Would you want to be killed today ? That’s how much you value life over non-existence.
How would you react if a loved one was to be killed today ? Same as above, that’s how you value life over non-existence.
Almost everybody agree that life has value, considerable value, over non-existence. Hence considering some commonly agreed arbitrary utility function, giving life to somebody, giving existence to somebody, probably beats all the good deeds you could do in a lifetime, just as murder would probably beat all the good deeds you did over your lifetime.
The comfort of one’s life is definitely important, but i’d bet the majority of depressive people still don’t want to die. There’s a large margin for life to become so invaluable that you’d want to die, and even then, you’d still have to consider this (usually) large positive part of your life where you still wanted to live.
Hence,
you should also actually create the utility for all these new lives
might not be a problem if life itself, if just being conscious has an almost infinite weight in most living conditions. In our arbitrary utility function, being an African kid rummaging a dump might have a weight of 1 000 000 while being a Finish kid born in a loving and wealthy family might have a weight of 1 100 000 at the very best (it could very well be lower depending on opinions and the kids trajectories).
it is possible that maximizing animal life, or perhaps alien or artificial life, would create more utility, as these lives might be optimized with way less effort
Whereas everybody agrees on the value of human life, not everybody will agree about the value of animal life (raise your hand if you ate chicken or beef or fish in the past weeks ?). Artificial life, certainly, unless the solution to the hard problem of consciousness rules out consciousness for some types of artificial life.
But, the way you stated your idea might not describe how people feel about this idea, instead of human life should be maximized, i lean more toward human life should not be minimized or it’s a good thing to increase human life.
To me, it’s about maximizing utility.
Would you want to be killed today ? That’s how much you value life over non-existence.
How would you react if a loved one was to be killed today ? Same as above, that’s how you value life over non-existence.
Almost everybody agree that life has value, considerable value, over non-existence. Hence considering some commonly agreed arbitrary utility function, giving life to somebody, giving existence to somebody, probably beats all the good deeds you could do in a lifetime, just as murder would probably beat all the good deeds you did over your lifetime.
The comfort of one’s life is definitely important, but i’d bet the majority of depressive people still don’t want to die. There’s a large margin for life to become so invaluable that you’d want to die, and even then, you’d still have to consider this (usually) large positive part of your life where you still wanted to live.
Hence,
might not be a problem if life itself, if just being conscious has an almost infinite weight in most living conditions. In our arbitrary utility function, being an African kid rummaging a dump might have a weight of 1 000 000 while being a Finish kid born in a loving and wealthy family might have a weight of 1 100 000 at the very best (it could very well be lower depending on opinions and the kids trajectories).
Whereas everybody agrees on the value of human life, not everybody will agree about the value of animal life (raise your hand if you ate chicken or beef or fish in the past weeks ?). Artificial life, certainly, unless the solution to the hard problem of consciousness rules out consciousness for some types of artificial life.
But, the way you stated your idea might not describe how people feel about this idea, instead of human life should be maximized, i lean more toward human life should not be minimized or it’s a good thing to increase human life.