I think there might be too much of a values gap (in that I’m much more negative utilitarian than you) for me to agree with your overall position even if you managed to convince me on most of the factual questions.
Yep, I think that’s a very confused moral position! I could argue here against it (as a random example, think about whether you would prefer to live a life that is 99.99999999% great and fulfilling, but once in 10,000 years you would experience a single 100ms of torture, which I think is likely an underestimate of the actual ratios here), but it seems like a big topic.
Certainly if you are a inclined to be a negative utilitarian then this post will not be very reassuring! Indeed almost any human-controlled future I think would end up looking quite bad, though it depends of course on whether you really are fully negative utilitarian.
I think that’s a very confused moral position! I could argue here against it (as a random example, think about whether you would prefer to live a life that is 99.99999999% great and fulfilling, but once in 10,000 years you would experience a single 100ms of torture)
This is only relevant given (at least) three assumptions, one about conscious experience and two about aggregation:
Being tortured for a long time and ‘tortured’ for 100ms differ only in length; there’s nothing in the experience of eternal (or very long) torture that distinguishes it from an infinite (or very large) number of isolated 100ms ‘tortures’
Good is separable (in the sense used by Broome) across time
Good is separable across people
If you’ve engaged seriously with this issue and are willing to write out an argument demonstrating that mine is a confused position, I will happily read and consider it! If not, I think you’re confusing “confused” with “disagrees with me on something I feel is obvious”.
(My position does require me to bite some actual bullets. But so does yours, and unless you’ve thought about this carefully enough to write about it for real, I suspect you’re underestimating how difficult it is to avoid all three of contradiction, vagueness, and weird/counterintuitive conclusions.)
Yep, I think that’s a very confused moral position! I could argue here against it (as a random example, think about whether you would prefer to live a life that is 99.99999999% great and fulfilling, but once in 10,000 years you would experience a single 100ms of torture, which I think is likely an underestimate of the actual ratios here), but it seems like a big topic.
Certainly if you are a inclined to be a negative utilitarian then this post will not be very reassuring! Indeed almost any human-controlled future I think would end up looking quite bad, though it depends of course on whether you really are fully negative utilitarian.
This is only relevant given (at least) three assumptions, one about conscious experience and two about aggregation:
Being tortured for a long time and ‘tortured’ for 100ms differ only in length; there’s nothing in the experience of eternal (or very long) torture that distinguishes it from an infinite (or very large) number of isolated 100ms ‘tortures’
Good is separable (in the sense used by Broome) across time
Good is separable across people
If you’ve engaged seriously with this issue and are willing to write out an argument demonstrating that mine is a confused position, I will happily read and consider it! If not, I think you’re confusing “confused” with “disagrees with me on something I feel is obvious”.
(My position does require me to bite some actual bullets. But so does yours, and unless you’ve thought about this carefully enough to write about it for real, I suspect you’re underestimating how difficult it is to avoid all three of contradiction, vagueness, and weird/counterintuitive conclusions.)