Hi Richard––it was a joke; my apologies. I enjoyed your post. The serious point is this: If someone asked us for advice on a project they felt clueless about, and then explained that the project involved determining which actions best promote a goal across the entire future, the common-sense reply would be "Oh, well." I'd argue that if we turned out to be clueless about what the consequentialist part of morality requires of us, that should not come as a huge surprise. I agree that epistemic difficulty need not amount to cluelessness, but I’m less sure than you that it doesn’t here. There are good reasons to think that building paperclip factories increases paperclips locally; once we ask about the total across the long-run future, however, we can have a long and disturbing debate about where the balance of reasons points.
Only a radical skeptic could doubt that we know which action maximizes the total number of paperclip-shaped structures until the heat death of the universe.
Hi Anthony, thanks––unpacking the worry and making it precise would be helpful, yes (especially as it applies to bottom-up bracketing). Perhaps my discussion with Michael can help locate potential disagreements. I just added a few thoughts.
Hi again, thanks––that's indeed what follows for the chickens, on this approach. I don't necessarily want to defend this implication, but on the assumption that sufficiently tiny probabilities of "higher" suffering put the respective prospects in the "lower" category, it's less troubling than one might think. Consider another case: A trillion existing people each have the option to participate in a lottery that will cause one person higher suffering and make everybody else happy. They are all asking you to let them participate in the lottery, and would object otherwise (on personal welfare grounds). You point out that one person will certainly end up experiencing higher suffering, and that certain higher suffering cannot be outweighed by non-higher happiness. And yet, that should not dissuade them (on the assumption that a one-in-a-trillion chance of higher suffering is sufficiently small). Hence, if you want to take seriously the welfare-based verdicts of the people affected by your choice, you should arguably run the lottery.
This approach may allow us to discount the reasons supplied by far future individuals sufficiently to place them in the lower category––as you say. If we want/expect determinate "consequentialist" verdicts in favor of saving people from malaria today (or any higher harms), despite long-term cluelessness, this is a welcome result.
However, the implication for the chickens is troubling, and it's unclear why empirical specifics about the causal origins of moral patients should be so important. What may have gone wrong, in this approach, is that the designators we use (e.g., "the chicken with DNA xyz") are out of line with our moral concern for those we know exist or will exist. To the extent possible, our designators should arguably pick them out.This may recommend switching to an ex post view and respective designators such as "the chickens who will come into torturous existence given action A." Or, within a formally ex ante view, it may recommend switching to person-moments as the basic objects of concern: "the person-moments who will experience higher suffering after the lottery," in the above case. (The ex ante/ex post distinction is harder to draw than is often assumed.) This would allow us to avoid the troubling implication for the chickens, and avoid having to run the lottery in the above case. Both the person-moments who will suffer after the lottery and the chicken-moments who will come into torturous existence are in the higher category and supply decisive reasons. (As mentioned in another comment, I'm open to person-moment-centered bottom-up bracketing, which can be justified by exactly parallel arguments and is not "impersonal" or "aggregate-first.")
What about far future individuals? Take a very simple case involving two people or person-moments: the one who will suffer at welfare level -10 if we choose A and x-risk is averted (Alice), and the one who will suffer at -10 if we choose B and x-risk is averted (Bob). Suppose we are clueless about how A and B affect the probability of x-risk being averted. On some sharpenings, the probability is sufficiently low to place Alice and Bob in the lower category. Consequently, it is not the case that they are determinately in the higher category. That may or may not provide a basis for subordinating them to the people we can save from malaria today.
The defense of person(-moment)-centered bottom-up bracketing I give in the post grants Kollin et al.'s background views about how to deal with representors. These entail that, in the above case involving Alice and Bob, the situation is indeterminate (there are sharpenings on which Alice supplies the stronger contrastive reason, and sharpenings on which Bob does). This may "threaten" cluelessness in the cases we happen to be facing in the actual world, depending on the number of people like Alice and Bob. (If the people we can save from malaria were numerous enough relative to the Alice- and Bob-like people, the situation would determinately favor saving the people from malaria. Their combined determinate reasons would outweigh the admissible net reason supplied by the Alice- and Bob-like people under every sharpening.) Given Kollin et al.'s unanimity requirement––a single dissenting sharpening is sufficient for indeterminacy––this is exactly as it should be. Personally, I don't necessarily expect more determinacy than that (see below). But if you do, you should question the unanimity requirement:
You might argue that since Alice's and Bob's reasons are of the same kind (anti-suffering), occur in equal number (1), and have mirror-symmetric magnitudes (p∈[0, 1]; 10), their reasons should balance each other out. If we added Carol at -10 alongside Bob, Carol and Bob's reasons should be stronger than Alice's. If, instead of adding Carol, we put Bob at -20, his reason should also be stronger than Alice's. And if we narrowed Bob's p to [0.5,1], his reason should again become stronger. (Suppose you are offered a choice between p1∈[0,1] of serious -10 suffering and an independently varying p2∈[0.5,1] of the same -10 suffering, what would you choose? Or suppose you must choose between p1∈[0,1] of -10 and independently varying p2∈[0,1] of -20? Intuitively, the second prospect is worse in each comparison.)
