Radical empathy

It seems to me that almost every ethical view misses a lot of what we care about, projects concerns we don’t actually have onto us, or otherwise fails to care about what we care about on our behalves as we (would actually) care about them. In one way or the other, they fall short in empathy.

In this sequence, I develop consequentialist-compatible views guided primarily by empathy, to capture exactly what we (would actually) care about.

1. In the first piece, I discuss the various ways of caring and defend all of them, and a focus on what we care about  rather than the caring itself (e.g. pleasure, satisfaction), and in turn criticize hedonism and most desire and preference views for often missing what we care about, giving weight to things we don't actually care about, or otherwise getting the weights wrong. I motivate object views, which are concerned exactly with what we (would actually) care about.
2. In the second piece, I discuss some ethical implications of object views: the harms of death, that suffering may not always be bad even when it's action-guiding, that chemically induced pleasures and displeasures may not matter in themselves if they aren't about anything, and other revisions to the concept of welfare.
3. In the third piece, I motivate actualist preference-affecting object views as best capturing what we (would actually) care about, and derive from them the (Procreation) Asymmetry: we have reasons to prevent miserable lives, but not to create happy or fulfilling lives, for the sake of what those lives would actually care about. This should lead to less priority for extinction risk reduction, relative to (symmetric) total utilitarianism.
4. In the fourth piece, I argue that most measures of welfare, if maximized directly on someone's behalf, can result in replacing most or all of what they care about against their wishes and for their sake. This can be avoided with preference-affecting views, which give less priority to extinction risk reduction.
5. In the fifth piece, I develop technical extensions of the views to handle changing preferences and population ethics as types of multi-player games.