By bounding utility, you also enforce diminishing marginal utility to a much greater degree than most people claim to experience it. If one good thing is utility 0.5, a second good thing must be less than 0.5, and a third good thing pretty much is worthless.
personally, my objection to utilitarianism is more fundamental than this. I don’t believe utility is an objective scalar measure that can be compared across persons (or even across independent decisions for a person). It’s just a convenient mathematical formalism for a decision theory.
By bounding utility, you also enforce diminishing marginal utility to a much greater degree than most people claim to experience it. If one good thing is utility 0.5, a second good thing must be less than 0.5, and a third good thing pretty much is worthless.
If utility is bounded between −1 and 1, then 0.5 is an extremely large amount of utility, not just some generic good thing. Bounded utility functions do not contradict common sense beliefs about how diminishing marginal returns works.
No. We look at Utility at points in time. One good thing is 0.5. We then calculate subsequent utility of another good thing after receiving that one good thing. You reevaluate the utility again after the first occurrence of the event.
So, reset to 0 at every 50ms, or some other time unit? And this applies to instantaneous utility as well—do you really mean to say that there can exist no experience that is twice as good as a 0.5 utility experience?
You may have a total utility of 10^10X where X is the maximum utility of the average human. All your utility values are expressed as a fraction of 10^10X. A utility value of 0.5 utils grants you 5.0*10^9 utility, and grants an average human 0.5 utility.
What’s an “event”? What if multiple streams of qualia are happening simultaneously—is each instant (I chose 50ms as a guess at minimum experience unit) an event, or the time between sleep periods (and do people not have experiences while sleeping)?
Why do you claim there is a maximum utility for an “average human”, and why use that rather than the maximum utility of the maximally-satisfied human? And is this a linear scaling (if so, why not just use the number rather than a constant fraction) or some logarithmic or other transform (and if so, why)?
By bounding utility, you also enforce diminishing marginal utility to a much greater degree than most people claim to experience it. If one good thing is utility 0.5, a second good thing must be less than 0.5, and a third good thing pretty much is worthless.
personally, my objection to utilitarianism is more fundamental than this. I don’t believe utility is an objective scalar measure that can be compared across persons (or even across independent decisions for a person). It’s just a convenient mathematical formalism for a decision theory.
If utility is bounded between −1 and 1, then 0.5 is an extremely large amount of utility, not just some generic good thing. Bounded utility functions do not contradict common sense beliefs about how diminishing marginal returns works.
No. We look at Utility at points in time. One good thing is 0.5. We then calculate subsequent utility of another good thing after receiving that one good thing. You reevaluate the utility again after the first occurrence of the event.
You shouldn’t. That’s not how utility works.
So, reset to 0 at every 50ms, or some other time unit? And this applies to instantaneous utility as well—do you really mean to say that there can exist no experience that is twice as good as a 0.5 utility experience?
Reset to 0 after each event.
You may have a total utility of 10^10X where X is the maximum utility of the average human.
All your utility values are expressed as a fraction of 10^10X. A utility value of 0.5 utils grants you 5.0*10^9 utility, and grants an average human 0.5 utility.
What’s an “event”? What if multiple streams of qualia are happening simultaneously—is each instant (I chose 50ms as a guess at minimum experience unit) an event, or the time between sleep periods (and do people not have experiences while sleeping)?
Why do you claim there is a maximum utility for an “average human”, and why use that rather than the maximum utility of the maximally-satisfied human? And is this a linear scaling (if so, why not just use the number rather than a constant fraction) or some logarithmic or other transform (and if so, why)?