This is definitely not what I mean if I say I like vanilla twice as much as chocolate. I might like it twice as much even though there is no chance that I can ever eat more than one serving of ice cream. If I have the choice of a small serving of vanilla or a triple serving of chocolate, I might still choose the vanilla. That does not mean I like it three times as much.
It is not about “How much ice cream.” It is about “how much wanting”.
I’m saying that the experience of eating chocolate is objectively twice as valuable. Maybe there is a limit on how much ice cream you can eat at a single sitting. But you can still choose to give up eating vanilla today and tomorrow, in exchange for eating chocolate once.
Again, you are assuming there is a quantitative measure over eating chocolate and eating vanilla, and that this determines the measure of my utility. This is not necessarily true, since these are arbitrary examples. I can still value one twice as much as the other, even if they both are experiences that can happen only once in a lifetime, or even only once in the lifetime of the universe.
Sure. But there is still some internal, objective measure of value of experiences. The constraints you add make it harder to determine what they are. But in simple cases, like trading ice cream, it’s easy to determine how much value a person has for a thing.
This is definitely not what I mean if I say I like vanilla twice as much as chocolate. I might like it twice as much even though there is no chance that I can ever eat more than one serving of ice cream. If I have the choice of a small serving of vanilla or a triple serving of chocolate, I might still choose the vanilla. That does not mean I like it three times as much.
It is not about “How much ice cream.” It is about “how much wanting”.
I’m saying that the experience of eating chocolate is objectively twice as valuable. Maybe there is a limit on how much ice cream you can eat at a single sitting. But you can still choose to give up eating vanilla today and tomorrow, in exchange for eating chocolate once.
Again, you are assuming there is a quantitative measure over eating chocolate and eating vanilla, and that this determines the measure of my utility. This is not necessarily true, since these are arbitrary examples. I can still value one twice as much as the other, even if they both are experiences that can happen only once in a lifetime, or even only once in the lifetime of the universe.
Sure. But there is still some internal, objective measure of value of experiences. The constraints you add make it harder to determine what they are. But in simple cases, like trading ice cream, it’s easy to determine how much value a person has for a thing.