Hare considers what would happen if, considering the possibility that the world is infinite, we were to try to have minimal good will towards all agents in the world. It seems plausible that this would require at least preferring a world that 'tightly pareto-dominates' another: in other words, it has the same population (i.e. everyone in one world has a counterpart in the other), and is at least as good for everyone in the world and strictly better for some people. But Hare argues in that if one prefers a tightly pareto-dominant world, then one is rationally required to prefer anonymously tightly pareto-dominated worlds. In Chapter 9 of the book, Hare defends the following:
Anonymous Benevolence
If decency requires of you that you be benevolent toward people of kind K (to prefer, other things being equal, K-pareto-dominant worlds), then decency and rationality together require of you that you be anonymously benevolent toward kind K-people (to prefer, other things being equal, anonymously K-pareto-dominant worlds). (p. 146, Hare, 2013)
The argument Hare gives for Anonymous Benevolence appeals to three principles: Minimal Benevolence, which says roughly that your being better off in a state of affairs is a reason to prefer it (p. 23), transitivity, which says 'if you prefer a to b, and you prefer b to c, then you prefer a to c' (p. 114, Hare, 2013), and Generalized Morphing. The first two principles are plausible, but it's worth outlining the third in more detail. Prior to his discussion of morphing, Hare - in Chapter 7 of the book - defends the following claim about essences:
Personal Essence is not Perfectly Fragile
All people could have been ever-so-slightly different along any natural dimension of qualitative sameness and difference. (p. 101, Hare, 2013)
In other words, an agent A remains either identical to or counter-part related to A* if there is only a very small qualitative difference between A and A* (see pp. 139-142, Hare, 2013 for a discussion of identity/counterpart theories). I take this claim to at least be plausible in most cases, but can discuss the principle in more detail elsewhere if this is useful.
Once we grant that personal essence is not perfectly fragile, we can introduce the concept of morphing. The idea here is basically that for any two non-counterpart agents A and B (I will focus here on counterparts rather than identities), there is some sequence of transitions wherein A is a counterpart of A1, A1 is a counterpart of A2, and so on, until we reach some An that is a counterpart of B. So the counterpart relation is not transitive.
Hare says that one world 'K-pareto-dominates' another iff all people of kind K exist in two worlds and no K-person is worse off in that world and at least one K-person is better off in that world. And one world anonymously K-pareto-dominates another if there exists a correspondence relation that pairs the K-people in two worlds, and the dominance relation holds between K-people and their pairs. Generalized Morphing says that if one world anonymously K-dominates another then there exists a morphing sequence such that each world in that sequence (non-anonymously) K-dominates its predecessor. This is because we can construct a sequence of worlds sufficiently similar that anonymity does not hold between them, given what we have said above about essences.
It is easy to see how Generalized Morphing will result in Anonymous Benevolence if we assume Minimal Benevolence and transitivity. Minimal benevolence guarantees that we will prefer each K-pareto-dominant world in the sequence, and so transitivity guarantees that we will prefer the anonymously K-pareto-dominant world to the anonymously K-pareto-dominated world. This kind of argument isn't entirely uncontroversial (e.g. it's similar to the sequential argument for the repugnant conclusion in population ethics) but in the interest of time let's assume that it works, and that Anonymous Benevolence is the result.
In Chapter 11 Hare considers what would happen if we tried to extend Anonymous Benevolence to cases where agents believe the world may be infinite. The problem is that, given our assumption about essences, infinite worlds anonymously K-pareto-dominate themselves. This is because if we have an infinite world where people have the names and utility of the integers, say, we can create a correspondence relation in finite worlds that will eventually pair them with someone of slightly greater utility (here I'm giving an overly simplistic account of the argument on p. 184). Here is the diagram that Hare uses to illustrate this application of morphing to infinite worlds:
In other words, an agent A remains either identical to or counter-part related to A* if there is only a very small qualitative difference between A and A* (see pp. 139-142, Hare, 2013 for a discussion of identity/counterpart theories). I take this claim to at least be plausible in most cases, but can discuss the principle in more detail elsewhere if this is useful.
