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TheOtherDave comments on Skirting the mere addition paradox - Less Wrong
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This is true insofar as it can be performed without creating significant disutility for their above-average-utility neighbors, and not otherwise. A community that would suffer greatly due to the deaths of half the people around them would not necessarily have its average utility increased by that operation.
True. Actually, it's worse than that... we don't even have a way to compare an individual's utility over time with any level of precision, though we talk casually as though we did. (If we had such an intertemporal utility comparison, then we could for example declare that the highest-utility state each individual has achieved in their lifetime is 1 unit of utility, and the lowest-utility state is 0 units, and interpolate linearly, recalibrating whenever an individual exceeds their previous maximum, and that would be one way of comparing interpersonal utilities at any given time. Of course, that might not be acceptable because it fails to account for the possibility that some individuals are just worth more than others, or for various other reasons, but it would at least be a place to start.)
Without that, utilitarianism is at best no more than a qualitative way to address ethical questions.
You don't have to kill off half of the population to increase average utility.
Yup, that's true.
And I initially misunderstood your "killing off anyone with below-maximum utility" to mean "for all X with below-maximum utility, kill X" rather than "select some X with below-maximum utility and kill X," sorry.
That said, if we're talking about individual or small-group cases, the argument against average-utilitarianism no longer feels quite so intuitively cut-and-dried.
That is: if selecting one X experiencing low utility and killing X does not cause significant utility-decrease (e.g. suffering, grief, anxiety, having-one's-memory-edited, etc.) among the survivors, I suspect quite a few people would more-or-less endorse X's death if it leaves a larger share of available resources for them to enjoy. So arguing "this can't possibly be a correct description of human morality because humans in fact reject it" is not quite so easy as in the kill-off-everyone-but-the-being-experiencing-highest-utility scenario (which humans reliably reject).
That being said, even in the one-corpse case, we can certainly counter that the people who endorse that are simply endorsing unethical/immoral behavior.
Well, consider some unlucky fellow without any significant family ties, without friends and without a job, living off government welfare. His death wouldn't generate much negative externalities, in fact, the externalities would be mostly positive, since he would stop receiving welfare.
Assume that you can compare personal utilities and it turns out that this guy has below-average utility. Would it be moral to kill him? Average utilitarianism says yes.
I suppose that the moral intuitions of most, though not all, people would be against killing him, at least not in a obvious way (some might be in favour of taking his welfare away and letting him starve to death, though, but I doubt that these kind of people use an utilitarian type of moral reasoning).
So would total utilitarianism, if his resources were reallocated to other people of more efficient happiness levels (or to new individuals brought into the world).
That's why I'm not a fan of utilitarianism in its various forms.
You'll get no argument from me there :-)
I understand why you say this, but I'm not quite sure I agree.
I mean, I certainly agree that most people, if asked that question in those terms, would say "of course not! killing this poor lonely friendless unemployed wretch would be wrong."
But I'm less sure that most people, if placed in a situation where they express their revealed preferences without framing them explicitly, would make decisions that were consistent with that answer.
And if I actually worked out what "below-average utility" means in terms that make intuitive sense to people... e.g., how much is this fellow actually suffering on a daily basis?... I'm genuinely unsure what most people would say, even if asked explicitly. Especially if our mechanism for comparing personal utilities, unlike the one I proposed above, does not arbitrarily conclude that each individual's lifetime maximum is equivalent for purposes of comparison, as I expect most people's intuitions in fact don't.
That said, I certainly agree with you that most of the people who are in favor of letting the hungry starve, etc., are not using any sort of aggregated utilitarian moral reasoning.