Kollin et al.'s unanimity rule denies this and entails indeterminacy in each of these cases. But some standard, independently axiomatized, and prima facie attractive choice rules entail all of the comparative verdicts just suggested: e.g., minimax regret and non-extremal Hurwicz (see Hayashi 2008, Stoye 2010 and 2011, and Pettigrew 2016). These rules can be applied after the person-centered bottom-up bracketing filter.
If you wish to avoid indeterminacy, this is arguably the way to go. Indeterminacy is not forced by person-centered bottom-up bracketing. It results from combining that architecture with a unanimity rule for sharpenings. Other rules can recover additional action guidance while preserving person-first filtering.
Personally, I'm quite sympathetic to the unanimity rule. But I have sympathies for it across the board: In section 4 of my post, I argue that it's unclear why impartial altruists must be scope-sensitive. If you can either (1) save one person or (2) save two other people but not all three, there is no unanimity. The set of factors relevant to the choice contains three members, two of which favor (2) but one of which favors (1). Kollin et al. should, I think, take seriously the view that the situation is indeterminate. It's unclear to me why one would strongly favor the unanimity rule for representors while rejecting it outright for sets of persons. Just like each admissible probability-sharpening has an equal "claim" to determining our belief, each person has an equal claim to determining our preference. Why "collapse the information" we have in the case of separate persons, but not in the case of separate sharpenings? And if every sharpening must agree before a verdict is epistemically determinate, why is it not the case that every person must agree before a verdict is morally determinate? Why give each separate sharpening veto power, but not each separate person? If anything, I would have thought veto power even more plausible for persons who each have their life on the line––the only one they have––and are insisting to be saved.
Finally, my post briefly discusses Anthony's metanormative bracketing. Even if our favorite rule for representors remains the unanimity of sharpenings, metanormative considerations should perhaps warm us up to alternative rules such as minimax regret and Hurwicz (which plausibly deserve non-negligible credence). When the unanimity rule outputs indeterminacy, the other rules will have a preference. On metanormative bottom-up bracketing, the unanimity rule is bracketed out and the others will decide the case.
Hi both, thanks––yes, I agree this might justify Toby's intuition: Person-moments, or "points of view" that a person occupies (cf. Pettigrew's lecture 6 here), might be the appropriate basic objects of moral concern. I am sympathetic to some of the arguments for this view (e.g., drawing on the apparent existence of intrapersonal moral demands). It might also help us avoid the cluelessness problem potentially posed by prudential longtermism: Take the snack now, bracket your far future "selves."
So my response is this: I think we should first try and see how far we can get with persons as the basic objects of altruistic concern, for a variety of reasons. But feel free to insert "person-moment" or "point of view occupied by a person" where my post says "person"; you'll get person-moment-centered bottom-up bracketing, or personal-point-of-view-centered bottom-up bracketing, based on exactly parallel arguments. Importantly, the shift to person-moments or points of view does not render the theory "impersonal" or "aggregate-first." It just makes the individual, separate persons we are concerned with smaller.
Interesting, thanks––more later, just one (meta-)comment: Maybe, if huge numbers of individuals are pointing in each direction (i.e., if we are clueful enough to be able to pick out these individuals and assign them a contrastive reason of determinate direction but vague magnitude), it would be a mistake for impartial altruists to reach a determinate overall verdict. In cases where the balance of contrastive person-attributable reasons is vague, it seems inadequate to favor either option. In other words, indeterminacy may not be a problem to "solve" in these cases (whether hypothetical or actual); instead, it would be a problem if our theory told us that the situation, in these particular cases, is determinate.
