After my first round I played more rounds where I tried to answer based on intuitions that I think are closer to common sense than my own. In one round, I don't think I actually had to bite all the suggested bullets. My rules were roughly:
impersonal improvements are good: For a fixed number of persons, it's better if the same number of persons are all better off individually.
This still holds, if in the same move we add more people with lives worth living.
no judgment on welfare distribution on purely consequential grounds. If in one world some people are better off but others are worse off or don't exist, I can't judge it. Maybe I still strive for equality as a principle in society but I won't judge two world only on grounds of welfare distribution.
One bullet I supposedly had to bite was titled "Comparable when the numbers match, unrankable when they do not" and an example of the problem described as "100 people at 90 is determinately better than 100 different people at 50; put one more person into the better future and the comparison falls silent", but I'm not sure why this would follow from my answers. On question 8, I agreed to benign addition, which captures exactly this situation.
Another was Parfit's Depletion problem. I definitely had to bite this one, but my intuitions here are: I can still think ruining the climate is bad because it is selfish. You should not make the future worse for your own good. This can be read as an impersonal statement, i.e. it doesn't matter that the future beings are only worse off than the counterfactual future beings which are not the same.
Maybe I admit that I like worlds better, were people follow the principles I like and so in this scenario I would actually choose the more equal world. Then you might conclude that you can get me in the repugnant conclusion again. But this would work by adding more generations that wouldn't have existed otherwise and maybe under this framing the hypothetical me that has those intuitions would agree this time: If we have a world were humanity survives for hundreds of generations in the status quo, it would be false for the current generation to have much better lives at the expense of all future generations.
This is nice, we need more games!
After my first round I played more rounds where I tried to answer based on intuitions that I think are closer to common sense than my own. In one round, I don't think I actually had to bite all the suggested bullets. My rules were roughly:
This gave me https://mdickens.me/pop-ethics/#a=yrnlrrnynr---y-y-n-&q=r
One bullet I supposedly had to bite was titled "Comparable when the numbers match, unrankable when they do not" and an example of the problem described as "100 people at 90 is determinately better than 100 different people at 50; put one more person into the better future and the comparison falls silent", but I'm not sure why this would follow from my answers. On question 8, I agreed to benign addition, which captures exactly this situation.
Another was Parfit's Depletion problem. I definitely had to bite this one, but my intuitions here are: I can still think ruining the climate is bad because it is selfish. You should not make the future worse for your own good. This can be read as an impersonal statement, i.e. it doesn't matter that the future beings are only worse off than the counterfactual future beings which are not the same.
Maybe I admit that I like worlds better, were people follow the principles I like and so in this scenario I would actually choose the more equal world. Then you might conclude that you can get me in the repugnant conclusion again. But this would work by adding more generations that wouldn't have existed otherwise and maybe under this framing the hypothetical me that has those intuitions would agree this time: If we have a world were humanity survives for hundreds of generations in the status quo, it would be false for the current generation to have much better lives at the expense of all future generations.