Average utilitarianism implies the Sadistic Conclusion: if average welfare is very negative, then this rule calls for creating beings with lives of torture not worth living as long as those lives are even slightly better than the average. This helps no one and harms particular individuals.
Frankly, if the only flaw in that moral theory is that it comes to a weird answer in a world that is already a universally horrible hellscape for all sentient beings, then I don’t see that as a huge problem in it.
In any case, I’m not sure that’s the wrong answer anyway. If every generation is able to improve the lives of the next generation, and keep moving the average utility in a positive direction, then the species is heading in the right direction, and likely would be better off in the long run then if they just committed mass suicide (like additive utilitarian theory might suggest). For that matter, there’s a subjective aspect to utility; a medieval peasant farmer might be quite happy if he is 10% better off then all of his neighbors.
I think you’re on the right track. I believe that a small population with high utility per capita is better than a large one with low utility per capita, even if the total utility is larger in the small population. But I think tying that moral intuition to the average utility of the population might be the wrong way to go about it, if only because it creates problems like the one CarlShuman mentioned.
I think a better route might be to somehow attach a negative number to the addition of more people after a certain point, or something like that. Or you can add a caveat that basically says for the system to act like total utilitarianism while the average is negative, and average when it’s positive.
Btw, in your original post you mention that we’d need a caveat to stop people from killing existing people to raise the average. A simple solution to that would be to continue to count people in the average even after they are dead.
Average utilitarianism implies the Sadistic Conclusion: if average welfare is very negative, then this rule calls for creating beings with lives of torture not worth living as long as those lives are even slightly better than the average.
That’s not the Sadistic Conclusion, that’s something else. I think Michael Huemer called it the “Hell Conclusion.” It is a valid criticism of average utilitarianism, whatever it’s called. Like you, I reject the Hell Conclusion.
The Sadistic Conclusion is the conclusion that, if adding more people with positive welfare to the world is bad, it might be better to do some other bad thing then to add more people with positive welfare. Arrhenius gives as an example, adding one person of negative welfare instead of a huge amount of people with positive welfare. But really it could be anything. You could also harm (or refuse to help) existing people to avoid creating more people.
I accept the Sadistic Conclusion wholeheartedly. I harm myself in all sorts of ways in order to avoid adding more people to the world. For instance, I spend money on condoms instead of on candy, abstain from sex when I don’t have contraceptives, and other such things. Most other people seem to accept the SC as well. I think the only reason it seems counterintuitive is that Arrhenius used a particularly nasty and vivid example of it that invoked our scope insensitivity.
More exactly, Ng’s theory implies the “Sadistic Conclusion” (Arrhenius 2000a,b): For any number of lives with any negative welfare (e.g. tormented lives), there are situations in which it would be better to add these lives rather than some number of lives with positive welfare
There are two different reasons why these population principles state that it might be preferable to add lives of negative welfare. The first, which I referred to as the “Hell Conclusion,” is that a principle that values average welfare might consider it good to add lives with negative welfare in a situation where average welfare is negative, because doing so would up the average. The second, which I referred to as the “Sadistic Conclusion,” states that, if adding lives with positive welfare can sometimes be bad, then adding a smaller amount of lives with negative welfare might sometimes be less bad.
I am pretty sure I have my terminology straight. I am pretty sure that the “Sadistic Conclusion” the page you linked to is referring to is the second reason, not the first. That being said, your original argument is entirely valid. Adding tormented lives to raise the average is bad, regardless of you refer to it as the “Sadistic Conclusion” or the “Hell Conclusion.” I consider it a solid argument against naive and simple formulations of average utilitarianism.
What I refer to as the Sadistic Conclusion differs from the Hell Conclusion in a number of ways, however. Under the Hell Conclusion adding tormented lives is better than adding nobody, providing the tormented lives are slightly less tormented than average. Under the Sadistic Conclusion adding tormented lives is still a very bad thing, it just may be less bad than adding a huge amount of positive lives.
