= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
teageegeepea comments on Humans are utility monsters - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (213)
More repugnant than that is that naive average utilitarianism would seem to say that killing the least happy person in the world is a good thing, no matter how happy they are.
This can be resolved by taking a timeless view of the population, so that someone still counts as part of the average even after they die. This neatly resolves the question you asked Eliezer earlier in the thread, "If you prefer no monster to a happy monster why don't you kill the monster." The answer is that once the monster is created it always exists in a timeless sense. The only way for there to be "no monster" is for it to never exist in the first place.
That still leaves the most repugnant conclusion of naive average utilitarianism, namely that it states that, if the average utility is ultranegative (i.e., everyone is tortured 24/7), creating someone with slightly less negative utility (ie they are tortured 23/7) is better than creating nobody.
In my view average utilitarianism is a failed attempt to capture a basic intuition, namely that a small population of high utility people is sometimes better than a large one of low utility people, even if the large population's total utility is higher. "Take the average utility of the population" sounds like an easy and mathematically rigorous to express that intuition at first, but runs into problems once you figure out "munchkin" ways to manipulate the average, like adding moderately miserable people to a super-miserable world..
In my view we should keep the basic intuition (especially the timeless interpreation of it), but figure out a way to express it that isn't as horrible as AU.
If I kill someone in their sleep so they don't experience death, and nobody else is affected by it (maybe it's a hobo or something), is that okay under the timeless view because their prior utility still "counts"?
If we're talking preference utilitarianism, in the "timeless sense" you have drastically reduced the utility of the person, since the person (while still living) would have preferred not to be so killed; and you went against that preference.
It's because their prior utility (their preference not to be killed) counts, that killing someone is drastically different from them not being born in the first place.
The obvious way to avoid this is to weight each person by their measure, e.g. the amount of time they spend alive.
I think total utilitarianism already does that.
Yes, that's my point (Maybe my tenses were wrong.) This answer (the weighting) was meant to be the answer to teageegeepea's question of how exactly the timeless view considers the situation.
No, because they'll be deprived of any future utility they might have otherwise received by remaining alive.
So if a person is born, has 50 utility of experiences and is then killed, the timeless view says the population had one person of 50 utility added to it by their birth.
By contrast, if they were born, have 50 utility of experiences, avoid being killed, and then have an additional 60 utility of experiences before they die of old age, the timeless view says the population had one person of 110 utility added to it by their birth.
Obviously, all other things being equal, adding someone with 110 utility is better than adding someone with 50, so killing is still bad.