Are you saying we should maximize the average utility of all humans, or of all sentient beings? The first one is incredibly parochial, but the second one implies that how many children we should have depends on the happiness of aliens on the other side of the universe, which is, at the very least, pretty weird.
Not having an ethical mandate to create new life might or might not be a good idea, but average utilitarianism doesn’t get you there. It just changes the criteria in bizarre ways.
Are you saying we should maximize the average utility of all humans, or of all sentient beings?
I’m not saying anything, at this point. I believe that the best population ethics is likely to be complicated, just as standard ethics are, and I haven’t fully settled on either yet.
Are you saying we should maximize the average utility of all humans, or of all sentient beings? The first one is incredibly parochial, but the second one implies that how many children we should have depends on the happiness of aliens on the other side of the universe, which is, at the very least, pretty weird.
Not having an ethical mandate to create new life might or might not be a good idea, but average utilitarianism doesn’t get you there. It just changes the criteria in bizarre ways.
I’m not saying anything, at this point. I believe that the best population ethics is likely to be complicated, just as standard ethics are, and I haven’t fully settled on either yet.