You’re making a lot of posts about these wacky utility functions that avoid the repugnant conclusion. What’s it all in aid of? The repugnant conclusion is not meant to be a general counterargument to utilitarianism, it’s an argument against total utilitarianism specifically. There are many, many utility functions that avoid the repugnant conclusion. Please explain why this particular one is interesting.
It is also worth noting that average utilitarianism has also its share of problems: killing off anyone with below-maximum utility is an improvement. Stuart Armstrong’s proposed aggregation function has essentially the same problem, since while it disincentivizes reducing the number of people, it doesn’t disincentivizes it much at any significant population level.
BTW: all flavors of utilitarianism suffer from the fact that there is no known satisfactory way of comparing the utility of different people. Without interpersonal utility comparison, the point is moot.
average utilitarianism [...] killing off anyone with below-maximum utility is an improvement.
This is true insofar as it can be performed without creating significant disutility for their above-average-utility neighbors, and not otherwise. A community that would suffer greatly due to the deaths of half the people around them would not necessarily have its average utility increased by that operation.
Without interpersonal utility comparison, the point is moot.
True. Actually, it’s worse than that… we don’t even have a way to compare an individual’s utility over time with any level of precision, though we talk casually as though we did. (If we had such an intertemporal utility comparison, then we could for example declare that the highest-utility state each individual has achieved in their lifetime is 1 unit of utility, and the lowest-utility state is 0 units, and interpolate linearly, recalibrating whenever an individual exceeds their previous maximum, and that would be one way of comparing interpersonal utilities at any given time. Of course, that might not be acceptable because it fails to account for the possibility that some individuals are just worth more than others, or for various other reasons, but it would at least be a place to start.)
Without that, utilitarianism is at best no more than a qualitative way to address ethical questions.
A community that would suffer greatly due to the deaths of half the people around them would not necessarily have its average utility increased by that operation.
You don’t have to kill off half of the population to increase average utility.
And I initially misunderstood your “killing off anyone with below-maximum utility” to mean “for all X with below-maximum utility, kill X” rather than “select some X with below-maximum utility and kill X,” sorry.
That said, if we’re talking about individual or small-group cases, the argument against average-utilitarianism no longer feels quite so intuitively cut-and-dried.
That is: if selecting one X experiencing low utility and killing X does not cause significant utility-decrease (e.g. suffering, grief, anxiety, having-one’s-memory-edited, etc.) among the survivors, I suspect quite a few people would more-or-less endorse X’s death if it leaves a larger share of available resources for them to enjoy. So arguing “this can’t possibly be a correct description of human morality because humans in fact reject it” is not quite so easy as in the kill-off-everyone-but-the-being-experiencing-highest-utility scenario (which humans reliably reject).
That being said, even in the one-corpse case, we can certainly counter that the people who endorse that are simply endorsing unethical/immoral behavior.
Well, consider some unlucky fellow without any significant family ties, without friends and without a job, living off government welfare. His death wouldn’t generate much negative externalities, in fact, the externalities would be mostly positive, since he would stop receiving welfare. Assume that you can compare personal utilities and it turns out that this guy has below-average utility. Would it be moral to kill him? Average utilitarianism says yes.
I suppose that the moral intuitions of most, though not all, people would be against killing him, at least not in a obvious way (some might be in favour of taking his welfare away and letting him starve to death, though, but I doubt that these kind of people use an utilitarian type of moral reasoning).
Would it be moral to kill him? Average utilitarianism says yes.
So would total utilitarianism, if his resources were reallocated to other people of more efficient happiness levels (or to new individuals brought into the world).
Assume that you can compare personal utilities and it turns out that this guy has below-average utility. [..] I suppose that the moral intuitions of most, though not all, people would be against killing him,
I understand why you say this, but I’m not quite sure I agree.
I mean, I certainly agree that most people, if asked that question in those terms, would say “of course not! killing this poor lonely friendless unemployed wretch would be wrong.”
But I’m less sure that most people, if placed in a situation where they express their revealed preferences without framing them explicitly, would make decisions that were consistent with that answer.
