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Thrasymachus comments on Open Thread, February 15-29, 2012 - Less Wrong
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I was thinking something along the lines that people will generally pick the very best things, ground projects, or whatever to do first, and so as they satisfy those they have to go on to not quite so awesome things, and so on. So although years per se don't 'get in each others way', how you spend them will.
Obviously lots of counterveiling concerns too (maybe you get wiser as you age so you can pick even more enjoyable things, etc.)
That sounds more like diminishing marginal utility than diminishing returns. (E.g. money has diminishing marginal utility because we tend to spend money first on the things that are the most important for us.)
Your hypothesis seems to be implying that humans engage in activities that are essentially "used up" afterwards - once a person has had an awesome time writing a book, they need to move on to something else the next year. This does not seem right: rather, they're more likely to keep writing books. It's true that it will eventually get harder and harder to find even more enjoyable activities, simply because there's an upper limit to how enjoyable an activity can be. But this doesn't lead to diminishing marginal utility: it only means that the marginal utility of life-years stops increasing.
For example, suppose that somebody's 20. At this age they might not know themselves very well, doing some random things that only give them 10 hedons worth of pleasure a year. At age 30, they've figured out that they actually dislike programming but love gardening. They spend all of their available time gardening, so they get 20 hedons worth of pleasure a year. At age 40 they've also figured out that it's fun to ride hot air balloons and watch their gardens from the sky, and the combination of these two activities lets them enjoy 30 hedons worth of pleasure a year. After that, things basically can't get any better, so they'll keep generating 30 hedons a year for the rest of their lives. There's no point at which simply becoming older will derive them of the enjoyable things that they do, unless of course there is no life extension available, at which case they will eventually lose their ability to do the things that they love. But other than that, there will never be diminishing marginal utility.
Of course, the above example is a gross oversimplification, since often our ability to do enjoyable things is affected by circumstances beyond our control, and it is likely to go up and down over time. But these effects are effectively random and thus uncorrelated with age, so I'm ignoring in them. In any case, for there to be diminishing marginal utility for years of life, people would have to lose the ability to do the things that they enjoy. Currently they only lose it due to age-related decline.
I would also note that your argument for why people would have diminishing marginal utility in years of life doesn't actually seem to depend on whether or not we presume continuity of personal identity. Nor does my response depend on it. (The person at age 30 may be a different person than the one at age 20, but she has still learned from the experiences of her "predecessors".)
If you are arguing that we should let people die and then replace them with new people due to the (strictly hypothetical) diminishing utility they get from longer lives, you should note that this argument could also be used to justify killing and replacing handicapped people. I doubt you intended that way, but that's how it works out.
To make it more explicit, in a utilitarian calculation there is no important difference between a person whose utility is 5 because they only experienced 5 utility worth of good things, and someone whose utility is 5 because they experienced 10 utility of good things and -5 utility worth of bad things. So a person with a handicap that makes their life difficult would likely rank about the same as a person who is a little bored because they've done the best things already.
You could try to elevate the handicapped person's utility to normal levels instead of killing them. But that would use a lot of resources. The most cost-effective way to generate utility would be to kill them and conceive a new able person to replace them.
And to make things clear, I'm not talking about aborting a fetus that might turn out handicapped, or using gene therapy to avoid having handicapped children. I'm talking about killing a handicapped person who is mentally developed enough to have desires, feelings, and future-directed preferences, and then using the resources that would have gone to support them to concieve a new, more able replacement.
This is obviously the wrong thing to do. Contemplating this has made me realize that "maximize total utility" is a limited rule that only works in "special cases" where the population is unchanging and entities do not differ vastly in their ability to convert resources into utility. Accurate population ethics likely requires some far more complex rules.
Morality should mean caring about people. If your ethics has you constantly hoping you can find a way to kill existing people and replace them with happier ones you've gone wrong somewhere. And yes, depriving someone of life-extension counts as killing them.
Why should morality mean caring about the people who exist now, rather than caring about the people who will exist in a year?
Obviously it's morally good to care about people who will exist in a year. The "replacements" that I am discussing are not people who will exist. They are people who will exist if and only if someone else is killed and they are created to replace them.
Now, I think I typical counterargument to the point I just made is to argue that, due to the butterfly effect, any policy made to benefit future people will result in different sperms hitting different ovums, so the people who benefit from these policies will be different from the people who would have suffered from the lack of them. From this the counterarguer claims that it is acceptable to replace people with other people who will lead better lives.
