Yes, this is a failure mode of (some forms of?) utilitarianism, but not the specific weirdness I was trying to get at, which was that if you aggregate by min(), then it’s completely morally OK to do very bad things to huge numbers of people—in fact, it’s no worse than radically improving huge numbers of lives—as long as you avoid affecting the one person who is worst-off. This is a very silly property for a moral system to have.
You can attempt to mitigate this property with too-clever objections, like “aha, but if you kill a happy person, then in the moment of their death they are temporarily the most unhappy person, so you have affected the metric after all”. I don’t think that actually works, but didn’t want it to obscure the point, so I picked “kill their dog” as an example, because it’s a clearly bad thing which definitely doesn’t bump anyone to the bottom.
Yes, this is a failure mode of (some forms of?) utilitarianism, but not the specific weirdness I was trying to get at, which was that if you aggregate by min(), then it’s completely morally OK to do very bad things to huge numbers of people—in fact, it’s no worse than radically improving huge numbers of lives—as long as you avoid affecting the one person who is worst-off. This is a very silly property for a moral system to have.
You can attempt to mitigate this property with too-clever objections, like “aha, but if you kill a happy person, then in the moment of their death they are temporarily the most unhappy person, so you have affected the metric after all”. I don’t think that actually works, but didn’t want it to obscure the point, so I picked “kill their dog” as an example, because it’s a clearly bad thing which definitely doesn’t bump anyone to the bottom.