Good exploration. I think more thought (and bullet-biting) is needed in terms of recognizing that it’s well-known that intuitions about population ethics are self-contradictory AND leaning heavily on fairly naive intuitions in the debate between NUH and UH.
Personally, I’m nowhere near utilitarian—I don’t believe in a consistent non-subjective valuation of other peoples’ lives. I DO value other peoples’ lives, but I recognize that this is my valuation, not any objective aggregate, and it’s certainly nowhere near linear and not directly proportional to their self-evaluation.
My declining utility for larger quantities of similar lives STILL leads me to prefer a longer timeline for humans (or human-empathetic intelligent beings), in order to get more variety. I strongly prefer species-longevity over individual non-me longevity, and variety of type and context over sheer quantity.
Which directly leads to preferring species survival over current quantity or quality. The future is big enough that we’ll come back from almost any setback short of true extinction. What ACTIONS I take that have any impact whatsoever on that are a completely different calculation, though.
Good exploration. I think more thought (and bullet-biting) is needed in terms of recognizing that it’s well-known that intuitions about population ethics are self-contradictory AND leaning heavily on fairly naive intuitions in the debate between NUH and UH.
Personally, I’m nowhere near utilitarian—I don’t believe in a consistent non-subjective valuation of other peoples’ lives. I DO value other peoples’ lives, but I recognize that this is my valuation, not any objective aggregate, and it’s certainly nowhere near linear and not directly proportional to their self-evaluation.
My declining utility for larger quantities of similar lives STILL leads me to prefer a longer timeline for humans (or human-empathetic intelligent beings), in order to get more variety. I strongly prefer species-longevity over individual non-me longevity, and variety of type and context over sheer quantity.
Which directly leads to preferring species survival over current quantity or quality. The future is big enough that we’ll come back from almost any setback short of true extinction. What ACTIONS I take that have any impact whatsoever on that are a completely different calculation, though.