What amount of disutility does creating a new person generate in Negative Preference Utilitarian ethics?
I need to elaborate in order to explain exactly what question I am asking: I’ve been studying various forms of ethics, and when I was studying Negative Preference Utilitarianism (or anti-natalism, as I believe it’s often also called) I came across what seems like a huge, titanic flaw that seems to destroy the entire system.
The flaw is this: The goal of negative preference utilitarianism is to prevent the existence of unsatisfied preferences. This means that negative preference utilitarians are opposed to having children, as doing so will create more unsatisfied preferences. And they are opposed to people dying under normal circumstances, because someone’s death will prevent them from satisfying their existing preferences.
So what happens when you create someone who is going to die, and has an unbounded utility function? The amount of preferences they have is essentially infinite, does that mean that if such a person is created it is impossible to do any more harm, since an infinite amount of unsatisfied preferences have just been created? Does that mean that we should be willing to torture everyone on Earth for a thousand years if doing so will prevent the creation of such a person?
The problem doesn’t go away if you assume humans have bounded utility functions. Suppose we have a bounded utility function, so living an infinite number of years, or a googolplex number of years, is equivalent to living a mere hundred billion years for us. That still means that creating someone who will live a normal 70 year lifespan is a titanic harm, a harm that everyone alive on Earth today should be willing to die to prevent it, as it would create 99,999,999,930 years worth of unsatisfied preferences!
My question is, how do negative preference utilitarians deal with this? The ones I’ve encountered online make an effort to avoid having children, but they don’t devote every waking minute of their lives to it. And I don’t think akrasia is the cause, because I’ve heard some of them admit that it would be acceptable to have a child if doing so reduced the preference frustration/suffering of a very large amount of existing people.
So with that introduction out of the way, my questions, on a basic level are:
How much suffering/preference frustration would an antinatalist be willing to inflict on existing people in order to prevent a birth? How much suffering/preference frustration would a birth have to stop in order for it to be justified? For simplicity’s sake, let’s assume the child who is born has a normal middle class life in a 1st world country with no exceptional bodily or mental health problems.
How exactly did they go about calculating the answer to question 1?
There has to be some answer to this question, there wouldn’t be whole communities of anti-natalists online if their ideology could be defeated with a simple logic problem.
(To the extent that I’m negative utilitarian, I’m a hedonistic negative utilitarian, so I can’t speak for the preference NUs, but...)
So what happens when you create someone who is going to die, and has an unbounded utility function?
Note that every utilitarian system breaks once you introduce even the possibility of infinities. E.g. a hedonistic total utilitarian will similarly run into the problem that, if you assume that a child has the potential to live for an infinite amount of time, then the child can be expected to experience both an infinite amount of pleasure and an infinite amount of suffering. Infinity minus infinity is undefined, so hedonistic total utilitarianism would be incapable of assigning a value to the act of having a child. Now saving lives is in this sense equivalent to having a child, so the value every action that has even a remote chance of saving someone’s life becomes undefined as well...
A bounded utility function does help matters, but then everything depends on how exactly it’s bounded, and why one has chosen those particular parameters.
The ones I’ve encountered online make an effort to avoid having children, but they don’t devote every waking minute of their lives to it.
I take it you mean to say that they don’t spend all of their waking hours convincing other people not to have children, since it doesn’t take that much effort to avoid having children yourself. One possible answer is that loudly advocating “you shouldn’t have children, it’s literally infinitely bad” is a horrible PR strategy that will just get your movement discredited, and e.g. talking about NU in the abstract and letting people piece the full implications themselves may be more effective.
Also, are they all transhumanists? For the typical person (or possibly even typical philosopher), infinite lifespans being a plausible possibility might not even occur as something that needs to be taken into account.
How much suffering/preference frustration would an antinatalist be willing to inflict on existing people in order to prevent a birth? How much suffering/preference frustration would a birth have to stop in order for it to be justified? For simplicity’s sake, let’s assume the child who is born has a normal middle class life in a 1st world country with no exceptional bodily or mental health problems.
