I consider fairness to be part of my terminal values, and while I consider myself an utilitarian, I reject both total and average utilitarianism. The same way that here at LW we agree that human values are complicated and that you just can’t reduce everything to one value (like “happiness”), I think that the way to aggregate utility among everyone is complicated, and that just taking the average or the sum of all utilities won’t work, but we need a compound function, involving average, sum, median, Gini, … of the individual utilities. And I don’t know more the real shape of that function that I know the shape of my utility function, I can tell you what it involves, but not exactly how it works.
I consider fairness to be part of my terminal values, and while I consider myself an utilitarian, I reject both total and average utilitarianism. The same way that here at LW we agree that human values are complicated and that you just can’t reduce everything to one value (like “happiness”), I think that the way to aggregate utility among everyone is complicated, and that just taking the average or the sum of all utilities won’t work, but we need a compound function, involving average, sum, median, Gini, … of the individual utilities. And I don’t know more the real shape of that function that I know the shape of my utility function, I can tell you what it involves, but not exactly how it works.