And if I actually worked out what “below-average utility” means in terms that make intuitive sense to people… e.g., how much is this fellow actually suffering on a daily basis?… I’m genuinely unsure what most people would say, even if asked explicitly. Especially if our mechanism for comparing personal utilities, unlike the one I proposed above, does not arbitrarily conclude that each individual’s lifetime maximum is equivalent for purposes of comparison, as I expect most people’s intuitions in fact don’t.
That said, I certainly agree with you that most of the people who are in favor of letting the hungry starve, etc., are not using any sort of aggregated utilitarian moral reasoning.
It is also worth noting that average utilitarianism has also its share of problems: killing off anyone with below-maximum utility is an improvement.
No it isn’t. This can be demonstrated fairly simply. Imagine a population consisting of 100 people. 99 of those people have great lives, 1 of those people has a mediocre one.
At the time you are considering doing the killing the person with the mediocre life, he has accumulated 25 utility. If you let him live he will accumulate 5 more utility. The 99 people with great lives will accumulate 100 utility over the course of their lifetimes.
If you kill the guy now average utility will be 99.25. If you let him live and accumulate 5 more utility average utility will be 99.3. A small, but definite improvement.
I think the mistake you’re making is that after you kill the person you divide by 99 instead of 100. But that’s absurd, why would someone stop counting as part of the average just because they’re dead? Once someone is added to the population they count as part of it forever.
It is also worth noting that average utilitarianism has also its share of problems: killing off anyone with below-maximum utility is an improvement.
It’s true that some sort of normalization assumption is needed to compare VNM utility between agents. But that doesn’t defeat utilitarianism, it just shows that you need to include a meta-moral obligation to make such an assumption (and to make sure that assumption is consistent with common human moral intuitions about how such assumptions should be made).
As it happens, I do interpersonal utility comparisons all the time in my day-to-day life using the mental capacity commonly referred to as “empathy.” The normalizing assumption I seem to be making is to assume that others people’s minds are similar to mine, and match their utility to mine on a one to one basis, doing tweaks as necessary if I observe that they value different things than I do.
It is also worth noting that average utilitarianism has also its share of problems: killing off anyone with below-maximum utility is an improvement.
If one averages across all time, the strong preference of people to not be killed would suffice to more than cancel the benefits of their non-participation in the future averages.
I don’t know what you mean by “average across time”. You typically discount across time. Anyway, utilitarianism is a form of consequentialism in that it assigns moral preferences to world states rather than transitions. Being killed is a transition in any description at any meaningful level of abstraction, hence you can’t assign an utility to it. If you do, then you have an essentially dentological ethics, not utilitarianism.
I don’t know what you mean by “average across time”
I mean calculating the average utility of the whole timeline, not of particular discrete moments in time.
An example. Let’s say we’re in the year 2020 and considering whether it’s cool to murder 7 billion people in order to let a person-of-maximum-utility lead an optimal life from 2021 onwards. By utility in this case I mean “satisfaction of preferences” (preference utilitarianism) rather than “happiness”.
If we do so, a calculation that treats 2020 and 2021 as separate “worlds” might say “If 7 billion people are killed, 2021 will have a much higher average utility than 2020, so we should do it in order to transit to the world of 2021″
But I’d calculate it differently: If 7 billion people are killed between 2020 and 2021, the people of 2020 have far less utility because they very strongly prefer to not be killed, and their killings would therefore grossly reduce the satisfaction of their preferences. Therefore the average utility in the timeline as a whole would be vastly reduced by their murders.
Anyway, utilitarianism is a form of consequentialism in that it assigns moral preferences to world states rather than transitions
One just needs treat ‘world-states’ 4-dimensionally, as ‘timeline-states’...
Rather than counting on other factors (people’s preferences) to avoid outcomes we feel are bad, I think it would be better to encode the badness of these outcomes directly.
You’re making a lot of posts about these wacky utility functions that avoid the repugnant conclusion. What’s it all in aid of? The repugnant conclusion is not meant to be a general counterargument to utilitarianism, it’s an argument against total utilitarianism specifically. There are many, many utility functions that avoid the repugnant conclusion. Please explain why this particular one is interesting.
It’s just an investigation around these issues—no real conclusion yet.
Indeed.
It is also worth noting that average utilitarianism has also its share of problems: killing off anyone with below-maximum utility is an improvement.
