I am an average utilitarian with one modification: Once a person exists, they are always counted in the number of people I average over, even if they’re dead. For instance, a world where 10 people are born and each gets 50 utility has 10X50/10=50 utility. A world where 20 people are born, then 10 of them die and the rest get 50 utility each has (10X50+10X0)/20=25 utility. AFAICT, this method has several advantages:
It avoids the repugnant conclusion.
It avoids the usual argument against average utilitarianism, namely that it advocates killing off people experiencing low (positive) utility.
It favors life extension over replacement, which fits both my intuitions and my interests. It also captures the badness of death in general.
A society that subscribed to it would revive cryopreserved people.
This doesn’t seem to be monotonic in pareto improvements.
Suppose I had the choice between someone popping into existence for 10 years on a distant planet, living a worthwhile life, and then disappearing. They would prefer this to happen, and so might everyone else in the universe; however, if other’s utilities were sufficiently high, this person’s existence might lower the average utility of the world.
That is . . . a pretty solid criticism. Half of the reason I posted this was to have people tear holes in it.
I’m looking for some way of modeling utilitarianism that adequately expresses the badness of death and supports resurrecting the dead, but maybe this isn’t it. Perhaps a big negative penalty for deaths or “time spent dead,” though that seems inelegant.
EDIT: Looking at this again later, I’m not sure what counts as a pareto improvement. Someone popping into existence, living happily for one day, and then disappearing would not be a good thing according to my (current conception of) my values. That implies there’s some length of time or amount of happiness experienced necessary for a life to be worth creating.
Isn’t there something a little bit broken about trying to find a utility system that will produce the conclusions you presently hold? How would you ever know if your intuitions were wrong?
What basis do I have for a utility system besides my moral intuitions? If my intuitions are inconsistent, I’ll notice that because every system I formulate will be inconsistent. (Currently, I think that if my intuitions are inconsistent the best fix will be accepting the repugnant conclusion, which I would be relatively okay with.)
I understand what you are saying. But when I start with a conclusion, what I find myself doing is rationalizing. Even if my reasons are logically consistent I am suspicious of any product based on this process.
If it helps, the thought process that produced the great^4-grandparent was something like this:
“Total utilitarianism leads to the repugnant conclusion; average leads to killing unhappy people. If there was some middle ground between these two broken concepts . . . hm, what if people who were alive and are now dead count as having zero utility, versus the utility they could be experiencing? That makes sense, and it’s mathematically elegant. And it weighs preserving and restoring life over creating it! This is starting to look like a good approximation of my values. Better post it on LW and see if it stands up to scrutiny.”
It seems that you could use this to argue that nobody ever ought to be born unless we can ensure that they’ll never die (assuming they stay dead, as people tend to do now).
I bite this bullet to an extent, but I don’t think the argument that strong. If someone has a better-than-average life before they die, they can still raise the average, especially if everyone else dies too. I’m not sure how to model that easily; I’m thinking of something like: the utility of a world is the integral of all the utilities of everyone in it (all the utility anyone ever experiences), divided by the number of people who ever existed. In this framework, I think it would be permissible to create a mortal person in some circumstances, but they might be too rare to be plausible.
I am an average utilitarian with one modification: Once a person exists, they are always counted in the number of people I average over, even if they’re dead. For instance, a world where 10 people are born and each gets 50 utility has 10X50/10=50 utility. A world where 20 people are born, then 10 of them die and the rest get 50 utility each has (10X50+10X0)/20=25 utility. AFAICT, this method has several advantages:
It avoids the repugnant conclusion.
It avoids the usual argument against average utilitarianism, namely that it advocates killing off people experiencing low (positive) utility.
It favors life extension over replacement, which fits both my intuitions and my interests. It also captures the badness of death in general.
A society that subscribed to it would revive cryopreserved people.
This doesn’t seem to be monotonic in pareto improvements.
Suppose I had the choice between someone popping into existence for 10 years on a distant planet, living a worthwhile life, and then disappearing. They would prefer this to happen, and so might everyone else in the universe; however, if other’s utilities were sufficiently high, this person’s existence might lower the average utility of the world.
That is . . . a pretty solid criticism. Half of the reason I posted this was to have people tear holes in it.
I’m looking for some way of modeling utilitarianism that adequately expresses the badness of death and supports resurrecting the dead, but maybe this isn’t it. Perhaps a big negative penalty for deaths or “time spent dead,” though that seems inelegant.
EDIT: Looking at this again later, I’m not sure what counts as a pareto improvement. Someone popping into existence, living happily for one day, and then disappearing would not be a good thing according to my (current conception of) my values. That implies there’s some length of time or amount of happiness experienced necessary for a life to be worth creating.
Isn’t there something a little bit broken about trying to find a utility system that will produce the conclusions you presently hold? How would you ever know if your intuitions were wrong?
What basis do I have for a utility system besides my moral intuitions? If my intuitions are inconsistent, I’ll notice that because every system I formulate will be inconsistent. (Currently, I think that if my intuitions are inconsistent the best fix will be accepting the repugnant conclusion, which I would be relatively okay with.)
I understand what you are saying. But when I start with a conclusion, what I find myself doing is rationalizing. Even if my reasons are logically consistent I am suspicious of any product based on this process.
If it helps, the thought process that produced the great^4-grandparent was something like this:
“Total utilitarianism leads to the repugnant conclusion; average leads to killing unhappy people. If there was some middle ground between these two broken concepts . . . hm, what if people who were alive and are now dead count as having zero utility, versus the utility they could be experiencing? That makes sense, and it’s mathematically elegant. And it weighs preserving and restoring life over creating it! This is starting to look like a good approximation of my values. Better post it on LW and see if it stands up to scrutiny.”
It seems that you could use this to argue that nobody ever ought to be born unless we can ensure that they’ll never die (assuming they stay dead, as people tend to do now).
I bite this bullet to an extent, but I don’t think the argument that strong. If someone has a better-than-average life before they die, they can still raise the average, especially if everyone else dies too. I’m not sure how to model that easily; I’m thinking of something like: the utility of a world is the integral of all the utilities of everyone in it (all the utility anyone ever experiences), divided by the number of people who ever existed. In this framework, I think it would be permissible to create a mortal person in some circumstances, but they might be too rare to be plausible.
I like this. Captures everything nicely. Em-ghettos and death both suck. It is good to have a firm basis to argue against them.