I have the same question as I have about the torture vs. dust speck question:
Is there an obvious reason why the utility to me of N people watching youtube has to be a function of N that increases without bound? (I grant, for the sake of argument, that it is an increasing function.)
Is there a slam dunk argument for why I can’t consider 3^^^3 people watching youtube to be only a tiny sliver-of-utility better than 3^^3 people watching youtube? And why can’t the sum of such slivers converge to a finite value as the number of “^”s goes to infinity?
Is such a utility function contrary to some obvious utility-function desideratum? Or is it just contrary to what many people here arrive at using intuition+reflection?
ETA: [Forgot the punchline.] And if the utility of arbitrarily many youtube video-watchers is bounded, is there an obvious reason why it can’t be less than one sublime life?
I have the same question as I have about the torture vs. dust speck question:
Is there an obvious reason why the utility to me of N people watching youtube has to be a function of N that increases without bound? (I grant, for the sake of argument, that it is an increasing function.)
Is there a slam dunk argument for why I can’t consider 3^^^3 people watching youtube to be only a tiny sliver-of-utility better than 3^^3 people watching youtube? And why can’t the sum of such slivers converge to a finite value as the number of “^”s goes to infinity?
Is such a utility function contrary to some obvious utility-function desideratum? Or is it just contrary to what many people here arrive at using intuition+reflection?
ETA: [Forgot the punchline.] And if the utility of arbitrarily many youtube video-watchers is bounded, is there an obvious reason why it can’t be less than one sublime life?