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Stuart_Armstrong comments on Population ethics and utility indifference - Less Wrong Discussion
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Comments (11)
I could, but see absolutely no reason to.
As ThrustVectoring pointed out in your "Skirting the mere addition paradox" thread, the suggested aggregation function there doesn't allow us to preserve the intuition that adding positive-welfare lives is always positive. Huemer calls the intuition
Whereas, your new utility-indifference suggestion doesn't allow us to preserve the intuition that it's OK to have kids in the real world. Most actual prospective parents face some small epistemic probability that their child would have some horrible fatal genetic disease that makes a life worse than nothing. Even for parents who do have genetic flaws however, there is typically also a chance that a child, conceived from a healthy egg and sperm, will lead a rewarding life. The lucky child, coming from a different sperm/egg combo, would be a different child than the unlucky one. Most parents reason that the large probability of making a happy child outweighs the tiny chance of making a doomed miserable one. But if we do a "utility correction" for positive lives, and no such correction for negative lives, then the net expectation for having a child is negative.
The correction is the expected utility of the child, not the actual utility.
I believe your second use of the word "the" above is a mistake. Maybe I misunderstood the utility-correction idea, but it seemed to me it was about individual human lives, not acts by agents who might create lives. There is the act of reproduction, but there is (at the time of decision) no such thing as the child.
But there is an expected personal utility for the potential being created.
Sure, but if you interpret your principle that way, I think it loses some plausibility in the original context of average vs total utilitarianism (etc.). When B is a variable ranging over different people, it's no longer so plausible that we should be indifferent when the expected personal utility for B is zero.