conchis

I can see the appeal, but I worry that a metaphor where a single person is given a single piece of software, and has an option to rewrite it for their own and/or others’ purpose without grappling with myriad upstream and downstream dependencies, vested interests, and so forth is probably missing an important part of the dynamics of real world systems?

(This doesn’t really speak to moral obligations to systems, as much as practical challenges doing anything about them, but my experience is that the latter is a much more binding constraint.)

Additional/complementary argument in favour (and against the “any difference you make is marginal” argument): one’s personal example of viable veganism increases the chances of others becoming vegan (or partially so, which is still a benefit). Under plausible assumptions this effect could be (potentially much) larger the the direct effect of personal consumption decisions.

I have to say that the claimed reductios here strike me as under-argued, particularly when there are literally decades of arguments articulating and defending various versions of moral anti-realism, and which set out a range of ways in which the implications, though decidedly troubling, need not be absurd.

Alon’s Design Principles of Biological Circuits

His 2018 lectures are also available on youtube and seem pretty good so far if anyone wants a complement to the book. The course website also has lecture notes and exercises.

To me, at least, it seems clear that you should not take the opportunities to reduce your torture sentence. After all, if you repeatedly decide to take them, you will end up with a 0.5 chance of being highly uncomfortable and a 0.5 chance of being tortured for 3^^^^3 years. This seems like a really bad lottery, and worse than the one that lets me have a 0.5 chance of having an okay life.

FWIW, this conclusion is not clear to me. To return to one of my original points: I don't think you can dodge this objection by arguing from potentially idiosyncratic prefe... (read more)

So, I don't think your concern about keeping utility functions bounded is unwarranted; I'm just noting that they are part of a broader issue with aggregate consequentialism, not just with my ethical system.

Agreed!

you just need to make it so the supremum of them their value is 1 and the infimum is 0.

Fair. Intuitively though, this feels more like a rescaling of an underlying satisfaction measure than a plausible definition of satisfaction to me. That said, if you're a preferentist, I accept this is internally consistent, and likely an improvement on alternative versions of preferentism.    

One issue with only having boundedness above is that is that the expected of life satisfaction for an arbitrary agent would probably often be undefined or $-\infty$ in

In an infinite universe, there's already infinitely-many people, so I don't think this applies to my infinite ethical system.

YMMV, but FWIW allowing a system of infinite ethics to get finite questions (which should just be a special case) wrong seems a very non-ideal property to me, and suggests something has gone wrong somewhere. Is it really never possible to reach a state where all remaining choices have only finite implications?

I'll clarify the measure of life satisfaction I had in mind. Imagine if you showed an agent finitely-many descriptions of situations they could end up being in, and asked the agent to pick out the worst and the best of all of them. Assign the worst scenario satisfaction 0 and the best scenario satisfaction 1.

Thanks. I've toyed with similar ideas perviously myself. The advantage, if this sort of thing works, is that it conveniently avoids a major issue with preference-based measures: that they're not unique and therefore incomparable across individuals. How... (read more)

Re boundedness:

It's important to note that the sufficiently terrible lives need to be really, really, really bad already. So much so that being horribly tortured for fifty years does almost exactly nothing to affect their overall satisfaction. For example, maybe they're already being tortured for more than 3^^^^3 years, so adding fifty more years does almost exactly nothing to their life satisfaction.

I realise now that I may have moved through a critical step of the argument quite quickly above, which may be why this quote doesn't seem to capture the core ... (read more)

Re the repugnant conclusion: apologies for the lazy/incorrect example. Let me try again with better illustrations of the same underlying point. To be clear, I am not suggesting these are knock-down arguments; just that, given widespread (non-infinitarian) rejection of average utilitarianisms, you probably want to think through whether your view suffers from the same issues and whether you are ok with that. 

Though there's a huge literature on all of this, a decent starting point is here:

However, the average view has very little support among moral phil

Fair point re use cases! My familiarity with DSGE models is about a decade out-of-date, so maybe things have improved, but a lot of the wariness then was that typical representative-agent DSGE isn't great where agent heterogeneity and interactions are important to the dynamics of the system, and/or agents fall significantly short of the rational expectations benchmark, and that in those cases you'd plausibly be better of using agent-based models (which has only become easier in the intervening period).

I (weakly) believe this is mainly because econometrists

My point was more that, even if you can calculate the expectation, standard versions of average utilitarianism are usually rejected for non-infinitarian reasons (e.g. the repugnant conclusion) that seem like they would plausibly carry over to this proposal as well. I haven't worked through the details though, so perhaps I'm wrong.

Separately, while I understand the technical reasons for imposing boundedness on the utility function, I think you probably also need a substantive argument for why boundedness makes sense, or at least is morally acceptable. Bound... (read more)

Worth noting that many economists (including e.g. Solow, Romer, Stiglitz among others) are pretty sceptical (to put it mildly) about the value of DSGE models (not without reason, IMHO). I don't want to suggest that the debate is settled one way or the other, but do think that the framing of the DSGE approach as the current state-of-the-art at least warrants a significant caveat emptor. Afraid I am too far from the cutting edge myself to have a more constructive suggestion though. 

This sounds essentially like average utilitarianism with bounded utility functions. Is that right? If so, have you considered the usual objections to average utilitarianism (in particular, re rankings over different populations)?

There is no value to a superconcept that crosses that boundary.

This doesn't seem to me to argue in favour of using wording that's associated with the (potentially illegitimate) superconcept to refer to one part of it. Also, the post you were responding to (conf)used both concepts of utility, so by that stage, they were already in the same discussion, even if they didn't belong there.

Two additional things, FWIW:

(1) There's a lot of existing literature that distinguishes between "decision utility" and "experienced utility" (where "... (read more)

I'm hesitant to get into a terminology argument when we're in substantive agreement. Nonetheless, I personally find your rhetorical approach here a little confusing. (Perhaps I am alone in that.)

Yes, it's annoying when people use the word 'fruit' to refer to both apples and oranges, and as a result confuse themselves into trying to derive propositions about oranges from the properties of apples. But I'd suggest that it's not the most useful response to this problem to insist on using the word 'fruit' to refer exclusively to apples, and to proceed to make c... (read more)

While I'm in broad agreement with you here, I'd nitpick on a few things.

Different utility functions are not commensurable.

Agree that decision-theoretic or VNM utility functions are not commensurable - they're merely mathematical representations of different individuals' preference orderings. But I worry that your language consistently ignores an older, and still entirely valid use of the utility concept. Other types of utility function (hedonic, or welfarist more broadly) may allow for interpersonal comparisons. (And unless you accept the possibility ... (read more)

Are you familiar with the debate between John Harsanyi and Amartya Sen on essentially this topic (which we've discussed ad nauseam before)? In response to an argument of Harsanyi's that purported to use the VNM axioms to justify utilitarianism, Sen reaches a conclusion that broadly aligns with your take on the issue.

If not, some useful references here.

ETA: I worry that I've unduly maligned Harsanyi by associating his argument too heavily with Phil's post. Although I still think it's wrong, Harsanyi's argument is rather more sophisticated than Phil's, and w... (read more)