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timtyler comments on Open Thread: August 2009 - Less Wrong
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A number of days ago I was arguing with AngryParsley about how to value future actions; I thought it was obvious one should maximize the total utility over all people the action affected, while he thought it equally self-evident that maximizing average utility was better still. When I went to look, I couldn't see any posts on LW or OB on this topic.
(I pointed out that this view would favor worlds ruled by a solitary, but happy, dictator over populous messy worlds whose average just happens to work out to be a little less than a dictator's might be; he pointed out that if total was all that mattered, we might wind up favoring worlds where everyone is just 2 utilons away from committing suicide.)
Have we really never discussed this topic?
What you "should" do depends on what your goal is.
Most biological organisms don't maximise either of your proposed functions - their utility function is down to how many great grandchildren they have - not how many people they help.
I don't really see how what most organisms do is relevant; we're discussing what's moral/ethical for human beings. This is quite relevant to deciding whether to say, help out Africa (which with its very high birth rates is equivalent to plumping for total) or work on issues in the rest of the world (average).
As I understand it, there is widespread disagreement on that issue. Most humans don't seem to have a clear idea of what their goals are, and of those that do, there is considerable disagreement about what those goals are.
Scientists can model human goals. The result seems to be that humans act so as to try to maximise their genes - and sometimes the memes they have been infected with. Basically all goal-directed behaviour is the result of some optimisation process - and in biology, that process usually involves differential reproductive success of replicators.
Human goal-seeking behaviour thus depends on the details of the memes the humans have been infected with - which mostly explains why humans vocalise a diverse range of goals.
Humans often spread the patterns they copy while working from hypotheses about how the world works that are long out of date. Also organisms often break and malfunction as a result of developmental problems and/or environmental stresses - so these theories are not always as good as we would like.