Imagine 10 equally happy people, all exactly alike. Now imagine 10 equally happy people, all different. The latter feels more valuable to me, and I think to many others as well.
But their life does seem equally valuable to themselves, so it isn’t clear why external evaluations should matter here. Imagine we can either rescue 11 equal people or 10 different people. The equal people would argue that they should be rescued because they are one more.
Are the 11 equal people like a single person who lives 11 times as long as normal and repeats the same experience 11 times while each time forgetting everything that happened before? Arguably no, because the single person would neither want to have amnesia nor repeating experiences, similar to how we wouldn’t want to unknowingly die during sleep. But the 11 people are probably not bothered much by the existence of their copies.
To me it actually feels plausible that identical people might value themselves less. If there are 100 identical people and 1 different person, the identical ones might prefer saving the different one rather than one of their own. But maybe not everyone has that intuition.
Equally happy is very different from identical experiences. 11 non-diverging copies of a person is (IMO) more like one person with especially intense qualia. 11 superficially-similar people are probably not actually “the same” enough to start with declining marginal utility.
But their life does seem equally valuable to themselves, so it isn’t clear why external evaluations should matter here. Imagine we can either rescue 11 equal people or 10 different people. The equal people would argue that they should be rescued because they are one more.
Are the 11 equal people like a single person who lives 11 times as long as normal and repeats the same experience 11 times while each time forgetting everything that happened before? Arguably no, because the single person would neither want to have amnesia nor repeating experiences, similar to how we wouldn’t want to unknowingly die during sleep. But the 11 people are probably not bothered much by the existence of their copies.
To me it actually feels plausible that identical people might value themselves less. If there are 100 identical people and 1 different person, the identical ones might prefer saving the different one rather than one of their own. But maybe not everyone has that intuition.
Equally happy is very different from identical experiences. 11 non-diverging copies of a person is (IMO) more like one person with especially intense qualia. 11 superficially-similar people are probably not actually “the same” enough to start with declining marginal utility.