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peter_hurford comments on Potential vs already existent people and aggregation - Less Wrong Discussion
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A key difference is that when you're creating people, you're creating all their experiences in addition to the micro-torture, so if we expect those new lives to be good on balance, that's a net gain rather than a loss. So you'd prefer to create the 3^^^^3 people with micro-torture.
However, when you're not creating, you're just adding micro-torture, that's definitely a net loss. Turns out that the sum of the micro-losses is larger than the larger loss of 50 years.
Thus, the asymmetry.
From my edit: the purpose of this post is simply to show that there is a difference between certain reasoning for already existing and potential people. I don't argue that aggregation is the only difference, nor (in this post) that total utilitarianism for potential people is wrong. Simply that the case for existing people is stronger than for potential people.