Does any utilitarian system have a good answer to questions like these? If you ask a total utilitarian something like “how much morning rush-hour frustration would you be willing to inflict to people in order to prevent an hour of intense torture, and how exactly did you go about calculating the answer to that question”, you’re probably not going to get a very satisfying answer, either.
A bounded utility function does help matters, but then everything depends on how exactly it’s bounded, and why one has chosen those particular parameters.
Yes, and that is my precise point. Even if we assume a bounded utility function for human preferences, I think it’s reasonable assume that it’s a pretty huge function. Which means that antinatalism/negative preference utilitarianism would be willing to inflict massive suffering on existing people to prevent the birth of one person who would have a better life than anyone on Earth has ever had up to this point, but still die with a lot of unfulfilled desires. I find this massively counter-intuitive and want to know how the antinatalist community addresses this.
I take it you mean to say that they don’t spend all of their waking hours convincing other people not to have children, since it doesn’t take that much effort to avoid having children yourself.
If the disutility they assign to having children is big enough they should still spend every waking hour doing something about it. What if some maniac kidnaps them and forces them to have a child? The odds of that happening are incredibly small, but they certainly aren’t zero. If they really assign such a giant negative to having a child they should try to guard even against tiny possibilities like that.
Also, are they all transhumanists? For the typical person (or possibly even typical philosopher), infinite lifespans being a plausible possibility might not even occur as something that needs to be taken into account
Yes, but from a preference utilitarian standpoint it doesn’t need to actually be possible to live forever. It just has to be something that you want.
Does any utilitarian system have a good answer to questions like these? If you ask a total utilitarian something like “how much morning rush-hour frustration would you be willing to inflict to people in order to prevent an hour of intense torture, and how exactly did you go about calculating the answer to that question”, you’re probably not going to get a very satisfying answer, either.
Well, of course I’m not expecting an exact answer. But a ballpark would be nice. Something like “no more than x, no less than y.” I think, for instance, that a total utilitarian could at least say something like “no less than a thousand rush hour frustrations, no more than a million.”
Which means that antinatalism/negative preference utilitarianism would be willing to inflict massive suffering on existing people to prevent the birth of one person who would have a better life than anyone on Earth has ever had up to this point, but still die with a lot of unfulfilled desires.
Is that really how preference utilitarianism works? I’m very unfamiliar with it, but intuitively I would have assumed that the preferences in question wouldn’t be all the preferences that the agent’s value system could logically be thought to imply, but rather something like the consciously held goals at some given moment. Otherwise total preference utilitarianism would seem to reduce to negative preference utilitarianism as well, since presumably the unsatisfied preferences would always outnumber the satisfied ones.
Yes, but from a preference utilitarian standpoint it doesn’t need to actually be possible to live forever. It just has to be something that you want.
I’m confused. How is wanting to live forever in a situation where you don’t think that living forever is possible, different from any other unsatisfiable preference?
If the disutility they assign to having children is big enough they should still spend every waking hour doing something about it. What if some maniac kidnaps them and forces them to have a child? The odds of that happening are incredibly small, but they certainly aren’t zero. If they really assign such a giant negative to having a child they should try to guard even against tiny possibilities like that.
That doesn’t sound right. The disutility is huge, yes, but the probability is so low that focusing your efforts on practically anything with a non-negligible chance of preventing further births would be expected to prevent many times more disutility. Like supporting projects aimed at promoting family planning and contraception in developing countries, pro-choice policies and attitudes in your own country, rape prevention efforts to the extent that you think rape causes unwanted pregnancies that are nonetheless carried to term, anti-natalism in general (if you think you can do it in a way that avoids the PR disaster for NU in general), even general economic growth if you believe that the connection between richer countries and smaller families is a causal and linear one. Worrying about vanishingly low-probability scenarios, when that worry takes up cognitive cycles and thus reduces your chances of doing things that could have an even bigger impact, does not maximize expected utility.
