If, as you propose, you completely ignore the welfare of people who don’t exist yet, then it seems to me you will give rather odd answers to questions like this: You and your partner are going to have a baby. There is some spiffy new technology that enables you to ensure that the baby will not have nasty genetic conditions like Down’s syndrome, cystic fibrosis, spina bifida, etc. For some reason the risk of these is otherwise rather high. How much are you willing to pay for the new technology to be applied?
Your system will presumably not make the answer be zero because the parents will probably be happier with a healthier child. But it seems like the numbers it produces will be underestimates.
(There are other things I find confusing and possibly-wrong in this proposal, but that may simply indicate that I haven’t understood it. But I’ll list some of them anyway. I don’t think anyone—“total utilitarian” or not—wants to do utility calculations in much like the way your hypothetical Bob does; your proposal still needs a way of aggregating utilities across people, and that’s at least as problematic as aggregating utilities over time; the argument for the “repugnant conclusion” doesn’t in fact depend on aggregating utilities over time anyway; your system is plainly incomplete since it says nothing about how it does aggregate the utilities of “your constituents” when making a decision.)
If, as you propose, you completely ignore the welfare of people who don’t exist yet, then it seems to me you will give rather odd answers to questions like this: You and your partner are going to have a baby. There is some spiffy new technology that enables you to ensure that the baby will not have nasty genetic conditions like Down’s syndrome, cystic fibrosis, spina bifida, etc. For some reason the risk of these is otherwise rather high. How much are you willing to pay for the new technology to be applied?
Your system will presumably not make the answer be zero because the parents will probably be happier with a healthier child. But it seems like the numbers it produces will be underestimates.
(There are other things I find confusing and possibly-wrong in this proposal, but that may simply indicate that I haven’t understood it. But I’ll list some of them anyway. I don’t think anyone—“total utilitarian” or not—wants to do utility calculations in much like the way your hypothetical Bob does; your proposal still needs a way of aggregating utilities across people, and that’s at least as problematic as aggregating utilities over time; the argument for the “repugnant conclusion” doesn’t in fact depend on aggregating utilities over time anyway; your system is plainly incomplete since it says nothing about how it does aggregate the utilities of “your constituents” when making a decision.)