longer apply, and our affluent way of life is no longer an option.14 This is one credible future. I explore its ethical implications in Ethics for Possible Futures, Theorising about Justice for a Broken World, and Corporate agency and possible futures. Parfit, D., Reason and Persons, Oxford University Press, 1984. 
I focus on futures where our contemporary arguments for partiality might be undermined. 29 Parfit, Reasons and Persons, Part Three. Kumar, R., Who can be wronged?, Philosophy and Public Affairs 31, 2003, pp. 
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