= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
ArisKatsaris comments on Skirting the mere addition paradox - Less Wrong Discussion
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (25)
If one averages across all time, the strong preference of people to not be killed would suffice to more than cancel the benefits of their non-participation in the future averages.
I don't know what you mean by "average across time". You typically discount across time.
Anyway, utilitarianism is a form of consequentialism in that it assigns moral preferences to world states rather than transitions. Being killed is a transition in any description at any meaningful level of abstraction, hence you can't assign an utility to it. If you do, then you have an essentially dentological ethics, not utilitarianism.
I mean calculating the average utility of the whole timeline, not of particular discrete moments in time.
An example. Let's say we're in the year 2020 and considering whether it's cool to murder 7 billion people in order to let a person-of-maximum-utility lead an optimal life from 2021 onwards. By utility in this case I mean "satisfaction of preferences" (preference utilitarianism) rather than "happiness".
If we do so, a calculation that treats 2020 and 2021 as separate "worlds" might say "If 7 billion people are killed, 2021 will have a much higher average utility than 2020, so we should do it in order to transit to the world of 2021"
But I'd calculate it differently: If 7 billion people are killed between 2020 and 2021, the people of 2020 have far less utility because they very strongly prefer to not be killed, and their killings would therefore grossly reduce the satisfaction of their preferences. Therefore the average utility in the timeline as a whole would be vastly reduced by their murders.
One just needs treat 'world-states' 4-dimensionally, as 'timeline-states'...
If you could genetically modify future humans to make them indifferent to being killed, would you do that, since it would facilitate the mass murder?
Rather than counting on other factors (people's preferences) to avoid outcomes we feel are bad, I think it would be better to encode the badness of these outcomes directly.