I might be able to share a couple of thoughts on identity and counterpart relations later––it's very tricky business, of course. For now, just one more thought on your apparent intuition (?) that, in the cases we are actually/empirically facing today, we should be able to set far future individuals aside. There might be another, principled way of doing this that may align quite well with the defense of person-centered bottom-up bracketing offered in the post (which justifies its verdicts in terms of each person's ex ante perspective on our choices). Start with the plausible, widely shared idea that no number of mild, barely noticeable headaches can outweigh unbearable, torture-level suffering, i.e., draw a distinction between "lower" and "higher" kinds of suffering (and perhaps an analogous distinction between lower and higher kinds of happiness, à la John Stuart Mill). Then argue that sufficiently tiny probabilities of higher suffering still fall into the lower prospect category, i.e., can be traded off with headaches. (In other words, come up with a way to avoid the kind of fanaticism at issue here.) Finally, argue that our empirical situation happens to be such that, with our actions today, we can only make sufficiently tiny probability-dents in the fates of individual far future people (as represented by us).
Hi Toby––thanks, it's a good question. If you expected your broken glass to badly hurt a person tomorrow, I suppose you wouldn't feel clueless about the net effect on the person's lifetime wellbeing. If so, why feel clueless if the nasty injury occurs later? If injuries from broken glass in the ground are still happening in that future society, it can't have changed that much. (Otherwise, why assume that the broken glass would cause harm, rather than nothing or a benefit, in the first place?)
But suppose we are clueless about the net effect on the injured person's lifetime wellbeing. In that case, if we "ask" the person (from our ex ante perspective, given our imprecise credences) whether she prefers that we remove the glass rather than leaving it in the ground, her welfare-based answer is "no." Consequently, it would seem adequate to bracket her out and bracket you in (from a "consequentialist" point of view). The person supplies no contrastive reason favoring either option; you do.
I should also say, though, that not leaving the glass in the ground seems quite overdetermined by the reasons we have. E.g., deontological reasons not to actively cause serious foreseeable harm to a person (or violate their right to bodily integrity), and reasons not to risk doing so, provide a pretty clear verdict here. (Such reasons are relevant when it comes to actively causing the existence of future people, too.) You can't cut a person without their consent and then (over)compensate them for it.
Thanks, Michael—briefly for now (I'm short on time today and this week): I think some actualist views deserve to be taken very seriously, but for the purpose of defending person-centered bottom-up bracketing, I meant to leave open what procreative reasons are supplied by the persons we can bring into existence. E.g., while the framing of welfare-based objections/regrets suggests an asymmetric view (focused on preventing miserable lives), antiobjections/gratitudes might give us reasons too (to bring happy lives into existence, or to grant them permitting/justifying/canceling force). I agree myopia is an issue but think avoiding it is doable. I'd be interested in reading your draft.
Hi again––thanks! Yes, I should have been more precise about what the claim is I'm trying to argue: that person-centered bottom-up bracketing provides action guiding (determinate) verdicts in just those cases, whether hypothetical or actual, where altruistic action guidance plausibly obtains, and outputs indeterminacy in the other cases. In other words, the claim is that there are no normatively problematic failures of action guidance.
Hi Jesse and Anthony, thank you––regarding your second point, I think it's indeed a nonstarter, from a person-centered point of view, to make up a "counterpart" for Alice. One might think the same regarding your first point: The assumption that Alice's welfare is zero in B-worlds, where she does not exist, is made up. As Mogensen puts it (p. 1027): "We may believe, for example, that a person’s welfare level is defined in outcomes in which she does not exist, and that it takes a value of zero (Greaves & Cusbert, 2022; Holtug, 2001; Roberts, 2003). This would indeed undermine my argument. However, it is also a position that I find incredible, since I find it incredible that non-existent people have well-defined levels of any measurable quantity, be it height, weight, or welfare, any more than logic has a well-defined temperature."
If this is right, it immediately gets us out of the worry expressed in your first point: Alice is indeterminate between the options, so that she is bracketed out (i.e., she provides us with no contrastive reason to favor an option rather than another).
