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

LessWrong reports that Ronen Bar critiques the Saturation View, a moral theory advanced by philosopher Will MacAskill and Christian Tarsney, which holds that a world of diverse high‑quality experiences is better than a world of identical copies of the best life. Bar notes Elliott Thornley’s objection that no actual person gains from such variety. He argues that treating the overall pattern of value as a moral subject creates a fictional stakeholder, which he dubs the reified referent. This mirrors Carol J. Adams’s notion of the absent referent, where language makes a non‑entity appear in ethical discussion. The post concludes that a pattern of value that no individual experiences cannot serve as a valid moral category.

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