An Asymmetrical View

I'm a bit late today in posting, mainly because I had hoped I would come up with a solution overnight to my problem I encountered yesterday, but to no avail. Because this is so, I will instead go back to a small issue that I sort of ran into last week.

Harken back to the day I was explaining a loss of wellbeing for one person that caused a gain in the peak value of wellbeing within a world. If you don't remember, I was mentioning when the man with the highest wellbeing in the world robbed a man with lower wellbeing in order to increase his own wellbeing (the peak wellbeing) to a higher level. This is a good thing, according to the pure elitist. However, many people agree that robbing people is wrong (and I assure you, I am one of those people). Thus, as so many other ethical theorists do, I make my view asymmetrical.

What this means is that under my view, you are NOT required to do the good thing, but are instead only required NOT to do the BAD thing. For example, it is not necessary to move to a higher peak wellbeing. However, it is necessary to prevent moving from a high peak wellbeing to a lower peak wellbeing. Thus, it's asymmetrical.

By making it so, I do not require the man with the highest wellbeing to go around robbing everyone left and right in order to increase his own wellbeing.

A Major Set Back

I realized that not only am I forced to accept the position I discovered yesterday, there's an even more absurd conclusion that I am forced to. Let's set the minimum wellbeing value for a life worth living to 5 again.

Take two worlds. Both have populations A through Z (all the letters in between). In the first world, populations A through Z have a wellbeing of 5.1. Not too bad, since they all have lives worth living. In the second world, populations A through Y have a wellbeing of 100 quintillion, and populatoin Z has a wellbeing of 4.9. I am still forced to accept that the first world is better, but I simply do not see that. It doesn't seem realistic to me that anyone would say that world one is better, when 25/26 populations in world 2 are so much better off than those in the other world. And yet, if I maintain my attitude of the minimum wellbeing value trumping peak value, I have to accept this.

So as of right now, I have two options. Assuming, of course, that most people would agree with me and accept this conclusion as absurd, I could simply bite the bullet and say yes, I accept this conclusion. However, this is very unsatisfactory to me, so I will try to work around this by either adding in another feature or simply removing the minimum life worth living value.

This is kind of a setback, but oh well.

A Problem with Minimum Life Value

So I just thought of a position I think that, as of right now, I am forced to accept. I don't find it completely implausible, but it is certainly a little of a stretch. It comes from the fact that not going below a life worth living trumps peak value.

Take two worlds. Let us stipulate once again (for the sake of argument only) that any population that has a wellbeing below 5 is considered not worth living. They both have two populations (A and B). In the first world, A has a wellbeing of 3 billion and B has a wellbeing of 4. In the second world, both populations have a wellbeing of 6. Because of the fact that I have made not going below a life worth living more important than peak value, I am forced to accept that the 2nd world is a better world.

I'm not quite certain if this is a bad thing, I honestly am not sure what is the right answer here. My elitism cries out that world one is far superior, but I am not sure what the general public would think. Either way, it's definitely a problem I need to address, because no matter where I draw the line for "a life worth living", I will run into this problem. And it's quite easy to make it even more dramatic (change the wellbeing values of A and B in world one to 3 quintillion and 4.99, respectively).

I hate philosophy sometimes.

The Robbed Man

So I had planned on showing why people balk at this today, but instead I think I'll discuss further the idea of people choosing elitism every day without knowing it. Think of any parent. They give up money, time, and practically everything else in their life in order to make their child(ren) happy. At least, a good parent does.

Some might argue that, in reality, this does not actually lower the parent's wellbeing at all, and so I wanted to show an example where it clearly lowers someone's wellbeing for a gain in someone else's. Take a man who is rather well off, has a rather high wellbeing, etc. One day, another man comes to his house, holds him at gunpoint, and takes all of his money, credit cards, etc. Unbeknownst to the first man (the man who is being robbed), all of this money is going to be going to the man with the highest wellbeing in the world in order to increase his peak value of wellbeing (and thus for an elitist, a better world is being made). The robbed man has no inkling on this; as far as he knows, he was simply robbed. In my mind, it's hard to find a way for this to be an increase in the robbed man's wellbeing, even considering the wide variation in belief of what wellbeing actually is.

This is a very strong elitism here, proponing that whoever has the highest wellbeing go around and rob everyone else in order to increase the highest peak wellbeing. Hopefully over the next few weeks in the continuation of my discussion of my theory I won't be forced to this strong elitist view, but we'll see.

Everyday life

So today I'm going to start in on some examples and things that I hope will make my theory sound more plausible. The first is an appeal to everyday life. People every day, at least in my opinion, choose to act in an elitist way (elitist as in the ethical theory, not as in a pompous jackass). Imagine a student. Tomorrow, he has an economics mid-term that, if he fails, will most likely result in a failing grade for the entire semester (since his mid-term is worth 50% of his grade). His friend calls him up and asks him if he wants to go out and play some cricket. At this point, the student has two options (he may have more, but for the sake of argument, let us assume he can ONLY do one of these two things due to some preternatural force): study for his econ mid-term, for which has not studied at all as of yet, or go and play cricket. If he ends up playing cricket, he will fail his mid-term. If he studies, he will not.

