The Reified Referent: How the Saturation View Values the Taste of Someone Who Does Not Exist

TLDR The Saturation View holds that a world of varied joys is better than a world of equal but identical joys. Elliott Thornley objected that no one benefits from this variety, and Will MacAskill answered that it is a claim about the pattern of value in the world, rather than about individuals' experiences. This post elaborates on Thornley's point and argues that a pattern that possibly no one ever experiences is not a valid moral category. Treating it as intrinsically valuable smuggles a fictional experiencer into the moral conversation. I call this the reified referent: the mirror image of Carol J. Adams's absent referent. Where the absent referent hides a real being, the reified referent invents an unreal one. There may be good instrumental arguments for variety, but we should reject the claim that a world can be made better by a change that no individual gains from. And if, like me, you care more about reducing suffering than increasing happiness, there may be a danger in valuing variety, since it can push toward widening the spectrum of valence, away from stability and perhaps tranquility. Thanks to @KonradKozaczek and @Alistair Stewart for helpful comments on this post.  My View on Saturationism's Main Claim In The Saturation View, Will MacAskill, in work with Christian Tarsney, proposes that the value of an experience depends not only on its welfare but on how many relevantly similar experiences already exist. Near duplicates have diminishing marginal value. A world's value is a function of total welfare and of how widely that welfare is spread across the landscape of possible experience types. So Variety, a world of diverse excellent lives, beats Homogeneity, a world of equal welfare concentrated in identical copies of the single best life. I think variety could have instrumental value: exploration, robustness, error correction, and hedging under moral uncertainty. Felt variety is valuable too: novelty, contrast, and surprise are good experiences. But that is already counted inside the welfare, so at the experience level variety should not be double counted. If two beings have the same valence, one from a very familiar experience and one from a novel one, then whatever the novelty adds is already inside the number, and something else in the familiar experience is making up the difference. But the crux of Saturationism is not at the individual level but the pattern level. Elliott Thornley pressed this in his comment: "no one benefits from this variety. No one cares about this increased variety, at least in some sense of the word 'care.' You yourself, the person choosing Variety over Homogeneity, wouldn't care if you were incarnated into this universe." MacAskill answered: "The claim that Variety is better than Homogeneity is not a claim that each person in Variety is better off. It is a claim about the pattern of value in the world." I argue that the main mistake of this view sits exactly there. "The pattern of value in the world" invites us to count a fictional character's experience of variety, even though it could be that no individual experiences this variety at any moment in time. The Reified Referent In The Sexual Politics of Meat (1990), Carol J. Adams coined the absent referent: the animal is made to vanish from the meat, so that a living individual disappears behind a word. I propose the inverse operation, which I call the reified referent: language makes a nonentity appear inside the moral conversation and treats it as a stakeholder. The absent referent hides someone who is really there. The reified referent invents someone who is not there, at the expense, to a certain extent, of the individuals who are. God is taken by some to be a case of this kind. If no god exists, then "we must do this because it pleases God" brings the preferences of a fictional character into ethics. The subtler cases are much harder to detect. A group made of you and your friend is real in the sense that its parts are real; the group as a collection is a useful thought experiment, but it has no patienthood of its own. A specific case of the reified referent happens when the group itself, or the "total picture", is quietly promoted from a collection of experiences to an experiencing subject who gets a vote. There is a simple test: restate every value claim in terms of what some being feels or will feel. Whatever cannot be restated this way relies on a reified referent. This is quite counterintuitive to me, but truth that is viewed as an intrinsic value is also a reified referent. I value truth enormously, but there is no God looking at the world and feeling happy when truth is revealed or reflected in it. Hence it should be viewed as of instrumental value. Environmental ethics runs on this error, in my view. Intrinsic biodiversity value treats the diversity itself as mattering; the last rare lizard is said to matter intrinsically more than an individual of an abundant species. But no lizard knows he is endemic. The