I think, for instance, that a total utilitarian could at least say something like “no less than a thousand rush hour frustrations, no more than a million.”
I don’t know. At least I personally find it very difficult to compare experiences of such differing magnitudes. Someone could come up with a number, but that feels like trying to play baseball with verbal probabilities—the number that they name might not have anything to do with what they’d actually choose in that situation.
I’m very unfamiliar with it, but intuitively I would have assumed that the preferences in question wouldn’t be all the preferences that the agent’s value system could logically be thought to imply, but rather something like the consciously held goals at some given moment
I don’t think that would be the case. The main intuitive advantage negative preference utilitarianism has over negative hedonic utilitarianism is that it considers death to be a bad thing, because it results in unsatisfied preferences. If it only counted immediate consciously held goals it might consider death a good thing, since it would prevent an agent from developing additional unsatisfied preferences in the future.
However, you are probably onto something by suggesting some method of limiting which unsatisfied preferences count as negative. “What a person is thinking about at any given moment” has the problems I pointed out earlier, but another formulation could well work better.
Otherwise total preference utilitarianism would seem to reduce to negative preference utilitarianism as well, since presumably the unsatisfied preferences would always outnumber the satisfied ones.
I believe Total Preference Utilitarianism typically avoids this by regarding the creation of at most types of unsatisfied preferences as neutral rather than negative. While there are some preferences whose dissatisfaction typically counts as negative, such as the preference not to be tortured, most preference creations are neutral. I believe that under TPU, if a person spends the majority of their life not preferring to be dead then their life is considered positive no matter how many unsatisfied preferences they have.
At least I personally find it very difficult to compare experiences of such differing magnitudes.
I feel like I could try to get some sort of ballpark by figuring how much I’m willing to pay to avoid each thing. For instance, if I had an agonizing migraine I knew would last all evening, and had a choice between paying for an instant cure pill, or a device that would magically let me avoid traffic for the next two months, I’d probably put up with the migraine.
I’d be hesitant to generalize across the whole population, however, because I’ve noticed that I don’t seem to mind pain as much as other people, but find boredom far more frustrating than average.
Speaking personally, I don’t negatively weigh non-aversive sensory experiences. That is to say, the billions of years of unsatisfied preferences are only important for that small subset of humans for whom knowing about the losses causes suffering. Death is bad and causes negative experiences. I want to solve death before we have more kids, but I recognize this isn’t realistic. It’s worth pointing out that negative utilitarianism is incoherent. Prioritarianism makes slightly more sense.
Speaking personally, I don’t negatively weigh non-aversive sensory experiences. That is to say, the billions of years of unsatisfied preferences are only important for that small subset of humans for whom knowing about the losses causes suffering.
If I understand you correctly, the problem with doing this with negative utilitarianism is that it suggests we should painlessly kill everyone ASAP. The advantage of negative preference utilitarianism is that it avoids this because people have a preference to keep on living that killing would thwart.
It’s worth pointing out that negative utilitarianism is incoherent.
Why? For the reason I pointed out, or for a different one? I’m not a negative utilitarian personally, but I think a few aspects of it have promise and would like to see them sorted out.
What amount of disutility does creating a new person generate in Negative Preference Utilitarian ethics?
I need to elaborate in order to explain exactly what question I am asking: I’ve been studying various forms of ethics, and when I was studying Negative Preference Utilitarianism (or anti-natalism, as I believe it’s often also called) I came across what seems like a huge, titanic flaw that seems to destroy the entire system.
The flaw is this: The goal of negative preference utilitarianism is to prevent the existence of unsatisfied preferences. This means that negative preference utilitarians are opposed to having children, as doing so will create more unsatisfied preferences. And they are opposed to people dying under normal circumstances, because someone’s death will prevent them from satisfying their existing preferences.
