I don’t understand why it’s supposed to be somehow better to have more people, even if they are equally happen. 10 billion happy people is better than 5 billion equally happy people? Why? It makes no intuitive sense to me, I have no innate preference between the two (all else equal), and yet I’m supposed to accept it as a premise.
Isn’t it usually brought up by people who want you to reject it as a premise, as an argument against hedonic positive utilitarianism?
Personally I do disagree with that premise and more generally with hedonic utilitarianism. My utility function is more like “choice” or “freedom” (an ideal world would be one where everyone can do whatever they want, and in a non-ideal one we should try to optimize to get as close to that as possible), so based on that I have no preference with regards to people who haven’t been born yet, since they’re incapable of choosing whether or not to be alive.
(on the other hand my intuition is that bringing dead people back would be good if it were possible… I suppose that if the dead person didn’t want to die at the moment of death, that would be compatible with my ideas, and I don’t think it’s that far off from my actual, intuitive reasons for feeling that way.)
I don’t understand why it’s supposed to be somehow better to have more people, even if they are equally happen. 10 billion happy people is better than 5 billion equally happy people? Why? It makes no intuitive sense to me, I have no innate preference between the two (all else equal), and yet I’m supposed to accept it as a premise.
It makes some sense in terms of total happiness, since 10 billion happy people would give a higher total happiness than 5 billion happy people.
Isn’t it usually brought up by people who want you to reject it as a premise, as an argument against hedonic positive utilitarianism?
Personally I do disagree with that premise and more generally with hedonic utilitarianism. My utility function is more like “choice” or “freedom” (an ideal world would be one where everyone can do whatever they want, and in a non-ideal one we should try to optimize to get as close to that as possible), so based on that I have no preference with regards to people who haven’t been born yet, since they’re incapable of choosing whether or not to be alive. (on the other hand my intuition is that bringing dead people back would be good if it were possible… I suppose that if the dead person didn’t want to die at the moment of death, that would be compatible with my ideas, and I don’t think it’s that far off from my actual, intuitive reasons for feeling that way.)