But utilitarians needn't be preference utilitarians. They can instead maximize some other measure of quality of life. For example, lifetime hiccups would be easy to compare interpersonally.
I don't think this will work; it sweeps the difficult part under the rug. When you identify utility with a particular measure of welfare (for example, lifetime hiccups) there really is no good reason to think we all get the same amount of (dis)satisfaction for a single hiccup. Some would be extremely distressed by a hiccup, some would be only slightly bothered, and others will laugh because they think hiccups are funny.
If people actually do get different amount of (dis)satisfaction from the units of our chosen measure of welfare (which seems to me very likely), then even if we minimize (I'm assuming hiccups are supposed to be bad) the total (or average) number of lifetime hiccups between us, we still don't have very good reason to think that this state of affairs really provides the "the greatest amount of good for the greatest number" like Bentham and Mill were hoping for.
The assumption wasn't that minimizing hiccups maximizes satisfaction, but that it's hiccups rather than satisfaction that matters. Obviously we both agree this assumption is false. We seem to have some source of information telling us lifetime hiccups are the wrong utility function. Why not ask this source what is the right utility function?
Has anyone here ever addressed the question of why we should prefer
(1) Life Extension: Extend the life of an existing person 100 years
to
(2) Replacement: Create a new person who will live for 100 years?
I've seen some discussion of how the utility of potential people fits into a utilitarian calculus. Eliezer has raised the Repugnant Conclusion, in which 1,000,000 people who each have 1 util is preferable to 1,000 people who each have 100 utils. He rejected it, he said, because he's an average utilitarian.
Fine. But in my thought experiment, average utility remains unchanged. So an average utilitarian should be indifferent between Life Extension and Replacement, right? Or is the harm done by depriving an existing person of life greater in magnitude than the benefit of creating a new life of equivalent utility? If so, why?
Or is the transhumanist indifferent between Life Extension and Replacement, but feels that his efforts towards radical life extension have a much greater expected value than trying to increase the birth rate?
(EDITED to make the thought experiment cleaner. Originally the options were: (1) Life Extension: Extend the life of an existing person for 800 years, and (2) Replacement: Create 10 new people who will each live for 80 years. But that version didn't maintain equal average utility.)
*Optional addendum: Gustaf Arrhenius is a philosopher who has written a lot about this subject; I found him via this comment by utilitymonster. Here's his 2008 paper, "Life Extension versus Replacement," which explores an amendment to utilitarianism that would allow us to prefer Life Extension. Essentially, we begin by comparing potential outcomes according to overall utility, as usual, but we then penalize outcomes if they make any existing people worse off.
So even though the overall utility of Life Extension is the same as Replacement, the latter is worse, because the existing person is worse off than he would have been in Life Extension. By contrast, the potential new person is not worse off in Life Extension, because in that scenario he doesn't exist, and non-existent people can't be harmed. Arrhenius goes through a whole list of problems with this moral theory, however, and by the end of the paper we aren't left with anything workable that would prioritize Life Extension over Replacement.