2 is irrelevant, because it doesn’t matter whether our current utility is in some absolute sense low, because we will still make the same decisions! U(A)=1 U(B)=100 gives the same outcome as U(A)=0.001 and U(B)=0.1.
I was more thinking of people who needed to chose between benefiting our society and benefiting the ancient society, for whom this distinction would be relevant. I guess this is mathematically equivalent to 3.
1 and 3 can be solved by taking average utility over all agents, past and future. But that’s irrelevant to me because… I’m not an average utilitarian :-)
This brings back the original problem of killing people to bring up the average.
It feels odd to take an average over a possibly infinite future in this manner. It might work, but I feel like how well it matches our preferences will depend on the specifics of physics.
EDIT: This also implies that a world with 10 happy immortal people and 10 happy people who die is much worse than one with just 10 immortal people. Would you agree with that and all similar statements of that type implied by this solution?
I agree with that to some extent (as in I disagree, but replace both 10 with 10 trillion and I’d agree). But I’m still firming up my intuition at the moment.
I was more thinking of people who needed to chose between benefiting our society and benefiting the ancient society, for whom this distinction would be relevant. I guess this is mathematically equivalent to 3.
This brings back the original problem of killing people to bring up the average.
That can be dealt with in some usual way, by setting the utility of someone dead to zero but keeping them in the average.
It feels odd to take an average over a possibly infinite future in this manner. It might work, but I feel like how well it matches our preferences will depend on the specifics of physics.
EDIT: This also implies that a world with 10 happy immortal people and 10 happy people who die is much worse than one with just 10 immortal people. Would you agree with that and all similar statements of that type implied by this solution?
I agree with that to some extent (as in I disagree, but replace both 10 with 10 trillion and I’d agree). But I’m still firming up my intuition at the moment.