is Eliezer willing to kill off everyone except the happiest person, therefore raising the average?
If you’re averaging over time as well as space, that isn’t an option. All the people you kill will just drag down your average, and the one person who is really happy at the end of it all will barely register in the grand scheme of lives across time. In practice average utilitarianism just reduces to regular old utilitarianism, just with the zero point set at the average utility for a life across a history much vaster than you can affect, instead of set at nonexistence or whatever
Perhaps average utilitarianism would consider a world which only ever had one super happy person in it, as better than our world. But that seems less obviously false to me than the idea we should kill everyone to achieve that, which average utilitarianism wouldn’t recommend when properly considered.
I agree that many worlds has little bearing on this question though. Unless it’s to claim that you should expect the effective zero point to be different, because for whatever reason you think that our branch is particularly good or particularly bad.
If you’re averaging over time as well as space, that isn’t an option. All the people you kill will just drag down your average, and the one person who is really happy at the end of it all will barely register in the grand scheme of lives across time. In practice average utilitarianism just reduces to regular old utilitarianism, just with the zero point set at the average utility for a life across a history much vaster than you can affect, instead of set at nonexistence or whatever
Perhaps average utilitarianism would consider a world which only ever had one super happy person in it, as better than our world. But that seems less obviously false to me than the idea we should kill everyone to achieve that, which average utilitarianism wouldn’t recommend when properly considered.
I agree that many worlds has little bearing on this question though. Unless it’s to claim that you should expect the effective zero point to be different, because for whatever reason you think that our branch is particularly good or particularly bad.