In total utilitarianism, it is a morally neutral act to kill someone (in a painless and unexpected manner) and creating/giving birth to another being of comparable happiness (or preference satisfaction or welfare).
You can just finish there.
(In case the “sufficient cause to reject total utilitarianism” isn’t clear: I don’t like murder. Total utilitarianism advocates it in all sorts of scenarios that I would not. Therefore, total utilitarianism is Evil.)
Agreed completely. This goes for any utilitarianism where the worth of changing from state A to state B is f(B)-f(A) . Morality is about transitions; even hedonism is, as happiness is nothing if it is frozen solid.
That’s a good escape but only for specific laws of physics… what do you do about brain sim on computer? It has multiple CPUs going over calculating next state from current state in parallel, and it doesn’t care about how CPU is physically implemented, but it does care how many experience-steps it has. edit: i.e. i mean, transition from one happy state to other happy state that is equally a happy state is what a moment of being happy is about. the total utilitarianism boils down to zero utility of an update pass on a happy brain sim. It’s completely broken. edit: and with simple workarounds, it boils down to zero utility of switching the current/next state arrays, so that you sit in a loop recalculating same next state from static current state.
A smaller critique of total utilitarianism:
You can just finish there.
(In case the “sufficient cause to reject total utilitarianism” isn’t clear: I don’t like murder. Total utilitarianism advocates it in all sorts of scenarios that I would not. Therefore, total utilitarianism is Evil.)
:-) I kinda did. The rest was just “there are no strong countervailing reasons to reject that intuition”.
Excellent post then. I kind of stopped after the first line so I’ll take your word for the rest!
Agreed completely. This goes for any utilitarianism where the worth of changing from state A to state B is f(B)-f(A) . Morality is about transitions; even hedonism is, as happiness is nothing if it is frozen solid.
I’d take A and B in the equation above to include momentums as well as positions? :-)
That’s a good escape but only for specific laws of physics… what do you do about brain sim on computer? It has multiple CPUs going over calculating next state from current state in parallel, and it doesn’t care about how CPU is physically implemented, but it does care how many experience-steps it has. edit: i.e. i mean, transition from one happy state to other happy state that is equally a happy state is what a moment of being happy is about. the total utilitarianism boils down to zero utility of an update pass on a happy brain sim. It’s completely broken. edit: and with simple workarounds, it boils down to zero utility of switching the current/next state arrays, so that you sit in a loop recalculating same next state from static current state.