We should definitely reject the Hell Conclusion, but the Sadistic Conclusion seems correct to me. Like I said, people harm themselves all the time in order to avoid having children. All the traditional form of the SC does is concentrate all that harm into one person, instead of spreading it out among a lot of people. It still considers adding negative lives to be a bad thing, just sometimes less bad than adding vast amounts of positive lives.
Average utilitarianism implies the Sadistic Conclusion: if average welfare is very negative, then this rule calls for creating beings with lives of torture not worth living as long as those lives are even slightly better than the average. This helps no one and harms particular individuals.
It’s discussed in the SEP article.
Frankly, if the only flaw in that moral theory is that it comes to a weird answer in a world that is already a universally horrible hellscape for all sentient beings, then I don’t see that as a huge problem in it.
In any case, I’m not sure that’s the wrong answer anyway. If every generation is able to improve the lives of the next generation, and keep moving the average utility in a positive direction, then the species is heading in the right direction, and likely would be better off in the long run then if they just committed mass suicide (like additive utilitarian theory might suggest). For that matter, there’s a subjective aspect to utility; a medieval peasant farmer might be quite happy if he is 10% better off then all of his neighbors.
I think you’re on the right track. I believe that a small population with high utility per capita is better than a large one with low utility per capita, even if the total utility is larger in the small population. But I think tying that moral intuition to the average utility of the population might be the wrong way to go about it, if only because it creates problems like the one CarlShuman mentioned.
I think a better route might be to somehow attach a negative number to the addition of more people after a certain point, or something like that. Or you can add a caveat that basically says for the system to act like total utilitarianism while the average is negative, and average when it’s positive.
Btw, in your original post you mention that we’d need a caveat to stop people from killing existing people to raise the average. A simple solution to that would be to continue to count people in the average even after they are dead.
That’s not the Sadistic Conclusion, that’s something else. I think Michael Huemer called it the “Hell Conclusion.” It is a valid criticism of average utilitarianism, whatever it’s called. Like you, I reject the Hell Conclusion.
The Sadistic Conclusion is the conclusion that, if adding more people with positive welfare to the world is bad, it might be better to do some other bad thing then to add more people with positive welfare. Arrhenius gives as an example, adding one person of negative welfare instead of a huge amount of people with positive welfare. But really it could be anything. You could also harm (or refuse to help) existing people to avoid creating more people.
I accept the Sadistic Conclusion wholeheartedly. I harm myself in all sorts of ways in order to avoid adding more people to the world. For instance, I spend money on condoms instead of on candy, abstain from sex when I don’t have contraceptives, and other such things. Most other people seem to accept the SC as well. I think the only reason it seems counterintuitive is that Arrhenius used a particularly nasty and vivid example of it that invoked our scope insensitivity.
SEP:
There are two different reasons why these population principles state that it might be preferable to add lives of negative welfare. The first, which I referred to as the “Hell Conclusion,” is that a principle that values average welfare might consider it good to add lives with negative welfare in a situation where average welfare is negative, because doing so would up the average. The second, which I referred to as the “Sadistic Conclusion,” states that, if adding lives with positive welfare can sometimes be bad, then adding a smaller amount of lives with negative welfare might sometimes be less bad.
I am pretty sure I have my terminology straight. I am pretty sure that the “Sadistic Conclusion” the page you linked to is referring to is the second reason, not the first. That being said, your original argument is entirely valid. Adding tormented lives to raise the average is bad, regardless of you refer to it as the “Sadistic Conclusion” or the “Hell Conclusion.” I consider it a solid argument against naive and simple formulations of average utilitarianism.
What I refer to as the Sadistic Conclusion differs from the Hell Conclusion in a number of ways, however. Under the Hell Conclusion adding tormented lives is better than adding nobody, providing the tormented lives are slightly less tormented than average. Under the Sadistic Conclusion adding tormented lives is still a very bad thing, it just may be less bad than adding a huge amount of positive lives.
We should definitely reject the Hell Conclusion, but the Sadistic Conclusion seems correct to me. Like I said, people harm themselves all the time in order to avoid having children. All the traditional form of the SC does is concentrate all that harm into one person, instead of spreading it out among a lot of people. It still considers adding negative lives to be a bad thing, just sometimes less bad than adding vast amounts of positive lives.