I don't think this argument holds up. Future people do not yet have any preferences, since they don't exist yet. So it makes sense to, when considering how to best benefit future people, take actions that benefit future people the most, regardless of who those people end up being. Currently existing people, by contrast, already have preferences. They already want to live. You do them a great harm by killing and replacing them. Since a future person does not have preferences yet, you are not harming them if you make a choice that will result in a different future person who has a better life being born instead.
Suppose that a hundred years ago, Sam was considering the possibility of the eventual existence of people like us living lives like ours, and deciding how many resources to devote to increasing the likelihood of that existence.
I'm not positing prophetic abilities here; I don't mean he's peering into a crystal ball and seeing Dave and Ghatanathoah. I mean, rather, that he is considering in a general way the possibility of people who might exist in a century and the sorts of lives they might live and the value of those lives. For simplicity's sake I assume that Sam is very very smart, and his forecasts are generally pretty accurate.
We seem to be in agreement that Sam ought to care about us (as well as the various other hypothetical future people who don't exist in our world). It seems to follow that he ought to be willing to devote resources to us. (My culture sometimes calls this investing in the future, and we at the very least talk as though it were a good thing.)
Agreed?
Since Sam does not have unlimited resources, resources he devotes to that project will tend to be resources that aren't available to other projects, like satisfying the preferences of his neighbors. This isn't necessary... it may be, for example, that the best way to benefit you and I is to ensure that our grandparents' preferences were fully satisfied... but it's possible.
Agreed?
And if I'm understanding you correctly, you're saying that if it turns out that devoting resources towards arranging for the existence of our lives does require depriving his neighbors of resources that could be used to satisfy their preferences, it's nevertheless OK -- perhaps even good -- for Sam to devote those resources that way.
Yes?
What's not OK, on your account, is for Sam to harm his neighbors in order to arrange for the existence of our lives , since his neighbors already have preferences and we don't.
Have I understood you so far?
If so, can you clarify the distinction between harming me and diverting resources away from the satisfaction of my preferences, and why the latter is OK but the former is not?
Let's imagine that Sam is talking with a family who are planning on having another child. Sam knows, somehow, that if they conceive a child now they will give birth to a girl they will name Alice, and that if they wait a few years they will have a boy named Bob. They have enough money to support one more child and still live reasonably comfortable lives. It seems good for Sam to recommend the family have Alice or Bob, assuming either child will have a worthwhile life.
Sam also knows that the mother currently has an illness that will stunt Alice's growth in utero, so she will be born with a minor disability that will make her life hard, but still very much worth living and worth celebrating. He also knows that if the mother waits a few years her illness will clear up and she will be able to have healthy children who will have lives with all the joys Alice does, but without the problems caused by the disability.
Now, I think we can both agree that Sam should recommend the parents should wait a few years and have Bob. And that he should not at all be bothered at the idea that he is "killing" Alice to create Bob.
Now, let's imagine a second scenario in which the family has already had Alice. And let's say that Alice has grown sufficiently mature that no one will dispute that she is a person with preferences. And her life is a little difficult, but very much worth living and worth celebrating. The mother's illness has now cleared up so that she can have Bob, but again, the family does not have enough money to support another child.
Now, it occurs to Sam that if he kills Alice the family will be able to afford to have Bob. And just to avoid making the family's grief a confounding factor, let's say Sam is friends with Omega, who has offered to erase all the family's memories of Alice.
It seems to me that in this case Sam should not kill Alice. And I think the reason this is is that in the first hypothetical Alice did not exist, and did not have any preferences about existing or the future. In this hypothetical, however, she does. Bob, by contrast, does not have any preferences yet, so Sam shouldn't worry about "killing" Bob by not killing Alice.
On the other hand, it also seems wrong in the first hypothetical for Sam to recommend the family have neither Bob nor Alice, and just use their money to satisfy the preferences of the existing family members, even though in that case they are not "killing" Bob or Alice either.
What this indicates to me is:
It's good for there to be a large number of worthwhile lives in the world, both in the present and in the future. This may be because it is directly valuable, or it may be that it increases certain values that large numbers of worthwhile lives are needed to fulfill, such as diversity, love, friendship, etc.
It is good to make sure that the worthwhile lives we create have a high level of utility, both in the present and in the future.
We should split our resources between raising people's utility, and making sure the world is always full of worthwhile lives. What the exact ratio is would depend on how high the level of these two values are.
When you are choosing between creating two people who do not yet exist, you should pick the one who will have a better life.
If you screw up and accidentally create someone whose life isn't as good as some potential people you could create, but is still worth living, you have a duty to take care of them (because they have preferences) and shouldn't kill them and replace them with someone else who will have a better life (because that person doesn't have preferences yet).
When determining how to make sure there is a large number of worthwhile lives in the future, it is usually better to extend the life of an existing person than to replace them with a new person (because of point 5).
