I just thought of an argument that pulls toward average utilitarianism. Imagine I’m about to read a newspaper which will tell me the average happiness of people on Earth: is it 8000 or 9000 “chocolate equivalent units” per person? I’d much rather read the number 9000 rather than 8000. In contrast, if the newspaper is about to tell me whether the Earth’s population is 8 or 9 billion people, I don’t feel any strong hopes either way.
Of course there’s selfish value in living in a more populous world, more people = more ideas. But I suspect the difficulty of finding good ideas rises exponentially with their usefulness, so the benefit you derive from larger population could be merely logarithmic.
If I understand your second point, you’re suggesting that part of our intuition seems to suggest large populations are better is that larger populations tend to make the average utility higher. I like that! It would be interesting to try to estimate at that human population level average utility would be highest. (In hunter/gatherer or agricultural times probably very low levels. Today probably a lot higher?)
I just thought of an argument that pulls toward average utilitarianism. Imagine I’m about to read a newspaper which will tell me the average happiness of people on Earth: is it 8000 or 9000 “chocolate equivalent units” per person? I’d much rather read the number 9000 rather than 8000. In contrast, if the newspaper is about to tell me whether the Earth’s population is 8 or 9 billion people, I don’t feel any strong hopes either way.
Of course there’s selfish value in living in a more populous world, more people = more ideas. But I suspect the difficulty of finding good ideas rises exponentially with their usefulness, so the benefit you derive from larger population could be merely logarithmic.
If I understand your second point, you’re suggesting that part of our intuition seems to suggest large populations are better is that larger populations tend to make the average utility higher. I like that! It would be interesting to try to estimate at that human population level average utility would be highest. (In hunter/gatherer or agricultural times probably very low levels. Today probably a lot higher?)