EDIT: Mestroyer was the first one to find a bug that breaks this idea. Only took a couple of hours, that's ethics for you. :)
In the last Stupid Questions Thread, solipsist asked
Making a person and unmaking a person seem like utilitarian inverses, yet I don't think contraception is tantamount to murder. Why isn't making a person as good as killing a person is bad?
People raised valid points, such as ones about murder having generally bad effects on society, but most people probably have the intuition that murdering someone is bad even if the victim was a hermit whose death was never found out by anyone. It just occurred to me that the way to formalize this intuition would also solve more general problems with the way that the utility functions in utilitarianism (which I'll shorten to UFU from now on) behave.
Consider these commonly held intuitions:
- If a person is painlessly murdered and a new (equally happy) person is instantly created in their place, this is worse than if there was a single person who lived for the whole time.
- If a living person X is painlessly murdered at time T, then this is worse than if the X's parents had simply chosen not to have a child at time T-20, even though both acts would have resulted in X not existing at time T+1.
- If someone is physically dead, but not information-theoretically dead and a close enough replica of them can be constructed and brought back, then bringing them back is better than creating an entirely new person.
But not in any absolute sense, just because this is consistent with your moral intuition.
Not relevant because we are considering bringing these people into existence at which point they will be able to experience pain and pleasure.
Imagine you know that one week from now someone will force you to take heroin and you will become addicted. At this point you will be able to have an OK life if given a regular amount of the drug but will live in permanent torture if you never get any more of the substance. Would you pay $1 today for the ability to consume heroin in the future?
Yes, but I would argue that the fact that they can't actually do that yet makes a difference.
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