EDIT: Mestroyer was the first one to find a bug that breaks this idea. Only took a couple of hours, that's ethics for you. :)
In the last Stupid Questions Thread, solipsist asked
Making a person and unmaking a person seem like utilitarian inverses, yet I don't think contraception is tantamount to murder. Why isn't making a person as good as killing a person is bad?
People raised valid points, such as ones about murder having generally bad effects on society, but most people probably have the intuition that murdering someone is bad even if the victim was a hermit whose death was never found out by anyone. It just occurred to me that the way to formalize this intuition would also solve more general problems with the way that the utility functions in utilitarianism (which I'll shorten to UFU from now on) behave.
Consider these commonly held intuitions:
- If a person is painlessly murdered and a new (equally happy) person is instantly created in their place, this is worse than if there was a single person who lived for the whole time.
- If a living person X is painlessly murdered at time T, then this is worse than if the X's parents had simply chosen not to have a child at time T-20, even though both acts would have resulted in X not existing at time T+1.
- If someone is physically dead, but not information-theoretically dead and a close enough replica of them can be constructed and brought back, then bringing them back is better than creating an entirely new person.
That's true, but note that if e.g. 20 billion people have died up to this point, then that penalty of -20 billion gets applied equally to every possibly future state, so it won't alter the relative ordering of those states. So the fact that we're getting an infinite amount of disutility from people who are already dead isn't a problem.
Though now that you point it out, it is a problem that, under this model, creating a person who you don't expect to live forever has a very high (potentially infinite) disutility. Yeah, that breaks this suggestion. Only took a couple of hours, that's ethics for you. :)
That's an interesting idea, but it wasn't what I had in mind. As you point out, there are some pretty bad problems with that model.
Oddly enough, right before I noticed this thread I posted a question about this on the Stupid Questions Thread.
My question, however, was whether this problem applies to all forms of negative preferences utilitarianism. I don't know what the answer is. I wonder if SisterY or one of the o... (read more)