Once we grant that personal essence is not perfectly fragile, we can introduce the concept of morphing. The idea here is basically that for any two non-counterpart agents A and B (I will focus here on counterparts rather than identities), there is some sequence of transitions wherein A is a counterpart of A1, A1 is a counterpart of A2, and so on, until we reach some An that is a counterpart of B. So the counterpart relation is not transitive.
Hare says that one world 'K-pareto-dominates' another iff all people of kind K exist in two worlds and no K-person is worse off in that world and at least one K-person is better off in that world. And one world anonymously K-pareto-dominates another if there exists a correspondence relation that pairs the K-people in two worlds, and the dominance relation holds between K-people and their pairs. Generalized Morphing says that if one world anonymously K-dominates another then there exists a morphing sequence such that each world in that sequence (non-anonymously) K-dominates its predecessor. This is because we can construct a sequence of worlds sufficiently similar that anonymity does not hold between them, given what we have said above about essences.
It is easy to see how Generalized Morphing will result in Anonymous Benevolence if we assume Minimal Benevolence and transitivity. Minimal benevolence guarantees that we will prefer each K-pareto-dominant world in the sequence, and so transitivity guarantees that we will prefer the anonymously K-pareto-dominant world to the anonymously K-pareto-dominated world. This kind of argument isn't entirely uncontroversial (e.g. it's similar to the sequential argument for the repugnant conclusion in population ethics) but in the interest of time let's assume that it works, and that Anonymous Benevolence is the result.
In Chapter 11 Hare considers what would happen if we tried to extend Anonymous Benevolence to cases where agents believe the world may be infinite. The problem is that, given our assumption about essences, infinite worlds anonymously K-pareto-dominate themselves. This is because if we have an infinite world where people have the names and utility of the integers, say, we can create a correspondence relation in finite worlds that will eventually pair them with someone of slightly greater utility (here I'm giving an overly simplistic account of the argument on p. 184). Here is the diagram that Hare uses to illustrate this application of morphing to infinite worlds:
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| p. 185, The Limits of Kindness, Hare (2013) |
So we will end up either violating transitivity or saying that a world is better than itself. Notice that we can make finitely or infinitely many agents better off here. In the case above we make infinitely many agents better off, but - as Hare points out - we could make finitely many agents better off. Assume that positive integer agents all have the same amount of utility (+2, say), while negative integer agents have some lower amount of utility (+1, say). Then a correspondence relation that associates everyone with the integer above them will result in an infinite world that K-pareto-dominates itself but is better for only finitely many people.
It seems irrational for our preferences to be intransitive or reflexive, and yet the alternative seems to be giving up plausible principles like Minimal Benevolence or Generalized Morphing. Hare considers several responses to this worry. Let's suppose we don't want to say that our preferences should be irrational (intransitive or reflexive), or that we should simply not care about individuals who are made worse off in infinite worlds (giving up Minimal Benevolence).
Hare considers the view that we should care about individuals because we are uncertain about whether the world is infinite or not, and if the world is finite then it is good to make people better off, even if it makes no difference conditional on the world being infinite. I want to explore this in more detail in a future post, but I think that Hare is right to point out that this seems like too fragile a basis on which to ground good actions or good intentions, especially if we think that these merely need to accord with Minimal Benevolence. (Hare considers one additional solution on p. 188 that I won't consider here, both for the reasons that Hare gives and because the solution itself strikes me as ad hoc).
This concludes my summary of the discussion of infinite worlds in Hare's The Limits of Kindness. I thought it would be useful to summarize this because some of the issues related to agent identity across world will probably be relevant to a post I want to put up over the next few days that is a follow up to my post on Agential Betterness.
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