So what happens when you create someone who is going to die, and has an unbounded utility function? The amount of preferences they have is essentially infinite, does that mean that if such a person is created it is impossible to do any more harm, since an infinite amount of unsatisfied preferences have just been created? Does that mean that we should be willing to torture everyone on Earth for a thousand years if doing so will prevent the creation of such a person?
The problem doesn’t go away if you assume humans have bounded utility functions. Suppose we have a bounded utility function, so living an infinite number of years, or a googolplex number of years, is equivalent to living a mere hundred billion years for us. That still means that creating someone who will live a normal 70 year lifespan is a titanic harm, a harm that everyone alive on Earth today should be willing to die to prevent it, as it would create 99,999,999,930 years worth of unsatisfied preferences!
My question is, how do negative preference utilitarians deal with this? The ones I’ve encountered online make an effort to avoid having children, but they don’t devote every waking minute of their lives to it. And I don’t think akrasia is the cause, because I’ve heard some of them admit that it would be acceptable to have a child if doing so reduced the preference frustration/suffering of a very large amount of existing people.
So with that introduction out of the way, my questions, on a basic level are:
How much suffering/preference frustration would an antinatalist be willing to inflict on existing people in order to prevent a birth? How much suffering/preference frustration would a birth have to stop in order for it to be justified? For simplicity’s sake, let’s assume the child who is born has a normal middle class life in a 1st world country with no exceptional bodily or mental health problems.
How exactly did they go about calculating the answer to question 1?
There has to be some answer to this question, there wouldn’t be whole communities of anti-natalists online if their ideology could be defeated with a simple logic problem.
(To the extent that I’m negative utilitarian, I’m a hedonistic negative utilitarian, so I can’t speak for the preference NUs, but...)
Note that every utilitarian system breaks once you introduce even the possibility of infinities. E.g. a hedonistic total utilitarian will similarly run into the problem that, if you assume that a child has the potential to live for an infinite amount of time, then the child can be expected to experience both an infinite amount of pleasure and an infinite amount of suffering. Infinity minus infinity is undefined, so hedonistic total utilitarianism would be incapable of assigning a value to the act of having a child. Now saving lives is in this sense equivalent to having a child, so the value every action that has even a remote chance of saving someone’s life becomes undefined as well...
A bounded utility function does help matters, but then everything depends on how exactly it’s bounded, and why one has chosen those particular parameters.
I take it you mean to say that they don’t spend all of their waking hours convincing other people not to have children, since it doesn’t take that much effort to avoid having children yourself. One possible answer is that loudly advocating “you shouldn’t have children, it’s literally infinitely bad” is a horrible PR strategy that will just get your movement discredited, and e.g. talking about NU in the abstract and letting people piece the full implications themselves may be more effective.
Also, are they all transhumanists? For the typical person (or possibly even typical philosopher), infinite lifespans being a plausible possibility might not even occur as something that needs to be taken into account.
Does any utilitarian system have a good answer to questions like these? If you ask a total utilitarian something like “how much morning rush-hour frustration would you be willing to inflict to people in order to prevent an hour of intense torture, and how exactly did you go about calculating the answer to that question”, you’re probably not going to get a very satisfying answer, either.
Yes, and that is my precise point. Even if we assume a bounded utility function for human preferences, I think it’s reasonable assume that it’s a pretty huge function. Which means that antinatalism/negative preference utilitarianism would be willing to inflict massive suffering on existing people to prevent the birth of one person who would have a better life than anyone on Earth has ever had up to this point, but still die with a lot of unfulfilled desires. I find this massively counter-intuitive and want to know how the antinatalist community addresses this.
If the disutility they assign to having children is big enough they should still spend every waking hour doing something about it. What if some maniac kidnaps them and forces them to have a child? The odds of that happening are incredibly small, but they certainly aren’t zero. If they really assign such a giant negative to having a child they should try to guard even against tiny possibilities like that.
