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Vulture comments on Average utilitarianism must be correct? - Less Wrong
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This sentence doesn't really mean much. A dead person doesn't have preferences or utility (zero or otherwise) when dead any more than a rock does, a dead person had preferences and utility when alive. The death of a living person (who preferred to live) reduces average utility because the living person preferred to not die, and that preference is violated!
I support the right to euthanasia for people who truly prefer to be killed, e.g. because they suffer from terminal painful diseases. Do you oppose it?
Perhaps you should see it more clearly if you think of it as maximizing the average preference utility across the timeline, rather than the average utility at a single point in time.
I believe that what dhasenan was getting at is that without the assumption that a dead person has 0 utility, you would be willing to kill people who are happy (positive utility), but just not as happy as they could be. I'm not sure how exactly this would go mathematically, but the point is that killing a +utility person being a reduction in utility is a vital axiom
It's not that they could be happier. Rather, if the average happiness is greater than my happiness, the average happiness in the population will be increased if I die (assuming the other effects of a person dying are minimal or sufficiently mitigated).
I don't know if we need have it as an axiom rather than this being a natural consequence of happy people preferring not to be killed, and of us likewise preferring not to kill them, and of pretty much everyone preferring their continued lives to their deaths... The good of preference utilitarianism is that it takes all these preferences as an input.
If preference average utilitarianism nonetheless leads to such an abominable conclusion, I'll choose to abandon preference average utilitarianism, considering it a failed/misguided attempt at describing my sense of morality -- but I'm not certain it needs lead to such a conclusion at all.