糖心TV

Infinite democracy and computational (im)possibility

There is a growing body of literature on population ethics for infinite societies. In the typical case, such societies contain countably infinitely many individuals, intended to model potentially infinite societies comprised of successive future generations, even if there are only finitely many individuals alive at any given time. In this talk I will consider the idea that we should also consider the social and political preferences of such individuals, and try to aggregate them into a social decision. I will suggest that both predicting the preferences of individuals, and aggregating those preferences into social decisions, should obey computational constraints. I will then explore some limitations that this imposes on the possibility of aggregation.