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AlexMennen comments on Population ethics in practice - Less Wrong Discussion
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Critical level utilitarianism is isomorphic to total utilitarianism. Utilities are invariant under adding constants but sums of utilities are not, so to use total utilitarianism, you need to pick what level of utility to call 0, which is effectively the same as picking a level of utility to call u0 in critical level utilitarianism.
If you have some canonical way of picking a 0 point for the utility functions which is not the critical level, then it might be more convenient to use CLU so you don't have to change the 0 point, but the difference is purely notational. Your utility=income suggestion doesn't work as such a canonical method in humans because utility isn't proportional to income.
Nitpick: only if change in 2 under choice 2 is positive.
I just meant that picking a value of u0 is equivalent to picking a value of income ("y0") such that u(y0)=u0.
Which is in turn equivalent to picking a value of income y_0 such that u(y_0)=0 for total utilitarianism.
(btw, to get an _ instead of italics, put a \ in front of it.)