Average utilitarianism leads to the conclusion that if someone of below average personal experiential utility, meaning the utility that they experience rather than the utility function that describes their preferences, can be removed from the world without affecting anyone else's personal experiential utility, then this should be done.
I suspect you've allowed yourself to be confused by the semantics of the scenario. If you rule out externalities, removing someone from the world of the thought experiment can't be consequentially equivalent to killing them (which leaves a mess of dangling emotional pointers, has a variety of knock-on effects, and introduces additional complications if you're using a term for preference satisfaction, to say nothing of timeless approaches); it's more accurately modeled with a comparison between worlds where the person in question does and doesn't exist, Wonderful Life-style.
With that in mind, it's not at all self-evident to me that the world where the less-satisfied-than-average individual exists is more pleasant or morally perfect than the one in which they don't. Why not bite that bullet?
No, I was not making that confusion. I based my decision on a consideration of just that person's mental state. I find a `good' life valuable, though I don't know the specifics of what a good life is, and ceteris paribus, I prefer its existence to its nonexistence.
As evidence to me clearly differentiating killing and `deleting' someone, I am surprised by how much emphasis Eliezer puts on preserving life, rather than making sure that good life exist. Actually, thinking about that article, I am becoming less surprised that he takes this position because he f...
Some people see never-existed people as moral agents, and claim that we can talk about their preferences. Generally this means their personal preference in existing versus non-existing. Formulations such "it is better for someone to have existed than not" reflect this way of thinking.
But if the preferences of never-existed are relevant, then their non-personal perferences are also relevant. Do they perfer a blue world or a pink one? Would they want us to change our political systems? Would they want us to not bring into existence some never-existent people they don't like?
It seems that those who are advocating bringing never-existent people into being in order to satisfy those people's preferences should be focusing their attention on their non-personal preferences instead. After all, we can only bring into being so many trillions of trillions of trillions; but there is no theoretical limit to the number of never-existent people whose non-personal preferences we can satisfy. Just get some reasonable measure across the preferences of never-existent people, and see if there's anything that sticks out from the mass.