It seems that you could use this to argue that nobody ever ought to be born unless we can ensure that they’ll never die (assuming they stay dead, as people tend to do now).
I bite this bullet to an extent, but I don’t think the argument that strong. If someone has a better-than-average life before they die, they can still raise the average, especially if everyone else dies too. I’m not sure how to model that easily; I’m thinking of something like: the utility of a world is the integral of all the utilities of everyone in it (all the utility anyone ever experiences), divided by the number of people who ever existed. In this framework, I think it would be permissible to create a mortal person in some circumstances, but they might be too rare to be plausible.
It seems that you could use this to argue that nobody ever ought to be born unless we can ensure that they’ll never die (assuming they stay dead, as people tend to do now).
I bite this bullet to an extent, but I don’t think the argument that strong. If someone has a better-than-average life before they die, they can still raise the average, especially if everyone else dies too. I’m not sure how to model that easily; I’m thinking of something like: the utility of a world is the integral of all the utilities of everyone in it (all the utility anyone ever experiences), divided by the number of people who ever existed. In this framework, I think it would be permissible to create a mortal person in some circumstances, but they might be too rare to be plausible.