Yes, but from a preference utilitarian standpoint it doesn’t need to actually be possible to live forever. It just has to be something that you want.
Well, of course I’m not expecting an exact answer. But a ballpark would be nice. Something like “no more than x, no less than y.” I think, for instance, that a total utilitarian could at least say something like “no less than a thousand rush hour frustrations, no more than a million.”
Is that really how preference utilitarianism works? I’m very unfamiliar with it, but intuitively I would have assumed that the preferences in question wouldn’t be all the preferences that the agent’s value system could logically be thought to imply, but rather something like the consciously held goals at some given moment. Otherwise total preference utilitarianism would seem to reduce to negative preference utilitarianism as well, since presumably the unsatisfied preferences would always outnumber the satisfied ones.
I’m confused. How is wanting to live forever in a situation where you don’t think that living forever is possible, different from any other unsatisfiable preference?
That doesn’t sound right. The disutility is huge, yes, but the probability is so low that focusing your efforts on practically anything with a non-negligible chance of preventing further births would be expected to prevent many times more disutility. Like supporting projects aimed at promoting family planning and contraception in developing countries, pro-choice policies and attitudes in your own country, rape prevention efforts to the extent that you think rape causes unwanted pregnancies that are nonetheless carried to term, anti-natalism in general (if you think you can do it in a way that avoids the PR disaster for NU in general), even general economic growth if you believe that the connection between richer countries and smaller families is a causal and linear one. Worrying about vanishingly low-probability scenarios, when that worry takes up cognitive cycles and thus reduces your chances of doing things that could have an even bigger impact, does not maximize expected utility.
I don’t know. At least I personally find it very difficult to compare experiences of such differing magnitudes. Someone could come up with a number, but that feels like trying to play baseball with verbal probabilities—the number that they name might not have anything to do with what they’d actually choose in that situation.
I don’t think that would be the case. The main intuitive advantage negative preference utilitarianism has over negative hedonic utilitarianism is that it considers death to be a bad thing, because it results in unsatisfied preferences. If it only counted immediate consciously held goals it might consider death a good thing, since it would prevent an agent from developing additional unsatisfied preferences in the future.
However, you are probably onto something by suggesting some method of limiting which unsatisfied preferences count as negative. “What a person is thinking about at any given moment” has the problems I pointed out earlier, but another formulation could well work better.
I believe Total Preference Utilitarianism typically avoids this by regarding the creation of at most types of unsatisfied preferences as neutral rather than negative. While there are some preferences whose dissatisfaction typically counts as negative, such as the preference not to be tortured, most preference creations are neutral. I believe that under TPU, if a person spends the majority of their life not preferring to be dead then their life is considered positive no matter how many unsatisfied preferences they have.
I feel like I could try to get some sort of ballpark by figuring how much I’m willing to pay to avoid each thing. For instance, if I had an agonizing migraine I knew would last all evening, and had a choice between paying for an instant cure pill, or a device that would magically let me avoid traffic for the next two months, I’d probably put up with the migraine.
I’d be hesitant to generalize across the whole population, however, because I’ve noticed that I don’t seem to mind pain as much as other people, but find boredom far more frustrating than average.
Speaking personally, I don’t negatively weigh non-aversive sensory experiences. That is to say, the billions of years of unsatisfied preferences are only important for that small subset of humans for whom knowing about the losses causes suffering. Death is bad and causes negative experiences. I want to solve death before we have more kids, but I recognize this isn’t realistic. It’s worth pointing out that negative utilitarianism is incoherent. Prioritarianism makes slightly more sense.
If I understand you correctly, the problem with doing this with negative utilitarianism is that it suggests we should painlessly kill everyone ASAP. The advantage of negative preference utilitarianism is that it avoids this because people have a preference to keep on living that killing would thwart.
Why? For the reason I pointed out, or for a different one? I’m not a negative utilitarian personally, but I think a few aspects of it have promise and would like to see them sorted out.