There seems to be some struggle here with defining u0 in a way that intuitively represents morality, so I'll take a jab at it. As I see it, u0 can be viewed as "the utlity debt of creating a life", that is to say the amount of utility a person has to generate over the course of their lifetime in order to morally justify their existence (with all of its effects on the UDNTs of others already accounted for in their calculation), reasonably assuming they get to live a full t0 life.
An intuitive (albeit extreme) proof of concept: Imagine a fetus ... (read more)
I think another good way to look at u0 that compliments yours is to look at it as the "penalty for dying with many preferences left unsatisfied." Pretty much everyone dies with some things that they wanted to do left undone. I think most people have a strong moral intuition that being unable to fulfill major life desires and projects is tragic, and think a major reason death is bad is that it makes us unable to do even more of what we want to do with our lives. I think we could have u0 represent that intuition.
If we go back to Peter Singer's original formulation of this topic, we can think of unsatisfied preferences as "debts" that are unpaid. So if we have a choice between creating two people who live x years, or 1 person who lives 2x years, assuming their total lifetime happiness is otherwise the same, we should prefer the one person for 2x years. This is because the two people living x years generate the same amount of happiness, but twice the amount of "debt" from unfulfilled preferences. Everyone will die with some unfulfilled preferences because everyone will always want more, and that's fine and part of being human.
Obviously we need to calibrate this idea delicately in order to avoid any counterintuitive conclusions. If we treat creating a preference as a "debt" and satisfying it as merely "paying the debt" to "break even" then we get anti-natalism. We need to treat the "debt" that creating a preference generates as an "investment" that can "pay off" by creating tremendous happiness/life satisfaction when it is satisfied, but occasionally fails to "pay off" if its satisfaction is thwarted by death or something else.
I think that this approach could also address Isnasene's question below of figuring out the -u0 penatly for nonhuman animals. Drawing from Singer again, since nonhuman animals are not mentally capable of having complex preferences for the future, they generate a smaller u0 penalty. The preferences that they die without having satisfie
There seems to be some struggle here with defining u0 in a way that intuitively represents morality, so I'll take a jab at it. As I see it, u0 can be viewed as "the utlity debt of creating a life", that is to say the amount of utility a person has to generate over the course of their lifetime in order to morally justify their existence (with all of its effects on the UDNTs of others already accounted for in their calculation), reasonably assuming they get to live a full t0 life.
An intuitive (albeit extreme) proof of concept: Imagine a fetus ... (read more)