However, it seems to me that this cannot be right. Suppose Alice net-suffers terribly in A-worlds. Surely, this gives us a contrastive reason to choose B rather than A, as far as Alice is concerned. Pace Mogensen, I believe we should be able to get to this verdict without assuming that Alice's nonexistent welfare is literally zero in B-worlds: In the scenario where Alice exists (we choose A and x-risk is averted), she has a welfare-based perspective on how worlds where she doesn't exist compare/rank relative to the world where she exists and suffers, and the comparison prefers nonexistence. (In other words, Alice supplies a welfare-based objection against our choosing A, grounded in the welfare-based take she has on our choice in the scenario where she comes into being.)
So, we have an Alice-indexed contrastive reason not to choose A of the following two-dimensional magnitude: (p ∈ [0, 1]; her negative welfare, say -10, or perhaps [-20, 0)). This reason has a determinate direction (favoring B rather than A) but an indeterminate strength. Now suppose that, in choosing A, we also determinately save Mel from malaria, providing her with a +5 welfare benefit, say. Mel thus supplies a contrastive reason of determinate strength favoring A rather than B. The sum of contrastive reasons is now indeterminate, so that either choice is permissible.
This is the correct verdict, I think. Both intuitively and from person-centered "first principles," impartial altruists should not favor either option in this case. What we have here is one moral patient favoring A, another one opposing A, and the balance of their contrastive reasons being unclear. It makes sense, intuitively and theoretically, that either option should be permissible. (On scope-sensitive forms of altruism, this verdict may change depending on the number of people like Alice and the number of people like Mel involved in the case, as one would expect.)
It is important not to lose sight of the fact that overall indeterminacy is not to be avoided tout court. We should avoid it where, and only where, it does not actually obtain from an impartial altruistic point of view. Consider the following variation on the above case. Suppose our uncertainty regarding Alice is deeper: She might also have a net-happy life in A-worlds, who knows. In that case, Alice provides us with no contrastive reason to favor either option; if we "ask her," she's fine with either choice (given her welfare stakes and our credences). Assuming that, in choosing A, we determinately save Mel from malaria, impartial altruists should not reach a verdict of overall indeterminacy: Mel is not fine with either choice and should thus determine our overall verdict.
The empirical situation (regarding x-risk, various ways in which human survival may be realized, and s-risk) is, of course, complicated. My post does not address the question of what kinds of cases we happen to be facing in the actual world today. It aims to make a contribution to the prior conceptual, moral, and decision-theoretic questions.
Hi Richard––it was a joke; my apologies. I enjoyed your post. The serious point is this: If someone asked us for advice on a project they felt clueless about, and then explained that the project involved determining which actions best promote a goal across the entire future, the common-sense reply would be "Oh, well." I'd argue that if we turned out to be clueless about what the consequentialist part of morality requires of us, that should not come as a huge surprise. I agree that epistemic difficulty need not amount to cluelessness, but I’m less sure than you that it doesn’t here. There are good reasons to think that building paperclip factories increases paperclips locally; once we ask about the total across the long-run future, however, we can have a long and disturbing debate about where the balance of reasons points.
Only a radical skeptic could doubt that we know which action maximizes the total number of paperclip-shaped structures until the heat death of the universe.
Hi Anthony, thanks––unpacking the worry and making it precise would be helpful, yes (especially as it applies to bottom-up bracketing). Perhaps my discussion with Michael can help locate potential disagreements. I just added a few thoughts.
Hi again, thanks––that's indeed what follows for the chickens, on this approach. I don't necessarily want to defend this implication, but on the assumption that sufficiently tiny probabilities of "higher" suffering put the respective prospects in the "lower" category, it's less troubling than one might think. Consider another case: A trillion existing people each have the option to participate in a lottery that will cause one person higher suffering and make everybody else happy. They are all asking you to let them participate in the lottery, and would object otherwise (on personal welfare grounds). You point out that one person will certainly end up experiencing higher suffering, and that certain higher suffering cannot be outweighed by non-higher happiness. And yet, that should not dissuade them (on the assumption that a one-in-a-trillion chance of higher suffering is sufficiently small). Hence, if you want to take seriously the welfare-based verdicts of the people affected by your choice, you should arguably run the lottery.
This approach may allow us to discount the reasons supplied by far future individuals sufficiently to place them in the lower category––as you say. If we want/expect determinate "consequentialist" verdicts in favor of saving people from malaria today (or any higher harms), despite long-term cluelessness, this is a welcome result.
