A Pareto Principle for Possible People

Paper by Christoph Fehige, published on January 1, 1998 in Preferences

How good or bad is a world? Let us assume, as so often, that this is a matter solely of the preferences it contains and of their frustration and satisfaction. One question we shall then have to face is how the existence of a preference and its satisfaction compares to the non-existence of this preference: is it better, or worse, or just as good, or sometimes one and sometimes the other? Section 1 will argue at length that, ceteris paribus, the two options - satisfied preference and no preference - are equally good, a doctrine we can call antifrustrationism. This settled, sections 2 to 7 will begin to translate antifrustrationism into moral principles, and to investigate the consequences.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110804294.508
Preferences De Gruyter, 1998, pp. 508-543

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