2 is irrelevant, because it doesn't matter whether our current utility is in some absolute sense low, because we will still make the same decisions! U(A)=1 U(B)=100 gives the same outcome as U(A)=0.001 and U(B)=0.1.
I was more thinking of people who needed to chose between benefiting our society and benefiting the ancient society, for whom this distinction would be relevant. I guess this is mathematically equivalent to 3.
1 and 3 can be solved by taking average utility over all agents, past and future. But that's irrelevant to me because... I'm not an average utilitarian :-)
This brings back the original problem of killing people to bring up the average.
This brings back the original problem of killing people to bring up the average.
That can be dealt with in some usual way, by setting the utility of someone dead to zero but keeping them in the average.
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.