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XiXiDu comments on The Preference Utilitarian’s Time Inconsistency Problem - Less Wrong
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My version of utilitarianism is "dealism", and the way I'd suggest thinking about this is in terms of the scope of the implicit "deal" you are implementing. At one extreme you as dictator just enforce your temporary personal preferences over everything, while at the other extreme you weigh the preferences of all creatures who ever have existed or ever could exist. Doing anything but the later may be a slippery slope. First you'll decide to ignore possible creatures, then future creatures, then animals, then maybe people with low IQ, people who don't respect Western values, and eventually it will just be the values of you and your friends on the project. What other principle can you use to draw this line between creatures who count and those who don't?
There does exist no goal that is of objective moral superiority. Trying to maximize happiness for everybody is just the selfish effort to survive, given that not you but somebody else wins. So we're trying to survive by making everybody wanting to make everybody else happy? What if the largest number of possible creatures is too different from us to peacefully, or happily, coexist with us?