However, the implication for the chickens is troubling, and it's unclear why empirical specifics about the causal origins of moral patients should be so important. What may have gone wrong, in this approach, is that the designators we use (e.g., "the chicken with DNA xyz") are out of line with our moral concern for those we know exist or will exist. To the extent possible, our designators should arguably pick them out. This may recommend switching to an ex post view and respective designators such as "the chickens who will come into torturous existence given action A." Or, within a formally ex ante view, it may recommend switching to person-moments as the basic objects of concern: "the person-moments who will experience higher suffering after the lottery," in the above case. (The ex ante/ex post distinction is harder to draw than is often assumed.) This would allow us to avoid the troubling implication for the chickens, and avoid having to run the lottery in the above case. Both the person-moments who will suffer after the lottery and the chicken-moments who will come into torturous existence are in the higher category and supply decisive reasons. (As mentioned in another comment, I'm open to person-moment-centered bottom-up bracketing, which can be justified by exactly parallel arguments and is not "impersonal" or "aggregate-first.")
What about far future individuals? Take a very simple case involving two people or person-moments: the one who will suffer at welfare level -10 if we choose A and x-risk is averted (Alice), and the one who will suffer at -10 if we choose B and x-risk is averted (Bob). Suppose we are clueless about how A and B affect the probability of x-risk being averted. On some sharpenings, the probability is sufficiently low to place Alice and Bob in the lower category. Consequently, it is not the case that they are determinately in the higher category. That may or may not provide a basis for subordinating them to the people we can save from malaria today.
The defense of person(-moment)-centered bottom-up bracketing I give in the post grants Kollin et al.'s background views about how to deal with representors. These entail that, in the above case involving Alice and Bob, the situation is indeterminate (there are sharpenings on which Alice supplies the stronger contrastive reason, and sharpenings on which Bob does). This may "threaten" cluelessness in the cases we happen to be facing in the actual world, depending on the number of people like Alice and Bob. (If the people we can save from malaria were numerous enough relative to the Alice- and Bob-like people, the situation would determinately favor saving the people from malaria. Their combined determinate reasons would outweigh the admissible net reason supplied by the Alice- and Bob-like people under every sharpening.) Given Kollin et al.'s unanimity requirement––a single dissenting sharpening is sufficient for indeterminacy––this is exactly as it should be. Personally, I don't necessarily expect more determinacy than that (see below). But if you do, you should question the unanimity requirement:
You might argue that since Alice's and Bob's reasons are of the same kind (anti-suffering), occur in equal number (1), and have mirror-symmetric magnitudes (p∈[0, 1]; 10), their reasons should balance each other out. If we added Carol at -10 alongside Bob, Carol and Bob's reasons should be stronger than Alice's. If, instead of adding Carol, we put Bob at -20, his reason should also be stronger than Alice's. And if we narrowed Bob's p to [0.5,1], his reason should again become stronger. (Suppose you are offered a choice between p1∈[0,1] of serious -10 suffering and an independently varying p2∈[0.5,1] of the same -10 suffering, what would you choose? Or suppose you must choose between p1∈[0,1] of -10 and independently varying p2∈[0,1] of -20? Intuitively, the second prospect is worse in each comparison.)
Kollin et al.'s unanimity rule denies this and entails indeterminacy in each of these cases. But some standard, independently axiomatized, and prima facie attractive choice rules entail all of the comparative verdicts just suggested: e.g., minimax regret and non-extremal Hurwicz (see Hayashi 2008, Stoye 2010 and 2011, and Pettigrew 2016). These rules can be applied after the person-centered bottom-up bracketing filter.
If you wish to avoid indeterminacy, this is arguably the way to go. Indeterminacy is not forced by person-centered bottom-up bracketing. It results from combining that architecture with a unanimity rule for sharpenings. Other rules can recover additional action guidance while preserving person-first filtering.
Personally, I'm quite sympathetic to the unanimity rule. But I have sympathies for it across the board: In section 4 of my post, I argue that it's unclear why impartial altruists must be scope-sensitive. If you can either (1) save one person or (2) save two other people but not all three, there is no unanimity. The set of factors relevant to the choice contains three members, two of which favor (2) but one of which favors (1). Kollin et al. should, I think, take seriously the view that the situation is indeterminate. It's unclear to me why one would strongly favor the unanimity rule for representors while rejecting it outright for sets of persons. Just like each admissible probability-sharpening has an equal "claim" to determining our belief, each person has an equal claim to determining our preference. Why "collapse the information" we have in the case of separate persons, but not in the case of separate sharpenings? And if every sharpening must agree before a verdict is epistemically determinate, why is it not the case that every person must agree before a verdict is morally determinate? Why give each separate sharpening veto power, but not each separate person? If anything, I would have thought veto power even more plausible for persons who each have their life on the line––the only one they have––and are insisting to be saved.
