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Lukas_Gloor comments on A (small) critique of total utilitarianism - Less Wrong
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Good catch, I'm well aware of that. I didn't say that I think bringing a neutral being into existence is neutral. If the neutral being's life contains suffering, then the suffering counts negatively. Prior-existence views seem to not work without the inconsistency you pointed out. The only consistent alternative to total utiltiarianism is, as I see it currently, negative utilitarianism. Which has its own repugnant conclusions (e.g. anti-natalism), but for several reasons I find those easier to accept.
As I said, any preferences that can be cast into utility function form are consistent. You seem to be adding extra requirements for this "consistency".
I should qualify my statement. I was talking only about the common varieties of utilitarianism and I may well have omitted consistent variants that are unpopular or weird (e.g. something like negative average preference-utilitarianism). Basically my point was that "hybrid-views" like prior-existence (or "critical level" negative utiltiarianism) run into contradictions. Most forms of average utilitarianism aren't contradictory, but they imply an obvious absurdity: A world with one being in maximum suffering would be [edit:] worse than a world with a billion beings in suffering that's just slightly less awful.
That last sentence didn't make sense to me when I first looked at this. Think you must mean "worse", not "better".
Indeed, thanks.
I'm still vague on what you mean by "contradictions".
Not in the formal sense. I meant for instance what Will_Savin pointed out above, a neutral life (a lot of suffering and a lot of happiness) being equally worthy of creating as a happy one (mainly just happiness, very little suffering). Or for "critical levels" (which also refers to the infamous dust specks), see section VI of this paper, where you get different results depending on how you start aggregating. And Peter Singer's prior-existence view seems to contain a "contradiction" (maybe "absurdity" is better) as well having to do with replaceability, but that would take me a while to explain. It's not quite a contradiction that the theory states "do X and not-X", but it's obvious enough that something doesn't add up. I hope that led to some clarification, sorry for my terminology.
Ah, I see. Anti-natalism is certainly consistent, though I find it even more repugnant.