But the important (and moral) question here is “how do we count the people for utility purposes.” We also need a normative way to aggregate their utilities, and one vote per person would need to be justified separately.
This scenario actually gives us a guideline for aggregating utilities. We need to prevent Dr. Evil from counting more than once.
One proposal is to count people by different hours of experience, so that if I’ve had 300,000 hours of experience, and my clone has one hour that’s different, it counts as 1⁄300,000 of a person. But if we go by hours of experience, we have the problem that with enough clones, Dr. Evil can amass enough hours to overwhelm Earth’s current population (giving ten trillion clones each one unique hour of experience should do it).
So this indicates that we need to look at the utility functions. If two entities have the same utility function, they should be counted as the same entity, no matter what different experiences they have. This way, the only way Dr. Evil will be able to aggregate enough utility is to change the utility function of his clones, and then they won’t all want to do something evil. Something like using a convergent series for the utility of any one goal might work: if Dr. Evil wants to destroy the world, his clone’s desire to do so counts for 1⁄10 of that, and the next clone’s desire counts for 1⁄100, so he can’t accumulate more than 10⁄9 of his original utility weight.
But the important (and moral) question here is “how do we count the people for utility purposes.” We also need a normative way to aggregate their utilities, and one vote per person would need to be justified separately.
This scenario actually gives us a guideline for aggregating utilities. We need to prevent Dr. Evil from counting more than once.
One proposal is to count people by different hours of experience, so that if I’ve had 300,000 hours of experience, and my clone has one hour that’s different, it counts as 1⁄300,000 of a person. But if we go by hours of experience, we have the problem that with enough clones, Dr. Evil can amass enough hours to overwhelm Earth’s current population (giving ten trillion clones each one unique hour of experience should do it).
So this indicates that we need to look at the utility functions. If two entities have the same utility function, they should be counted as the same entity, no matter what different experiences they have. This way, the only way Dr. Evil will be able to aggregate enough utility is to change the utility function of his clones, and then they won’t all want to do something evil. Something like using a convergent series for the utility of any one goal might work: if Dr. Evil wants to destroy the world, his clone’s desire to do so counts for 1⁄10 of that, and the next clone’s desire counts for 1⁄100, so he can’t accumulate more than 10⁄9 of his original utility weight.