In general people’s preference ordering seems to be: 1) New person exists and I am able to care for them without inflicting large harms on myself. 2) New person doesn’t exist 3) New person exists and I inflict large harms on myself to care for them. 4) New person exists and I don’t care for them.
That does seem to be so, but why? I’d change the order of 1) and 2). What’s so good about having more people? Better improve the lives of existing people instead.
My theory at the moment is that we have some sort of value that might be called “Harmony of self-interest and moral interests.” This value motivates us to try to make sure the world we live in is one where we do not have to make large sacrifices of our own self-interest in order to improve the lives of others. This in turn causes us to oppose the creation of new people with lives that are worse than our own, even if we could, in theory, maintain our current standard of living while allowing them to live in poverty. This neatly blocks the mere addition paradox since it makes it impossible to perform “mere additions” of new people without harming the interests of those who exist.
I suspect the reason this theory is not addressed heavily in moral literature is the tendency to conflate utility with “happiness.” Since it obviously is possible to “merely add” a new person without impacting the happiness of existing people (for instance, you could conceal the new person’s existence from others so they won’t feel sorry for them) it is mistakenly believed you can also do so without affecting their utility. But even brief introspection reveals that happiness and utility are not identical. If someone spread dirty rumors about me behind my back, cheated on me, or harmed my family when I wasn’t around, and I never found out, my happiness would remain the same. But I’d still have been harmed.
What’s so good about having more people? Better improve the lives of existing people instead.
You’re right, of course. But at this point in our history it isn’t actually a choice of one or the other. Gradually adding reasonable amounts of people to the world actually improves the lives of existing people. This is because doing so allows the economy to develop new divisions of labor that increase the total amount of wealth. That is why we are so much richer than we were in the Middle Ages, even though the population is larger. Plus humans are social animals, having more people means having more potential friends.
Eventually we may find some way to change this. For instance, if we invented a friendly AI that was cheaper to manufacture than a human, more efficient at working, and devoted all its efforts to improving existing lives, then mass manufacturing more copies of it would increase total wealth better than making more people (though we would still be justified in making more people if the relationships we formed with them greatly improved our lives).
But at the moment there is no serious dilemma between adding a reasonable amount of new people and improving existing lives. The main reason I am going after total utilitarianism so hard is that I like my moral theories to be completely satisfactory, and I disapprove of moral theories that give the wrong answers, even if they only do so in a scenario that I will never encounter in real life.
That does seem to be so, but why? I’d change the order of 1) and 2). What’s so good about having more people? Better improve the lives of existing people instead.
My theory at the moment is that we have some sort of value that might be called “Harmony of self-interest and moral interests.” This value motivates us to try to make sure the world we live in is one where we do not have to make large sacrifices of our own self-interest in order to improve the lives of others. This in turn causes us to oppose the creation of new people with lives that are worse than our own, even if we could, in theory, maintain our current standard of living while allowing them to live in poverty. This neatly blocks the mere addition paradox since it makes it impossible to perform “mere additions” of new people without harming the interests of those who exist.
I suspect the reason this theory is not addressed heavily in moral literature is the tendency to conflate utility with “happiness.” Since it obviously is possible to “merely add” a new person without impacting the happiness of existing people (for instance, you could conceal the new person’s existence from others so they won’t feel sorry for them) it is mistakenly believed you can also do so without affecting their utility. But even brief introspection reveals that happiness and utility are not identical. If someone spread dirty rumors about me behind my back, cheated on me, or harmed my family when I wasn’t around, and I never found out, my happiness would remain the same. But I’d still have been harmed.
You’re right, of course. But at this point in our history it isn’t actually a choice of one or the other. Gradually adding reasonable amounts of people to the world actually improves the lives of existing people. This is because doing so allows the economy to develop new divisions of labor that increase the total amount of wealth. That is why we are so much richer than we were in the Middle Ages, even though the population is larger. Plus humans are social animals, having more people means having more potential friends.
Eventually we may find some way to change this. For instance, if we invented a friendly AI that was cheaper to manufacture than a human, more efficient at working, and devoted all its efforts to improving existing lives, then mass manufacturing more copies of it would increase total wealth better than making more people (though we would still be justified in making more people if the relationships we formed with them greatly improved our lives).
But at the moment there is no serious dilemma between adding a reasonable amount of new people and improving existing lives. The main reason I am going after total utilitarianism so hard is that I like my moral theories to be completely satisfactory, and I disapprove of moral theories that give the wrong answers, even if they only do so in a scenario that I will never encounter in real life.