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taw comments on The Difficulties of Potential People and Decision Making - Less Wrong
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Total utilitarianism feels completely ridiculous to me.
For example existence of slaves (assuming they're not abused too much, just garden variety life of forced labour) must have non-negative utility to them - as indicated by them not committing mass suicide; and definitely positive utility to their owners - so total utility goes up with every slave as opposed to them not existing.
So a total utilitarian should definitely support creation of a new slave underclass - let's say by changing abortion laws to make abortion illegal, but having an option to sell your children that would otherwise get aborted into slavery. Isn't slavery much better than not existing due to getting aborted? Or we could even pay women to get pregnant and make more children to populate the new underclass - these people wouldn't even reach the embryo stage otherwise (the argument is not really related to abortion issues, we could have human cloning facilities etc., but this way is less scifi and more historically precedented).
Total utilitarianism is full of ridiculous consequences like that.
Average utilitarianism isn't - in modern civilization people benefit from existence of other people, so unexisting the unhappy ones would bring down utility of the happy ones. On the other hand in Malthusianish environments it makes perfect sense to unexist people, as utility externalities of a new person coming into existence is significantly negative. Both cases agree with intuitions we might have.
But there are slaves now. Given your objection to total utilitarianism, shouldn't you then advocate killing them all, as an average utilitarian? Would this really decrease the utility of most people, if most people never hear about it?
Killing and unexisting are different. If promoting birth control would somehow magically ensure the people with worst lives wouldn't be born, then average utilitarianism says we should be doing it.
Or as a simple proxy, promote birth control in poorest countries that cannot deal with the number of people they have now, but promote responsibly larger families (not "as many kids as possible") in countries that take more people and make them productive members of the modern civilization.
Near the end of the post, FrankAdamek notes the difference between killing someone and never bringing them into existence.
Killing current slaves is unacceptable to an average utilitarian. It would be acceptable to somehow ensure that no one is born into slavery in the future.
Why?
If what makes an action right is overall average utility, and killing people makes that go up, then how can it be unacceptable, all else being equal?
I don't think anyone holds a concept of average-utility maximizing that would allow you to simply kill everyone below average. Indeed, such a maxim would be self-defeating: if society killed everyone below average happiness every week, almost everyone would die after a year, and, knowing this, everyone would be much more miserable at the start of the year than they would be otherwise.
The average v. total is principally relevant to non-existent entities, i.e. those who have not been born. Existing persons already have utility and preferences, so they can't be brushed aside like non-existent persons can, since the non-existent don't even not-care. In order for killing unhappy people to be justified, then killing the living would basically have to not generate disutility; i.e. once they're dead, they're irrelevant, which would say there's nothing wrong with murder beyond how it affects the survivors. I do not think this is a common view.
No, it would only have to generate less disutility than the victims were unhappy to start with. If everyone were an average utilitarian, and was overjoyed that we were raising the mean, this type of killing might even have positive externalities.
I think this suggests that total utilitarianism is a better system: the Repugnant Conclusion is a far-oft danger, whereas if we adopted average utilitarianism, we would be in immediate danger of massacres.
Of course, an alternative ethical system may be better still.
In general with all the discussion here of average vs total utilitarianism, in my perception both are well-meaning generally great solutions, but both do have their oddities, pursuant to applying the same mathematical measurement to both situations. Most of this discussion seems to be people just arguing over which oddity they prefer to accept, how you can discount those oddities, etc. But in both cases, it requires something more than the fundamental rule, saying "Yes let's consider the average except when that means killing*. That works for a given person but it seems more to be patching up theories that don't quite fit here, rather than using a theory that doesn't require a patch at all.