Open Thread, May 1-14, 2013

If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.

I had a small thought the other day. Average utilitarianism appeals to me most it the various utilitarianisms I have seen, but has the obvious drawback of allowing utility to be raised simply by destroying beings with less than average utility.

My thought was that maybe this could be solved by making the individual utility functions permanent in some sense, i. e. killing someone with low utility would still cause average utility to decrease if they would have wanted to live. This seems to match my intuitions on morality better than any other utilitarianism I have seen.

One strange thing is that the preferences of our ancestors still would count just as much as any other person, but I had already been updating in this direction after reading an essay by gwern called the narrowing moral circle. I wasn't able to think of anything else too weird, but I haven't thought too much about this yet.

Anyway, I was wondering if anyone else has explored this idea already, or if anyone has any thoughts about it.

There are probably two stronger objections to average util along the lines you mention.

1) Instead of talking about killing someone with net positive utility, consider bringing someone into existence who has positive utility, but below the world average. It seems intuitive to say that would be good (especially if the absolute levels were really high), yet avutil rules it out. To make it more implausible, say the average is dragged up by blissfully happily aliens outside of our lightcone.

2) Consider a world where there are lives that are really bad, and bett... (read more)

5Luke_A_Somers13y

You don't evaluate the level of contemporary preference at each future time. You evaluate the current preferences, which are evaluated over the future history of the universe. The people to be slain will likely object to this plan based on these current preferences.

5Nornagest13y

That's even less tractable a problem than summing over the utility functions of all existing agents, but that's not necessarily a game-changer. There are some other odd features of this idea, though: * It only seems to work with preference utilitarianism; pleasure/pain utilitarianism would still treat the painless death of an agent with neutral expected utility as neutral. Fair enough; preference utilitarianism seems less broken than conventional utilitarianism anyway. * Contingent on using preference utilitarianism, certain ways of doing the summing lead to odd features regarding changing cultural values: if future preferences are unbounded in time, a big enough stack of dead ancestors with strong enough preferences could render arbitrary social changes unethical. This could be avoided by summing only over potential lifespan, time-discounting in some way, or using some kind of nonstandard aggregation function that takes new information into account. * Let's say we're now at a point in time . We can plan for using only the preferences of existing or previous agents; all very intuitive so far. But let's say we consider a time further in the future. New agents will have been introduced between and , and there's no obvious way to take their preferences into account; every option gives us potential inconsistencies between optimal actions planned at and optimal actions taken at time . The least bad option seems to be doing a probability-weighted average over agents extant in all possible futures, but (besides being just ridiculously intractable) that seems to introduce some weird acausal effects that I'm not sure I want to deal with. Taking the average at least avoids some of the crazier possible consequences, like the utilitarian go forth and multiply that I'm sure you've thought of already.

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Open Thread, May 1-14, 2013

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Open Thread, May 1-14, 2013

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