The personaffecting view is the idea that we have no reason to create a person just because their life would go well. In slogan form “make people happy, not happy people.” It’s important to know if the personaffecting view is right because it has serious implications for what actions should be taken. If the personaffecting view is false, it’s extremely important that we don’t go extinct so that we can then create lots of happy people.The far future could contain staggeringly large numbers of people on the order of 10^52, https://existential-risk.com/concept and possibly much more. https://benthams.substack.com/p/three-mistakes-in-three-mistakes If creating a happy person is a good thing, then ensuring we have such a future is a key priority. MacAskill and Greaves, in their paper on strong Longtermism, do some back of the envelope calculations and conclude that https://www.globalprioritiesinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/The-Case-for-Strong-Longtermism-GPI-Working-Paper-June-2021-2-2.pdf each dollar spent reducing existential risks increases expected future populations by 10 billion. This sounds outlandish, but it turns out pretty conservative when you take into account that there’s a non-zero chance that the future could sustain very large populations for billions of years.Unfortunately for personaffecting view proponents, the personaffecting view is very unlikely to be correct. I think the case against it is about as good as the case against any view in philosophy gets.I was largely inspired to write this by Elliott Thornley’s excellent summary https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/c6ZYCpq2L46AxSJNy/my-favourite-arguments-against-personaffecting-views#5__Deontic_PAVs of the arguments for the personaffecting view, which I highly recommend reading. My piece overlaps considerably with his. Separately, Thornley is great his blog and EA forum account are both very worth readinghttps://benthams.substack.com/p/its-good-to-create-happy-people-a
>>524219895buy an ad
>>524220025Bump
>>524219895That’s a (cute) man.
>>524221324I think it's a real woman I'm just pissed she forgot the tail https://fashionjournal.com.au/life/pubic-hair-playboy-bunny/
Bump on