Finally, my post briefly discusses Anthony's metanormative bracketing. Even if our favorite rule for representors remains the unanimity of sharpenings, metanormative considerations should perhaps warm us up to alternative rules such as minimax regret and Hurwicz (which plausibly deserve non-negligible credence). When the unanimity rule outputs indeterminacy, the other rules will have a preference. On metanormative bottom-up bracketing, the unanimity rule is bracketed out and the others will decide the case.
Hi both, thanks––yes, I agree this might justify Toby's intuition: Person-moments, or "points of view" that a person occupies (cf. Pettigrew's lecture 6 here), might be the appropriate basic objects of moral concern. I am sympathetic to some of the arguments for this view (e.g., drawing on the apparent existence of intrapersonal moral demands). It might also help us avoid the cluelessness problem potentially posed by prudential longtermism: Take the snack now, bracket your far future "selves."
So my response is this: I think we should first try and see how far we can get with persons as the basic objects of altruistic concern, for a variety of reasons. But feel free to insert "person-moment" or "point of view occupied by a person" where my post says "person"; you'll get person-moment-centered bottom-up bracketing, or personal-point-of-view-centered bottom-up bracketing, based on exactly parallel arguments. Importantly, the shift to person-moments or points of view does not render the theory "impersonal" or "aggregate-first." It just makes the individual, separate persons we are concerned with smaller.
Interesting, thanks––more later, just one (meta-)comment: Maybe, if huge numbers of individuals are pointing in each direction (i.e., if we are clueful enough to be able to pick out these individuals and assign them a contrastive reason of determinate direction but vague magnitude), it would be a mistake for impartial altruists to reach a determinate overall verdict. In cases where the balance of contrastive person-attributable reasons is vague, it seems inadequate to favor either option. In other words, indeterminacy may not be a problem to "solve" in these cases (whether hypothetical or actual); instead, it would be a problem if our theory told us that the situation, in these particular cases, is determinate.
I might be able to share a couple of thoughts on identity and counterpart relations later––it's very tricky business, of course. For now, just one more thought on your apparent intuition (?) that, in the cases we are actually/empirically facing today, we should be able to set far future individuals aside. There might be another, principled way of doing this that may align quite well with the defense of person-centered bottom-up bracketing offered in the post (which justifies its verdicts in terms of each person's ex ante perspective on our choices). Start with the plausible, widely shared idea that no number of mild, barely noticeable headaches can outweigh unbearable, torture-level suffering, i.e., draw a distinction between "lower" and "higher" kinds of suffering (and perhaps an analogous distinction between lower and higher kinds of happiness, à la John Stuart Mill). Then argue that sufficiently tiny probabilities of higher suffering still fall into the lower prospect category, i.e., can be traded off with headaches. (In other words, come up with a way to avoid the kind of fanaticism at issue here.) Finally, argue that our empirical situation happens to be such that, with our actions today, we can only make sufficiently tiny probability-dents in the fates of individual far future people (as represented by us).
Hi Toby––thanks, it's a good question. If you expected your broken glass to badly hurt a person tomorrow, I suppose you wouldn't feel clueless about the net effect on the person's lifetime wellbeing. If so, why feel clueless if the nasty injury occurs later? If injuries from broken glass in the ground are still happening in that future society, it can't have changed that much. (Otherwise, why assume that the broken glass would cause harm, rather than nothing or a benefit, in the first place?)
But suppose we are clueless about the net effect on the injured person's lifetime wellbeing. In that case, if we "ask" the person (from our ex ante perspective, given our imprecise credences) whether she prefers that we remove the glass rather than leaving it in the ground, her welfare-based answer is "no." Consequently, it would seem adequate to bracket her out and bracket you in (from a "consequentialist" point of view). The person supplies no contrastive reason favoring either option; you do.
I should also say, though, that not leaving the glass in the ground seems quite overdetermined by the reasons we have. E.g., deontological reasons not to actively cause serious foreseeable harm to a person (or violate their right to bodily integrity), and reasons not to risk doing so, provide a pretty clear verdict here. (Such reasons are relevant when it comes to actively causing the existence of future people, too.) You can't cut a person without their consent and then (over)compensate them for it.
