You’re still treating ethical values as external summable properties. You just can’t compare the ethical value of people in radically different situations. You can compare the ethical value of two possible decisions of a single situation.
If there’s no suffering, that doesn’t make people more or less ethical than if there is suffering—that comparison is meaningless. If an entity chooses to avoid knowledge of suffering, that choice is morally objectionable compared to the same entity seeking knowledge of such.
You can get away to some extent by generalizing and treating agents in somewhat similar situations as somewhat comparable—to the degree that you think A and B are facing the same decision points, you can judge the choices they make as comparable. But this is always less than 100%.
In fact, I think the same about utility—it’s bizarre and incoherent to treat it as comparable or additive. It’s ordinal only within a decision, and has no ordering across entities. This is my primary reason for being consequentialist but not utilitarian—those guys are crazy.
You’re still treating ethical values as external summable properties. You just can’t compare the ethical value of people in radically different situations. You can compare the ethical value of two possible decisions of a single situation.
If there’s no suffering, that doesn’t make people more or less ethical than if there is suffering—that comparison is meaningless. If an entity chooses to avoid knowledge of suffering, that choice is morally objectionable compared to the same entity seeking knowledge of such.
You can get away to some extent by generalizing and treating agents in somewhat similar situations as somewhat comparable—to the degree that you think A and B are facing the same decision points, you can judge the choices they make as comparable. But this is always less than 100%.
In fact, I think the same about utility—it’s bizarre and incoherent to treat it as comparable or additive. It’s ordinal only within a decision, and has no ordering across entities. This is my primary reason for being consequentialist but not utilitarian—those guys are crazy.