I'd be curious to see you expand on this - I have views on morality and personal identity that, as a lucky byproduct, happen to defuse the NIP, but I can't see how it would apply to the large class of evils that affect primarily already-existing people. Wouldn't the NIP actually *cut off* the common defense that those evils may be necessary to procure goods for future generations (eg the "we needed WWII so we could have rocket technology today" idea)?
Oh sorry let me clarify. I think our actions affect future procreation in ways that are morally relevant. Even small evils like one child getting cancer affect the identity of every future person a century from now. As a result of this, they have unexpected effects that are both quite good and quite bad, which make about half of apparently gratuitous evils genuinely gratuitous.
Hmm... I guess I'd say that, even if this approach did ultimately result in the amount of evils being cut in half, it wouldn't do anything to shift the distribution of explicability - if anything, it would just mean we had even *less* of an ability to plausibly identify outweighing goods being generated, right? But also, I just think this view of identity is totally wrong and collapses almost every ethical system into skepticism really fast if you're not careful!
I disagree about the ethical point. The identity affecting acts fizzle out in expectation.
It provides a fine explanation of any particular evil. For any particular evil, even on naturalism, you should only be just above 50% sure that it's genuinely bad.
Why doesn't that judgment just consign us to immediate moral skepticism, on the grounds that we have no reason to believe we can accurately assess the impacts of our own actions when we do attempt to act morally?
I think the nonidentity problem gives us reason to think about half of apparent evils aren’t bad.
I'd be curious to see you expand on this - I have views on morality and personal identity that, as a lucky byproduct, happen to defuse the NIP, but I can't see how it would apply to the large class of evils that affect primarily already-existing people. Wouldn't the NIP actually *cut off* the common defense that those evils may be necessary to procure goods for future generations (eg the "we needed WWII so we could have rocket technology today" idea)?
Oh sorry let me clarify. I think our actions affect future procreation in ways that are morally relevant. Even small evils like one child getting cancer affect the identity of every future person a century from now. As a result of this, they have unexpected effects that are both quite good and quite bad, which make about half of apparently gratuitous evils genuinely gratuitous.
Hmm... I guess I'd say that, even if this approach did ultimately result in the amount of evils being cut in half, it wouldn't do anything to shift the distribution of explicability - if anything, it would just mean we had even *less* of an ability to plausibly identify outweighing goods being generated, right? But also, I just think this view of identity is totally wrong and collapses almost every ethical system into skepticism really fast if you're not careful!
I disagree about the ethical point. The identity affecting acts fizzle out in expectation.
It provides a fine explanation of any particular evil. For any particular evil, even on naturalism, you should only be just above 50% sure that it's genuinely bad.
Why doesn't that judgment just consign us to immediate moral skepticism, on the grounds that we have no reason to believe we can accurately assess the impacts of our own actions when we do attempt to act morally?
They'll still be positive in expectation because the identity affecting acts cancel out in expectation.