SaidAchmiz comments on Humans are utility monsters - Less Wrong

67 Post author: PhilGoetz 16 August 2013 09:05PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (213)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: AndHisHorse 17 August 2013 02:20:23AM -1 points [-]

I do not see a contradiction in claiming that a) utility monsters do not exist and b) under utilitarianism, it is correct to kill an arbitrarily large number of nematodes to save one human.

The solution to this issue is to reject the idea of a continuous scale of "utility capability", under which nematodes can feel a tiny amount of utility, humans can feel a moderate amount, and some superhuman utility monster can feel a tremendous amount. Rather, we can (and, I believe, should) reduce it to two classes: agents and objects.

An agent, such as a human or a utility monster, is a creature which is sentient and judged by society to be worthy of moral consideration, including it in the social utility function. All agents are considered equal, with their individual utility units converted to some social standard. For example, Agent Alpha receives 100 Alpha-Utils from the average day, where Agent Beta receives 200 Beta-Utils from the average day. Both of these are converted into Society-Utils - let's say 10 Society-Utils - making an exchange rate of 10 Alpha:Society and 20 Beta:Society.

This is similar to how currency is exchanged. Assuming some reference point, perhaps an event which society deems is equally valuable for all agents (that is, society values it equally regardless of which agent experiences it), there exists a Utility Economy, in which there exists a comparative advantage; Agent Alpha and Agent Beta serve each other, producing more Society-Utils by trading than either could alone.

Left to the side are objects, such as nematodes. Objects are of value only to the extent to which they feature in an agent's utility function; for the purpose of ethical consideration, we consider objects to have no utility function. Therefore, it would be proper to kill nematodes to save humans - unless the side effects from killing so many nematodes began to threaten more humans than it would save. Similarly, animal protection laws would exist not because of any right of the animal, but rather the strong preferences of humans to avoid animal cruelty. This is consistent with the coexistence of factory farming and animal cruelty laws; humans don't much care about cows, but will fight to defend their pets (and creatures like them).

Of course, to some extent this is passing the buck to the "Utility Economy" to set fair rates, but I believe that a society could cobble together a reasonable exchange in which, for example, nobody's life would be valued trivially.

Comment author: SaidAchmiz 17 August 2013 02:27:15AM 0 points [-]

This seems like a pretty sensible account to me. (Does anyone see any obvious flaws?)

This is similar to how currency is exchanged. Assuming some reference point, perhaps an event which society deems is equally valuable for all agents (that is, society values it equally regardless of which agent experiences it), there exists a Utility Economy, in which there exists a comparative advantage; Agent Alpha and Agent Beta serve each other, producing more Society-Utils by trading than either could alone.

Could you explain this a bit more? I'm not sure I understand. (FYI, I know almost nothing about currency exchange.)

Comment author: AndHisHorse 17 August 2013 03:01:16AM 0 points [-]

I don't know much about it either, but the basic principles I'm trying to transfer are:

a) N different nations have N different currencies. Agents 1 through N have Agent1-Utils, Agent2-Utils...AgentN-Utils.

b) They are able to interact in an international market by setting an exchange rate between their currencies. In this case, we propose the extra step of creating a single societal currency, which would be analogous to a "World Dollar", so that we need only N different conversions (Agent i to Society, i = 1..N) rather than N(N-1)/2 (Agent i to Agent j, i = 1..N, j = i+1..N), and the responsibility to set conversion rates is a societal, rather than individual, responsibility.

Admittedly, this analogy has its own "utility monster" - a nation which is economically powerful enough to manipulate exchange rates. However, that doesn't quite exist in the "Utility Economy" unless one agent is powerful enough to bend society to their whim, in which case it's not so much a utilitarian society as a dictatorship.