gjm comments on Positive utility in an infinite universe - Less Wrong Discussion
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It feels to me as if the following things are likely to be true:
For instance, consider the following construction. We have a countable infinity of possible people (not all necessarily exist). We assume we've got a way of assigning utilities to individuals. Now say that a "global utility" means an assignment of a utility to each person (0 for nonexistent people), and put an equivalence relation on global utilities where u~v if you can get from one to the other by changing a finite number of the utilities, by amounts that add up to zero. (Or, maybe better: by changing any number, where {all the changes} is absolutely convergent -- i.e., sum of the absolute values is finite -- and the sum is zero.)
In this case, you can compute expected utilities "pointwise", which is nice; swapping two people's "labels" (or, more generally, permuting finitely many labels) makes no difference to a "global utility", which is nice; in any world with only finitely many people it's equivalent to total utilitarianism, which is probably nice; if you increase some utilities and don't decrease any, you get something strictly better, which is nice; but utilities aren't always comparable, so in some cases this value system doesn't know what to do. E.g., if you have disjoint infinite sets A and B of people, { everyone in A gets +1, everyone in B gets -1 } and {everyone in A gets -1, everyone in B gets +1 } are incomparable, which isn't so nice.