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kilobug comments on In favour of total utilitarianism over average - Less Wrong Discussion
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The same way that human values are complicated and can't be summarized as "seek happiness !", the way we should aggregate utility is complicated and can't be summarized with just a sum or an average. Trying to use a too simple metric will lead to ridiculous cases (utility monster, ...). The formula we should use to aggregate individual utilities is likely to be involve total, median, average, Ginny, and probably other statistical tools, and finding it is a significant part of finding our CEV.
The problem is that by doing that you are making your position that much more arbitrary and contrived. It would be better if we could find a moral theory that has solid parsimonious basis, and it would be surprising if the fabric of morality involved complicated formulas.
There is no objective absolute morality that exists in a vacuum. Our morality is a byproduct of evolution and culture. Of course we should use rationality to streamline and improve it, not limit ourselves to the intuitive version that our genes and education gave us. But that doesn't mean we can streamline it to the point of simple average or sum, and yet have it remain even roughly compatible with our intuitive morality.
Utility theory, prisoner's dilemma, Occam's razor, and many other mathematical structures put constraints on what a self-consistent, formalized morality has to be like. But they can't and won't pinpoint a single formula in the huge hypothesis space of morality, but we'll always have to rely heavily on our intuitive morality at the end. And this one isn't simple, and can't be made that simple.
That's the whole point of the CEV, finding a "better morality", that we would follow if we knew more, were more what we wished we were, but that remains rooted in intuitive morality.
No, that's highly contentious, and even if it's true, it doesn't grant a license to promote any odd utility rule as ideal. The anti-realist also may have reason to prefer a simpler version of morality.
There are much more relevant factors in building and choosing moral systems than those mathematical structures, whose relevance to moral epistemology is dubious in the first place.
It's not obvious that we would be more likely to believe anything in particular if we knew more and were more what we wished we were. CEV is a nice way of making different people's values and goals fit together, but it makes no sense to propose it as a method of actual moral epistemology.
"The way we should aggregate utility is complicated and can't be summarized with just a sum or an average" - why? I'm not convinced that the argument by analogy is persuasive here.