Granted, negative utilitarians would prefer to add a small population of beings with terrible lives over a very large beings with lives that are almost ideal, but this would not be a proper instance of the Sadistic Conclusion. See the formulation:
When I read the formulation of the Sadistic Conclusion I interpreted "people with positive utility" to mean either a person whose life contained no suffering, or a person whose satisfied preferences/happiness outweighed their suffering. So I would consider adding a small population of terrible lives instead of a large population of almost ideal lives to be the Sadistic Conclusion.
If I understand you correctly, you are saying that negative utilitarianism technically avoids the Sadistic Conclusion because it considers a life with any suffering at all to be a life of negative utility, regardless of how many positive things that life also contains. In other words, it avoid the SC because it's criterion for what makes a life positive and negative are different than the criterion Arrenhius used when he first formulated the SC. I suppose that is true. However, NU does not avoid the (allegedly) unpleasant scenario Arrenhius wanted to avoid (adding a tortured life instead of a large amount of very positive lives).
Negative utilitarians try to minimize the total amount of preference-frustrations, or suffering....(Also note that being killed is only a problem if you have a preference to go on living, and that even then, it might not be the thing considered worst that could happen to someone.)
Right, but if someone has a preference to live forever does that mean that infinite harm has been done if they die? In which case you might as well do whatever afterwards, since infinite harm has already occurred? Should you torture everyone on Earth for decades to prevent such a person from being added? That seems weird.
The best solution I can currently think of is to compare different alternatives, rather than try to measure things in absolute terms. So if a person who would have lived to 80 dies at 75 that generates 5 years of unsatisfied preferences, not infinity, even if the person would have preferred to live forever. But that doesn't solve the problem of adding people who wouldn't have existed otherwise.
What I'm trying to say is, people have an awful lot of preferences, and generally only manage to satisfy a small fraction of them before they die. So how many unsatisfied preferences should adding a new person count as creating? How big a disutility is it compared to other disutilities, like thwarting existing preferences and inflicting pain on people.
A couple possibilities that occurs to me off the top of my head. One would be to find the difference in satisfaction between the new people and the old people, and then compare it to the difference in satisfaction between the old people and the counter-factual old people in the universe where the new people were never added.
Another possibility would be to set some sort of critical level based on what the maximum level of utility it is possible to give the new people given our society's current level of resources, without inflicting greater disutilities on others than you give utility to the new people. Then weigh the difference between the new peoples actual utility and their "critical possible utility" and compare that to the dissatisfaction the existing people would suffer if the new people are not added.
Do either of these possibilities sound plausible to you, or do you have another idea?
I agree your points on the Sadistic Conclusion issue. Arrhenius acknowledges that his analysis depends on the (to him trivial) assumption that there are "positive" welfare levels. I don't think this axiom is trivial because it interestingly implies that non-consciousness somehow becomes "tarnished" and non-optimal. Under a Buddhist view of value, this would be different.
Right, but if someone has a preference to live forever does that mean that infinite harm has been done if they die?
If all one person cared about was to live for at ...
Summary: The term 'effective altuist' invites confusion between 'the right thing to do' and 'the thing that most efficiently promotes welfare.' I think this creeping utilitarianism is a bad thing, and should at least be made explicit. This is not to accuse anyone of deliberate deception.
Over the last year or so, the term 'Effective Altruist' has come into use. I self-identified as one on the LW survey, so I speak as a friend. However, I think there is a very big danger with the terminology.
The term 'Effective Altruist' was born out of the need for a label for those people who were willing to dedicate their lives to making the world a better place in rational ways, even if that meant doing counter-intuitive things, like working as an Alaskan truck driver. The previous term, 'really super awesome hardcore people', was indeed a little inelegant.
However, 'Effective Altruist' has a major problem: it refers to altruism, not ethics. Altruism may be a part of ethics (though the etymology of the term gives some concern), but it is not all there is to ethics. Value is complex. Helping people is good, but so is truth, and justice, and freedom, and beauty, and loyalty, and fairness, and honor, and fraternity, and tradition, and many other things.
A charity that very efficiently promoted beauty and justice, but only inefficiently produced happiness, would probably not be considered an EA organization. A while ago I suggested to [one of the leaders of the Center for Effective Altruism] the creation of a charity to promote promise-keeping. I didn't claim such a charity would be an optimal way of promoting happiness, and to them, this was sufficient to show 1) that it was not EA - and hence 2) inferior to EA things.
Such thinking involves either a equivocation or a concealed premise. If 'EA' is interpreted literally, so 'the primary/driving goal is to help others', then something not being EA is insufficient for it to not be the best thing you could do - there is more to ethics and the good, than altruism and promoting welfare. Failure to promote one dimension of the good doesn't mean you're not the optimal way of promoting their sum. On the other hand, if 'EA' is interpreted broadly, as being concerned with 'happiness, health, justice, fairness and/or other values', then merely failing to promote welfare/happiness does not mean a cause is not EA. Much EA discussion, like on the popular facebook group, equivocates between these two meanings.*
...Unless one thought that helping people was all their was to ethics, in which case this is not equivocation. As virtually all of CEA's leaders are utilitarians, it is plausible that is was the concealed premise in their argument. In this case, there is no equivocation, but a different logical fallacy, that of an omitted premise, has been committed. And we should be just as wary as in the case of equivocation.
Unfortunately, utilitarianism is false, or at least not obviously true. Something can be the morally best thing to do, while not being EA. Just because some utilitarians have popularized a term which cleverly equivocates between "promotes welfare" and "is the best thing" does not mean we should be taken in. Every fashionable ideology likes to blurr the lines between its goals and its methods (is Socialism about helping the working man or about state ownership of industry? is libertarianism about freedom or low taxes?) in order to make people who agree with the goals forget that there might be other means of achieving them.
There are two options: recognize 'EA' as referring to only a subset of morality, or recognize as 'EA' actions and organizations that are ethical through ways other than producing welfare/happiness.
* Yes, one might say that promoting X's honor thereby helped X, and thus there was no distinction. However, I think people who make this argument in theory are unlikely to observe it in practice - I doubt that there will be an EA organisation dedicated to pure retribution, even if it was both extremely cheap to promote and a part of ethics.