Thanks, Michael—briefly for now (I'm short on time today and this week): I think some actualist views deserve to be taken very seriously, but for the purpose of defending person-centered bottom-up bracketing, I meant to leave open what procreative reasons are supplied by the persons we can bring into existence. E.g., while the framing of welfare-based objections/regrets suggests an asymmetric view (focused on preventing miserable lives), antiobjections/gratitudes might give us reasons too (to bring happy lives into existence, or to grant them permitting/justifying/canceling force). I agree myopia is an issue but think avoiding it is doable. I'd be interested in reading your draft.
Hi again––thanks! Yes, I should have been more precise about what the claim is I'm trying to argue: that person-centered bottom-up bracketing provides action guiding (determinate) verdicts in just those cases, whether hypothetical or actual, where altruistic action guidance plausibly obtains, and outputs indeterminacy in the other cases. In other words, the claim is that there are no normatively problematic failures of action guidance.
Hi Jesse and Anthony, thank you––regarding your second point, I think it's indeed a nonstarter, from a person-centered point of view, to make up a "counterpart" for Alice. One might think the same regarding your first point: The assumption that Alice's welfare is zero in B-worlds, where she does not exist, is made up. As Mogensen puts it (p. 1027): "We may believe, for example, that a person’s welfare level is defined in outcomes in which she does not exist, and that it takes a value of zero (Greaves & Cusbert, 2022; Holtug, 2001; Roberts, 2003). This would indeed undermine my argument. However, it is also a position that I find incredible, since I find it incredible that non-existent people have well-defined levels of any measurable quantity, be it height, weight, or welfare, any more than logic has a well-defined temperature."
If this is right, it immediately gets us out of the worry expressed in your first point: Alice is indeterminate between the options, so that she is bracketed out (i.e., she provides us with no contrastive reason to favor an option rather than another).
However, it seems to me that this cannot be right. Suppose Alice net-suffers terribly in A-worlds. Surely, this gives us a contrastive reason to choose B rather than A, as far as Alice is concerned. Pace Mogensen, I believe we should be able to get to this verdict without assuming that Alice's nonexistent welfare is literally zero in B-worlds: In the scenario where Alice exists (we choose A and x-risk is averted), she has a welfare-based perspective on how worlds where she doesn't exist compare/rank relative to the world where she exists and suffers, and the comparison prefers nonexistence. (In other words, Alice supplies a welfare-based objection against our choosing A, grounded in the welfare-based take she has on our choice in the scenario where she comes into being.)
So, we have an Alice-indexed contrastive reason not to choose A of the following two-dimensional magnitude: (p ∈ [0, 1]; her negative welfare, say -10, or perhaps [-20, 0)). This reason has a determinate direction (favoring B rather than A) but an indeterminate strength. Now suppose that, in choosing A, we also determinately save Mel from malaria, providing her with a +5 welfare benefit, say. Mel thus supplies a contrastive reason of determinate strength favoring A rather than B. The sum of contrastive reasons is now indeterminate, so that either choice is permissible.
This is the correct verdict, I think. Both intuitively and from person-centered "first principles," impartial altruists should not favor either option in this case. What we have here is one moral patient favoring A, another one opposing A, and the balance of their contrastive reasons being unclear. It makes sense, intuitively and theoretically, that either option should be permissible. (On scope-sensitive forms of altruism, this verdict may change depending on the number of people like Alice and the number of people like Mel involved in the case, as one would expect.)
It is important not to lose sight of the fact that overall indeterminacy is not to be avoided tout court. We should avoid it where, and only where, it does not actually obtain from an impartial altruistic point of view. Consider the following variation on the above case. Suppose our uncertainty regarding Alice is deeper: She might also have a net-happy life in A-worlds, who knows. In that case, Alice provides us with no contrastive reason to favor either option; if we "ask her," she's fine with either choice (given her welfare stakes and our credences). Assuming that, in choosing A, we determinately save Mel from malaria, impartial altruists should not reach a verdict of overall indeterminacy: Mel is not fine with either choice and should thus determine our overall verdict.
The empirical situation (regarding x-risk, various ways in which human survival may be realized, and s-risk) is, of course, complicated. My post does not address the question of what kinds of cases we happen to be facing in the actual world today. It aims to make a contribution to the prior conceptual, moral, and decision-theoretic questions.