So, I can't quite figure out how to map your response to my earlier comment, so I'm basically going to ignore my earlier comment. If it was actually your intent to reply to my comment and you feel like making the correspondence more explicit, go ahead, but it's not necessary.
WRT your comment in a vacuum: I agree that it's good for lives to produce utility, and I also think it's good for lives to be enjoyable. I agree that it's better to choose for better lives to exist. I don't really care how many lives there are in and of itself, though as you say more lives may be instrumentally useful. I don't know what "worthwhile" means, and whatever it means I don't know why I should be willing to trade off either utility production or enjoyment for a greater number of worthwhile lives. I don't know why the fact that someone has preferences should mean that I have a duty to take care of them.
I understand that my previous argument was probably overlong, roundabout, and had some huge inferential differences, so I'll try to be more clear:
A "worthwhile life" is a synonym for the more commonly used term: "life worth living." Basically, it's a life that contains more good than bad. I just used it because I thought it carried the same meaning while sounding slightly less clunky in a sentence.
The idea that it was good for a society to have a large number of distinct worthwhile lives at any given time was something I was considering after contemplating which was better, a society with a diverse population of different people, or a society consisting entirely of brain emulators of the same person. It seemed to me that if the societies had the same population size, and the same level of utility per person, that the diverse society was not just better, but better by far.
It occurred to me that perhaps the reason it seemed that way to me was that having a large number of worthwhile lives and a high level of utility were separate goods. Another possibility that occurred to me was that having a large number of distinct individuals in a society increased the amount of positive goods such as diversity, friendship, love, etc. In a previous discussion you seemed to think this idea had merit.
Thinking about it more, I agree with you that it seems more likely that having a large number of worthwhile lives is probably good because of the positive values (love, diversity, etc) it generates, rather than as some sort of end in itself.
Now, I will try to answer your original question (Why should morality mean caring about the people who exist now, rather than caring about the people who will exist in a year?) in a more succinct manner:
Of course we should care about people who will exist in the future just as much as people who exist now. Temporal separations are just as morally meaningless as spatial ones.
The specific point I was making was not in regards to whether we should care about people who will exist in the future or not. The point I was making was in regards to deciding which specific people will exist in the future.
In the thought experiment I posited there were two choices about who specifically should exist in the future:
(A) Alice, who currently exists in the present, also exists in the future.
(B) Alice, who currently exists in the present, is dead in the future and Bob, who currently doesn't exist, has been created to take her place.
Now, I think we both agree that we should care about whoever actually ends up existing in the future, regardless of whether it is Alice or Bob. My main argument is whether (A) or (B) is morally better.
I believe that, all other things being equal (A) is better than (B). And I also argue that (A) is better even if Bob will live a slightly happier life than Alice. As long as Alice's life is worth living, and she isn't a huge burden on others, (A) is better than (B).
My primary justification for this belief is that since Alice already exists in the present, she has concrete preferences about the future. She wants to live, doesn't want to die, and has goals she wants to accomplish in the future. Bob doesn't exist yet, so he has no such preferences. So I would argue that it is wrong to kill Alice to create Bob, even if Bob's life might be happier than Alice's.
So, consider the following alternative thought experiment:
Alice exists at time T1.
In (A) Alice exists at T2 and in (B) Alice doesn't exist at T2 and Bob does, and Bob is superior to Alice along all the dimensions I care about (e.g., Bob is happier than Alice, or whatever).
Should I prefer (A) or (B)?
This is equivalent to your thought experiment if T1 is the present.
And on your model, the most important factor in answering my question seems to be whether T1 is the present or not... if it is, then I should prefer A; if it isn't, I should prefer B. Yes?
I prefer a moral structure that does not undergo sudden reversals-of-preference like that.
If I prefer B to A if T1 is in the future, and I prefer B to A if T2 is in the past, then I ought to prefer B to A if T1 is in the present as well. The idea that I ought to prefer A to B if (and only if) T1 is the present seems unjustified.
I agree with you, though, that this idea is probably held by most people.
No, it doesn't matter when T1 is. All that matters is that Alice exists prior to Bob.
If Omega were to tell me that Alice would definitely exist 1,000 years from now, and then gave me the option of choosing (A) or (B) I would choose (A). Similarly, if Omega told me Alice existed 1,000 years ago in the past and had been killed and replaced by Bob my response would be "That's terrible!" not "Yay!"
Now if T1 is in the future and Omega gave me option (C), which changes the future so that Alice is never created in the first place and Bob is created instead, I would choose (C) over (A). This is because in (C) Alice does not exist prior to Bob, whereas in (A) and (B) she does.