Now, let us say that this student abhors studying, such that whenever he studies it decreases his wellbeing. Also, he only mildly enjoys cricket, such that playing cricket does not affect his wellbeing all that much, perhaps only slightly increasing it. However, passing his mid-term due to studying would increase his wellbeing greatly, much more so than playing cricket. Being the good student he is (and unknowingly the good elitist he is), the student elects to study instead of playing cricket, as he desires to pass his econ mid-term. Thus, he has elected to decrease his wellbeing as one point, yet still keep it above the minimum level for a life worth living, in order to gain a higher peak value of wellbeing later on.

This scenario, of choosing to do something that decreases wellbeing in order to have a higher wellbeing than one would have otherwise gotten, seems to be an everyday occurrence in many people's lives. Other examples are donating to charities (for the tax rebate of course), going to work everyday (with the possible exception of those very few who actually like their jobs), paying taxes (so as to not go to jail), etc. These everyday scenarios are elitist through and through, and yet no one realizes it.

Tomorrow I will show why people will balk at this, even though they do it seemingly every day.

The Mere Addition Paradox

I looked through Parfit some, and the only objection I can possibly see is the Mere Addition Paradox, but I avoid this by having something akin to Kavka's "Bad Level" which Parfit explains. This "Bad Level" example has its own problems, mainly that it forces the theorist once again to the Repugnant Conclusion. (If you do not know what this is, check out http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/repugnant-conclusion/. It has a nice succinct summary of it with a few attempts at getting around it.) However, I avoid this conclusion with my prioritization of peak value rather than an averagist or totalistic approach. So as far as I can see, Parfit has nothing to say against my theory, at least, nothing from his book Reason and Persons (Oxford University Press, 1984).

Minimum Life Worth Living Value

So I think I've found a solution by adding a minimum "life worth living" value. What this means is there is a threshold below which a life is no longer worth living. By adding this, I would say that peak value is the most important value, as long as increasing it does not decrease any population below the value of a life worth living. For example, let's say anything below a wellbeing of 5 is not a life worth living. It is alright to do whatever it takes to increase the population in a given world with the highest peak value to a higher peak value, so long as no other population in the world falls below a wellbeing of 5. So in more generic terms, decreasing a population below the level of a life worth living trumps increasing peak value.

I remember Derek Parfit having something to say about ethical theories that take a minimum "life worth living" value into account, but I don't quite remember exactly what he said. I'll have to look it up and see if he has anything that messes up my theory.

A Possible Solution?

So one of the possible solutions is combining total value theory with peak value theory, as I said yesterday. Of course, the problem with this is drawing the line. When does total value theory become more important than peak value theory?

One thought is that you cannot decrease the total value. However, I just immediately disregarded this. If a world is moving from 2 populations both of whom have wellbeings of 10 to 2 populations, one of which has wellbeing 11 and one of which has wellbeing 8, I prefer the second scenario. However, the total wellbeing has decreased (from 20 to 19). So this won't suffice.

Another thought is to say that the total wellbeing cannot go below a certain threshold. But again, I was just thinking of this and I immediately disregard it. Because even if the threshold is something "high" (for the sake of argument, let's say a threshold of 10 is high), it still would not do. You could have one population with 20 and one population with -10, making the total 10 but leaving one population in complete misery.

An idea just struck me that I will attempt to develop tomorrow. It has to deal with adding in a minimum "life worth living" value for each population in a given world.

A Modern Elitism, part 2

Yesterday I attempted to explain peak value. Today I'm going to discuss an issue with value theories that have peak value as their primary concern.

Because only peak value matters, all of the other values are disregarded. This is rather problematic. Imagine two worlds. The first world has two populations, both of which have a wellbeing value of 10. The second world has two populations, one of which has a value of 11 and the other of which has a value of -1x10^200. According to peak value theory, this second world is better since there is a higher peak value. This is a very bad result, as no ethical theorist wants to say that a world in which some population has a wellbeing value that is extremely negative (with anything below 0 being a life not worth living or at least a life that is lived in utter suffering) is better than a world in which both populations have an equally high wellbeing that is positive.

My hope is that I can get around this by somehow combining peak value theory and totalistic value theory. I have yet to come up with the solution, but tomorrow I will put down a few ideas I have.

A Modern Elitism, part 1

My first goal is to work through my own ethical theory. Over the next few weeks I'm going to post ideas, explanations, refutations, etc. regarding my own version of elitism, an ethical theory.

The primary aspect of elitism is that it takes into account Peak Value for wellbeing (wellbeing meaning that generic term to which philosophers in value theory refer when they speak of such things as happiness or wealth, but remembering that it is not limited to these things) over Total Value. For example, for elitism, having two subjects that have a wellbeing of 8 and 2 respectively is better than having two subjects with a wellbeing of 6 each. The math shows that the second set of subjects has a higher total wellbeing, but the elitist would pick the first set of subjects since there is a higher peak value (that value being 8, which is higher than 6). This gives rise to some startling problems, which I will discuss next time.