We show that in infinite worlds the following three conditions are incompatible: The spatiotemporal ordering of individuals is morally irrelevant. All else being equal, the act of bringing about a good outcome with a high probability is better than the act of bringing about the same outcome with a low probability. One act is better than another only if there is a nonzero probability that it brings about a better outcome. The impossibility of combining these conditions shows that it is (...) more costly to endorse than has been previously acknowledged. (shrink)

It is widely assumed that a literal understanding of someone’s self-deception that p yields the following contradiction. Qua self-deceiver, she does not believe that p, yet – qua self-deceived – she does believe that p. I argue that this assumption is ill-founded. Literalism about self-deception – the view that self-deceivers literally self-deceive – is not committed to this contradiction. On the contrary, properly understood, literalism excludes it.

According to the person-affecting restriction, one distribution of welfare can be better than another only if there is someone for whom it is better. Extant problems for the person-affecting restriction involve variable-population cases, such as the nonidentity problem, which are notoriously controversial and difficult to resolve. This paper develops a fixed-population problem for the person-affecting restriction. The problem reveals that, in the presence of incommensurable welfare levels, the person-affecting restriction is incompatible with minimal requirements of impartial beneficence even in fixed-population (...) contexts. (shrink)

This essay examines the issue of false assumptions in models via a case study of a prominent economic model of sustainable development, wherein the assumption of an infinite future plays a central role. Two proposals are found to be helpful for this case, one based on the concept of derivational robustness and the other on understanding. Both suggest that the assumption of an infinite future, while arguably legitimate in some applications of the model, is problematic with respect to what I (...) call “Parfitian” welfare functions. This result is relevant to debates about discounting the future in economics and environmental ethics. (shrink)

In the context of worlds with infinitely many bearers of utility, we argue that several collections of natural Utilitarian principles--principles which are certainly true in the classical finite Utilitarian context and which any Utilitarian would find appealing--are inconsistent.

Our universe is both chaotic and (most likely) infinite in space and time. But it is within this setting that we must make moral decisions. This presents problems. The first: due to our universe's chaotic nature, our actions often have long-lasting, unpredictable effects; and this means we typically cannot say which of two actions will turn out best in the long run. The second problem: due to the universe's infinite dimensions, and infinite population therein, we cannot compare outcomes by simply (...) adding up their total moral values - those totals will typically be infinite or undefined. Each of these problems poses a threat to aggregative moral theories. But, for each, we have solutions: a proposal from Greaves let us overcome the problem of chaos, and proposals from the infinite aggregation literature let us overcome the problem of infinite value. But a further problem emerges. If our universe is both chaotic and infinite, those solutions no longer work - outcomes that are infinite and differ by chaotic effects are incomparable, even by those proposals. In this paper, I show that we can overcome this further problem. But, to do so, we must accept some peculiar implications about how aggregation works. (shrink)

The note addresses the problem of how utilitarianism and other finitely additive theories of value should evaluate infinitely long utility streams. We use the axiomatic approach and show that finite anonymity does not apply in an infinite framework. A stronger anonymity demand (fixed step anonymity) is proposed and motivated. Finally, we construct an ordering criterion that combines fixed step anonymity and strong monotonicity.

In this study, we propose a new direction of research on the axiomatic analysis of approval voting, which is a common democratic decision method. Its novelty is to examine an infinite population setting, which includes an application to intergenerational problems. In particular, we assume that the set of the population is countably infinite. We provide several extensions of the method of approval voting for this setting. As our main result, axiomatic characterizations of the extensions are offered by revealing a direct (...) link between approval voting and the Borda rule. The characterized methods are natural extensions of the standard approval voting method for the finite-population case and are regarded as minimum requirements for other possible infinite-population extensions, which are reasonably democratic. (shrink)