In my response to DanielLC I’m arguing against a kind of preference utilitarianism. In the main post I’m talking about how I’m not happy with either preference or hedonic utilitarianism. It sounds to me like you’re proposing a new kind, “welfare utilitarianism”, but while it’s relatively clear to me how to evaluate “preference satisfaction” or “amount of joy and suffering” I don’t fully see what “welfare” entails. I think I would understand you better if you could break down the details of how forcing wireheading on a person harms their welfare.
I think I would understand you better if you could break down the details of how forcing wireheading on a person harms their welfare.
Radically changing someone’s preferences in such a manner is essentially the same as killing them and replacing them with someone else. Doing this is generally frowned upon. For instance, it is generally considered a good thing to abort a fetus to save the life of the mother, even by otherwise ardent pro-lifers. While people are expected to make some sacrifices to ensure the next generation of people is born, generally killing one person to create another is regarded as too steep a price to pay.
The major difference between the wireheading scenario, and the fetal alcohol syndrome scenario, is that the future disabled person is pretty much guaranteed to exist. By contrast, in the wireheading scenario, the wireheaded person will exist if and only if the current person is forced to be wireheaded.
So in the case of the pregnant mother who is drinking, she is valuing current preferences to the exclusion of future ones. You are correct to identify this wrong. Thwarting preferences that are separated in time is no different from thwarting ones separated in space.
However, in the case of not wireheading the person who refuses to be wireheaded, you are not valuing current preferences to the exclusion of future ones. If you choose to not force wireheading on a person you are not thwarting preferences that will exist in the future, because the wireheaded person will not exist in the future, as long as you don’t forcibly wirehead the original person.
To go back to analogies, choosing to not wirehead someone who doesn’t want to be wireheaded isn’t equivalent to choosing to drink while pregnant. It is equivalent to choosing to not get pregnant in the first place because you want to drink, and know that drinking while pregnant is bad.
The wireheading scenario that would be equivalent to drinking while pregnant would be to forcibly modify a person who doesn’t want to be wireheaded into someone who desperately wants to be wireheaded, and then refusing to wirehead them.
The whole thing about “welfare” wasn’t totally essential to my point. I was just trying to emphasize that goodness comes from helping people (by satisfying their preferences). If you erase someone’s original preferences and replace them with new ones you aren’t helping them, you’re killing them.
In my response to DanielLC I’m arguing against a kind of preference utilitarianism. In the main post I’m talking about how I’m not happy with either preference or hedonic utilitarianism. It sounds to me like you’re proposing a new kind, “welfare utilitarianism”, but while it’s relatively clear to me how to evaluate “preference satisfaction” or “amount of joy and suffering” I don’t fully see what “welfare” entails. I think I would understand you better if you could break down the details of how forcing wireheading on a person harms their welfare.
Radically changing someone’s preferences in such a manner is essentially the same as killing them and replacing them with someone else. Doing this is generally frowned upon. For instance, it is generally considered a good thing to abort a fetus to save the life of the mother, even by otherwise ardent pro-lifers. While people are expected to make some sacrifices to ensure the next generation of people is born, generally killing one person to create another is regarded as too steep a price to pay.
The major difference between the wireheading scenario, and the fetal alcohol syndrome scenario, is that the future disabled person is pretty much guaranteed to exist. By contrast, in the wireheading scenario, the wireheaded person will exist if and only if the current person is forced to be wireheaded.
So in the case of the pregnant mother who is drinking, she is valuing current preferences to the exclusion of future ones. You are correct to identify this wrong. Thwarting preferences that are separated in time is no different from thwarting ones separated in space.
However, in the case of not wireheading the person who refuses to be wireheaded, you are not valuing current preferences to the exclusion of future ones. If you choose to not force wireheading on a person you are not thwarting preferences that will exist in the future, because the wireheaded person will not exist in the future, as long as you don’t forcibly wirehead the original person.
To go back to analogies, choosing to not wirehead someone who doesn’t want to be wireheaded isn’t equivalent to choosing to drink while pregnant. It is equivalent to choosing to not get pregnant in the first place because you want to drink, and know that drinking while pregnant is bad.
The wireheading scenario that would be equivalent to drinking while pregnant would be to forcibly modify a person who doesn’t want to be wireheaded into someone who desperately wants to be wireheaded, and then refusing to wirehead them.
The whole thing about “welfare” wasn’t totally essential to my point. I was just trying to emphasize that goodness comes from helping people (by satisfying their preferences). If you erase someone’s original preferences and replace them with new ones you aren’t helping them, you’re killing them.