Kaj_Sotala comments on Crossing the experiments: a baby - Less Wrong
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All else being equal, creating new lives would be a bad thing, but I don't believe that trying to discourage people from having children on those grounds would be particularly useful (its net effect would probably just be bad PR for negative utilitarianism), nor that it would be good to have a general policy of smart and ethical people having less children than people not belonging to that class. Also, I count Stuart as my friend, and I didn't want him to experience suffering due to his happy event being tainted by a uniformly negative response to this thread.
"All else being equal, creating new lives would be a bad thing"
Is negative utilitarianism the idea that we should minimize pain? And a new life will undoubtedly experience some degree of pain and suffering?
Is there any good PR for negative utilitarianism out there? Or some reading that you would recommend on it?
Prioritarianism seems more coherent.
Coherent in what sense? Prioritarianism is likely more intuitive, but a problem is that there are infinitely many ways to draw a concave welfare function and no good reasons to choose one over the other. I don't think negative utilitarianism is necessarily incoherent by itself, it depends on the way it is formalized.
I agree that prioritarianism has the problems you mention. I note that negative-leaning utilitarianism (though not strict negative utilitarianism) has analogous problems: just as there are infinitely many ways to draw a concave welfare function, so there are infinitely many exchange rates between positive and negative experience.
Right, and I suspect the same holds for classical utilitarianism too, because there seems to be no obvious way to normalize happiness-units with suffering-units. But I know you think differently.
They're the same size when you're indifferent between the status quo and equal chances of getting one more happiness unit or one more suffering unit. Duh.
Am I missing something?
Classical utilitarians usually argue for their view from an impartial, altruistic perspective. If they had atypical intuitions about particular cases, they would discard them if it can be shown that the intuitions don't correspond to what is effectively best for the interests of all sentient beings. So in order to qualify as genuinely other-regarding/altruistic, the procedure one uses for coming up with a suffering/happiness exchange rate would have to produce the same output for all persons that apply it correctly, otherwise it would not be a procedure for an objective exchange rate.
The procedure you propose leads to different people giving answers that differ in orders of magnitude. If I would accept ten hours of torture for a week of vacation on the beach, and someone else would only accept ten seconds of torture for the same thing, then either of us will have a hard time justifying to force such trades onto other sentient beings for the greater good. It goes both ways of course, if classical utilitarianism is correct, too low an exchange rate would be just as bad as one that is too high (by the same margin).
Since human intuitions differ so much on the subject, one would have to either (a) establish that most people are biased and that there is in fact an exchange rate that everyone would agree on, if they were rational and knew enough, or (b) find some other way to find an objective exchange rate plus a good enough justification for why it should be relevant. I'm very skeptical concerning the feasibility of this.
Preference utilitarianism is not the same thing as hedonistic utilitarianism (they reach different conclusions), so you can't use one to define the other.
Googles for
classical utilitarianismOops.
Note to self: Never comment anything unless I'm sure about the meaning of each word in it.
If you don't mind, I'd be interested in knowing why you think this is so. If you conceive of happiness and suffering as states that instantiate some phenomenal property (pleasantness and unpleasantness, respectively), then an obvious normalization of the units is in terms of felt intensity: a given instance of suffering corresponds to some instance of happiness just when one realizes the property of unpleasantness to the same degree as the other realizes the property of pleasantness. And if you, instead, conceive of happiness and suffering as states that are the objects of some intentional property (say, desiring and desiring-not), then the normalization could be done in terms of the intensity of the desires: a given instance of suffering corresponds to some instance of happiness just when the state that one desires not to be in is desired with the same intensity as the state one desires to be in.
How do you measure the intensity of desires, if not by introspectively comparing them (see below)? If you do measure something objectively, on what grounds do you justify its ethical relevance? I mean, we could measure all kinds of things, such as the amount of neurotransmitters released or activity of involved brain regions and so on, but just because there are parameters that turn out to be comparable for both pleasure and pain doesn't meant that they automatically constitute whatever we care about.
If you instead take an approach analogous to revealed preferences (what introspective comparison of hedonic valence seems to come down to), you have to look at decision-situations where people make conscious welfare-tradeoffs. And merely being able to visualize pleasure doesn't necessarily provoke the same reaction in all beings -- it depends on contingencies of brain-wiring. We can imagine beings that are only very slightly moved by the prospect of intense, long pleasures and that wouldn't undergo small amounts of suffering to get there.
You need intensity of desire to compare pains and pleasures, but also to compare pains of different intensities. So if introspection raises a problem for one type of comparison, it should raise a problem for the other type, too. Yet you think we can make comparisons within pains. So whatever reasons you have for thinking that introspection is reliable in making such comparisons, these should also be reasons for thinking that introspection is reliable for making comparisons between pains and pleasures.
Let's assume we make use of memory to rank pains in terms of how much we don't want to undergo them. Likewise, we may rank pleasures in terms of how much we want to have them now (or according to other measurable features). The result is two scales with comparability within the same scale. Now how do you normalize the two scales, is there not an extra source for arbitrariness? People may rank the pains the same way among themselves and the same for all the pleasures too, but when it comes to trading some pain for some pleasure, some people might be very eager to do it, whereas others might not be. Convergence of comparability of pains doesn't necessarily imply convergence of comparability of exchange rates. You'd be comparing two separate dimensions.
Preference utilitarianism is not the same thing as hedonistic utilitarianism (they reach different conclusions), so you can't use one to justify the other.
It depends on the counterfactual. If it consists of donating all the resources a kid would cost to the best cause, then that likely trumps everything. Especially also if you take the haste consideration into account; it takes forever to raise a child and good altruists are likely cheaper to create by other means. And the part about altruists losing ground in Darwinian terms can be counteracted by sperm donations (or egg donations if there is demand for that).
Having said that, it is important to emphasize that personal factors and preferences need to taken into account in the expected value calculation, since it would be bad/irrational if someone ends up unhappy and burned out after trying too hard to be a perfect utility-maximizer.