Bykvist, Krister | 2024
In: Mosquera, J. & O. Torpman (ed.), Studies on Climate Ethics and Future Generations vol. 6. Working Paper Series 2024:10–17
Decision-makers are in a hurry to find morally justified responses to climate change. Population ethicists have thrown a spanner in the works by formulating various impossibility theorems that show that no theory about the value of population change can satisfy all the conditions we think such a theory must satisfy. What shall we do, if we do not know which condition(s) to give up? One relatively unexplored option is to view the satisfaction of a condition as a matter of degree, as Geoff Brennan recently has suggested (in the context of Arrow’s impossibility theorem). This opens up the possibility that some theories might overall come closer to full satisfaction of the conditions than others. In my paper, I shall explore various versions of this idea and see how far they will take us. In particular, I will make use of the famous Kemeny-measure of distance and show that this will rule out all population theories that are indifferent between some of the alternative populations in the Mere Addition Paradox. I will also discuss factors beyond distance that are relevant for theory choice.
