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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.

What’s Wrong with ‘Conceptual Amelioration’?

Conceptual amelioration aims to make the world a more just place by ameliorating our concepts. I offer three arguments against this enterprise as currently practiced, to show how social philosophy aimed at producing social change can be better practiced. First, ameliorators often fail to provide plausible stories to vindicate their claims about how conceptual amelioration will unfold in our non-ideal world. Second, ameliorators’ focus on postulating meanings of ‘concepts’ risks distracting from important normative theorizing about justice. Third, ameliorators tend to overstate the importance of conceptual change for social change. The upshot is that, since such projects tend to be done poorly on their own terms and to evince excessively idealistic views of social change, we should reconsider how to engage in such projects. Drawing on these criticisms, I argue that conceptual amelioration should be conducted in service of ideology critique.