Are the sight experiences of people with 20⁄20 vision higher-utility than the sight experiences of nearly-blind people? Of blind people? If giving sight to everyone in the world is a net utility gain, how can you dispute that giving my ears to everyone (except the people better than me!) would be too? Is it incorrect to treat physical sense impairments and intensively-trained mental sensory enhancements on the same spectrum?
Sighted people are able to do things that blind people can’t do. Nontrivial things, not just pass a ‘has sighted vision’ test like you can pass a ‘distinguishes violins’ test.
I think it’s important to recognize that there are in fact nontrivial things that can be done with increased aural discernment. You might notice subtleties of emotional expression, or small choices in musical interpretation that aren’t perceptible to a novice listener.
If you assume there are only trivial benefits to increased aural discernment, then of course the discussion falls apart. The drawbacks of finding amateur music off-putting aren’t trivial, so aural discernment would just be a simple loss in utility.
Sure, there may be larger obvious benefits to wearing glasses than training your musical ear, but it’s arguably just a matter of degree. To me, this is the point of the parallel here: to consider how both rectifying impaired fidelity of perception and increasing beyond typical fidelity of perception are both examples of a difficult-to-calculate pattern of utility changes.
Sighted people are able to do things that blind people can’t do. Nontrivial things, not just pass a ‘has sighted vision’ test like you can pass a ‘distinguishes violins’ test.
I think it’s important to recognize that there are in fact nontrivial things that can be done with increased aural discernment. You might notice subtleties of emotional expression, or small choices in musical interpretation that aren’t perceptible to a novice listener.
If you assume there are only trivial benefits to increased aural discernment, then of course the discussion falls apart. The drawbacks of finding amateur music off-putting aren’t trivial, so aural discernment would just be a simple loss in utility.
Sure, there may be larger obvious benefits to wearing glasses than training your musical ear, but it’s arguably just a matter of degree. To me, this is the point of the parallel here: to consider how both rectifying impaired fidelity of perception and increasing beyond typical fidelity of perception are both examples of a difficult-to-calculate pattern of utility changes.