The reader can draw his or her own conclusion from this. It seems likely to me that the average life in the developing world is worth living,
I don’t ask this in the spirit of any disagreement (your post seems to me to be well reasoned), but just curiosity: what do you mean by ‘worth living’? What sorts of things need to be present for a life to be worth living? Is it just that, say, my life is worth living if I would choose to live rather than painlessly die on a given day?
Someone might not find their own life worth living but still not commit suicide because e.g. they don’t want their children to mourn them, they think that if they killed themselves they would go to hell whereas if they endured life they might eventually go to heaven, because there’s no reliable way of committing suicide available to them, etc.
ISTR negative utilitarians claiming that that’s the case for a sizeable fraction of people.
ISTR negative utilitarians claiming that that’s the case for a sizeable fraction of people.
Yeesh, that’s grim. Okay, so if that’s a problematic standard, would you care to take a swing at the question? The idea of a ‘life worth living’ appears to be an important part of how we think about EA, but I’m not sure what it means.
Well, suppose I’m a successful assassin: my life seems to me to have very high utility, but in fact I am the source of overwhelming net disutility. I take my life to be worth living, but you might think if I were clear-eyed about my situation, I would consider a painless death to be preferable than going on as before.
But that’s just off the top of my head, I haven’t really thought that through.
I don’t ask this in the spirit of any disagreement (your post seems to me to be well reasoned), but just curiosity: what do you mean by ‘worth living’? What sorts of things need to be present for a life to be worth living? Is it just that, say, my life is worth living if I would choose to live rather than painlessly die on a given day?
What if someone has an instinct that makes them not want to die, but that in no way increases how much they enjoy life?
Someone might not find their own life worth living but still not commit suicide because e.g. they don’t want their children to mourn them, they think that if they killed themselves they would go to hell whereas if they endured life they might eventually go to heaven, because there’s no reliable way of committing suicide available to them, etc.
ISTR negative utilitarians claiming that that’s the case for a sizeable fraction of people.
Yeesh, that’s grim. Okay, so if that’s a problematic standard, would you care to take a swing at the question? The idea of a ‘life worth living’ appears to be an important part of how we think about EA, but I’m not sure what it means.
Me neither. ISTR that EY puts the bar at “lives worth celebrating”, but that depends on you already having intuitions about which lives to celebrate.
(Personally, I think that a supermajority of human lives today are worth living/celebrating, but I’m not terribly confident about this.)
Yes.
Can I be wrong about whether my life is worth living?
Maybe, if you misremember what’s happened in the past or incorrectly predict what will happen in the future.
But I can’t be wrong about the value of my life if I’m clear-eyed about the past and future?
I wasn’t making a claim about that. Do you have a certain hypothetical in mind?
Well, suppose I’m a successful assassin: my life seems to me to have very high utility, but in fact I am the source of overwhelming net disutility. I take my life to be worth living, but you might think if I were clear-eyed about my situation, I would consider a painless death to be preferable than going on as before.
But that’s just off the top of my head, I haven’t really thought that through.
I was discussing immediate impacts rather than indirect consequences. Discussion of indirect consequences will follow.