Friday, March 20, 2015

People are not fungible

If people are fungible—can be exchanged for exact duplicates without this making any significant difference of value—then any two situations where there is the same number of exactly similar people are equivalent in value. After all, we can get from one situation to the other by just replacing the people in the one situation by the people in the other.

But suppose there are infinitely many exactly similar happy people and every second one ceases to exist. Obviously, something bad has happened—a lot of value has gone out of the world. But the number of exactly similar happy people is the same. So people are not fungible.

8 comments:

Mike Almeida said...

Alex,

Interesting post. It has implications for tele-transportation cases, like the one's Parfit discusses. If people are not fungible, then the duplicate of me created on Mars daily (as I tele-transport to work and back) somehow leaves the world less valuable. Unless of course the duplicate just is me. What if the duplicate is close enough to being me for it to matter in survival? Does it still leave the world worse off?

Heath White said...

I don't think you need infinity to make the argument. Suppose there are 100 people and God now and then annihilates one while simultaneously creating a new person. That doesn't seem as good as just letting everyone live in peace.

Walter Van den Acker said...

Heath White said

"I don't think you need infinity to make the argument. Suppose there are 100 people and God now and then annihilates one while simultaneously creating a new person. That doesn't seem as good as just letting everyone live in peace."


Now, what about:

Suppose there are 100 people and god now and then allows one to die while simultaneously putting a new baby on the world.
That doesn't seem as good as just letting everybody live in peace.

Alexander R Pruss said...

But if the one person goes to heaven, then it does seem pretty good.

Walter Van den Acker said...

Alexander R Pruss said

"But if the one person goes to heaven, then it does seem pretty good."

Yes, that's correct, but if the one person goes to hell, it doesn't seem so good anymore.
The bottom line is, it is only pretty good if all people go to heaven, so the only way for Heath's argument to work is universalism.

Cale said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Cale said...

Part of the problem in the argument as presented is that humans don't have the capacity for infinite valuation.

Pruss wants us to equivocate between the idea that the "value" in the situation is just the net happiness of people, or the total number of happy people, but this isn't actually how it works. Each of those people values the situation a certain amount, and that valuation is finite. If Ted is one of those infinite similarly happy people, there is some finite number of people that he cares about. If one of those particular people is annihilated, that will make Ted value the situation less.

So from Ted's perspective--or, from the perspective of any person (B) actually in that situation (S)--given any particular annihilation (A) either B doesn't care about A at all, or that A actually does reduce the value of S for B.

Of course, if we take a grand, overlooking perspective, then the value of S never changes. But, if we take a grand overlooking perspective, then Pruss's contention that "Obviously, something bad has happened" is simply false.

This "something bad" is only obvious from a human perspective that is incapable of infinite valuation.

Pruss wants us to switch haphazardly between these two very different types of valuation, but that is not good argumentation--if we were to construct this formally, it would either fall apart or rely upon a false equivocation--a formal logical failure. It would, actually, look like this:

1.) If people are fungible, then any infinite set* of similarly happy people (ISP) has the same value as any other ISP
2.) If a person is annihilated from an ISP, that ISP is still an ISP.
3.) If people are fungible and a person is annihilated from an ISP, that ISP still has the same value as it had before (from 1 and 2)
4.) If a person is annihilated from an ISP, that ISP loses value.
5.) People are not fungible (from 3 and 4)

However, here we can clearly see the false equivocation:

In premise 1, Pruss wants us to imagine that we are capable of valuing an infinite set of similarly happy people (which we are not).

If we continue to imagine that we are actually capable of valuing that ISP throughout the course of the argument, then premise 4 becomes trivially false--but Pruss doesn't want us to do this. He wants us to switch mid-stream and start valuing sets of people the way in which we actually do in reality: as though they were finite.

With this core inconsistency exposed, I think we have to acknowledge that the argument is a failure. As a poster above proposed, an argument which only deals with finite groups of people would be a better approach.



*all infinite sets in this argument are assumed to be of the same ordinal value

Alexander R Pruss said...

First, the argument is about objective value, not about our valuation of things.

Second, given that we are capable of elaborate and intricate reasoning about infinity, I don't see why our valuation of things must stop short of infinity. Sure, I can't hold an infinite number of people before my mind at once. But I can't hold a thousand people before my mind at once, either, and yet I can certainly value the thousand people.