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Ghatanathoah comments on Is Equality Really about Diminishing Marginal Utility? - Less Wrong Discussion

5 Post author: Ghatanathoah 04 December 2012 11:03PM

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Comment author: Ghatanathoah 05 December 2012 12:31:01AM *  1 point [-]

Limited resource use should be counted as indirect harm, surely.

If there are a finite amount of resources then you harm other people just by existing, because by using resources to live you are reducing the amount available for other people to use. By "limited" do you mean "resource use above a certain threshold?" What would that threshold be? Would it change depending on how many resources a given society has?

Are you suggesting that everyone is entitled to a certain level of life quality, and that any desires that would reduce that level of life quality if fulfilled should count as "malicious?" That is a line of thought that hadn't fully occurred to me. It seems to have some similarities with prioritarianism.

You mean "barely worth celebrating", surely?

Yes. I used the other term in the OP because I thought not everyone who read it would have read Eliezer's essay and got stuck in the habit.

EDIT: When I said "you harm other people just by existing" that technically isn't true in the present because we live in a non-malthusian world with a growing economy. Adding more people actually increases the amount of resources available to everyone because there are more people to do work. Assume, for the sake of the argument, that in this thought experiment the amount of resources available to a society is fixed.