Stuart Armstrong’s proposed aggregation function has essentially the same problem, since while it disincentivizes reducing the number of people, it doesn’t disincentivizes it much at any significant population level.
BTW: all flavors of utilitarianism suffer from the fact that there is no known satisfactory way of comparing the utility of different people. Without interpersonal utility comparison, the point is moot.
This is true insofar as it can be performed without creating significant disutility for their above-average-utility neighbors, and not otherwise. A community that would suffer greatly due to the deaths of half the people around them would not necessarily have its average utility increased by that operation.
True. Actually, it’s worse than that… we don’t even have a way to compare an individual’s utility over time with any level of precision, though we talk casually as though we did. (If we had such an intertemporal utility comparison, then we could for example declare that the highest-utility state each individual has achieved in their lifetime is 1 unit of utility, and the lowest-utility state is 0 units, and interpolate linearly, recalibrating whenever an individual exceeds their previous maximum, and that would be one way of comparing interpersonal utilities at any given time. Of course, that might not be acceptable because it fails to account for the possibility that some individuals are just worth more than others, or for various other reasons, but it would at least be a place to start.)
Without that, utilitarianism is at best no more than a qualitative way to address ethical questions.
You don’t have to kill off half of the population to increase average utility.
Yup, that’s true.
And I initially misunderstood your “killing off anyone with below-maximum utility” to mean “for all X with below-maximum utility, kill X” rather than “select some X with below-maximum utility and kill X,” sorry.
That said, if we’re talking about individual or small-group cases, the argument against average-utilitarianism no longer feels quite so intuitively cut-and-dried.
That is: if selecting one X experiencing low utility and killing X does not cause significant utility-decrease (e.g. suffering, grief, anxiety, having-one’s-memory-edited, etc.) among the survivors, I suspect quite a few people would more-or-less endorse X’s death if it leaves a larger share of available resources for them to enjoy. So arguing “this can’t possibly be a correct description of human morality because humans in fact reject it” is not quite so easy as in the kill-off-everyone-but-the-being-experiencing-highest-utility scenario (which humans reliably reject).
That being said, even in the one-corpse case, we can certainly counter that the people who endorse that are simply endorsing unethical/immoral behavior.
Well, consider some unlucky fellow without any significant family ties, without friends and without a job, living off government welfare. His death wouldn’t generate much negative externalities, in fact, the externalities would be mostly positive, since he would stop receiving welfare.
Assume that you can compare personal utilities and it turns out that this guy has below-average utility. Would it be moral to kill him? Average utilitarianism says yes.
I suppose that the moral intuitions of most, though not all, people would be against killing him, at least not in a obvious way (some might be in favour of taking his welfare away and letting him starve to death, though, but I doubt that these kind of people use an utilitarian type of moral reasoning).
So would total utilitarianism, if his resources were reallocated to other people of more efficient happiness levels (or to new individuals brought into the world).
That’s why I’m not a fan of utilitarianism in its various forms.
You’ll get no argument from me there :-)
I understand why you say this, but I’m not quite sure I agree.
I mean, I certainly agree that most people, if asked that question in those terms, would say “of course not! killing this poor lonely friendless unemployed wretch would be wrong.”
But I’m less sure that most people, if placed in a situation where they express their revealed preferences without framing them explicitly, would make decisions that were consistent with that answer.
And if I actually worked out what “below-average utility” means in terms that make intuitive sense to people… e.g., how much is this fellow actually suffering on a daily basis?… I’m genuinely unsure what most people would say, even if asked explicitly. Especially if our mechanism for comparing personal utilities, unlike the one I proposed above, does not arbitrarily conclude that each individual’s lifetime maximum is equivalent for purposes of comparison, as I expect most people’s intuitions in fact don’t.
That said, I certainly agree with you that most of the people who are in favor of letting the hungry starve, etc., are not using any sort of aggregated utilitarian moral reasoning.
No it isn’t. This can be demonstrated fairly simply. Imagine a population consisting of 100 people. 99 of those people have great lives, 1 of those people has a mediocre one.
At the time you are considering doing the killing the person with the mediocre life, he has accumulated 25 utility. If you let him live he will accumulate 5 more utility. The 99 people with great lives will accumulate 100 utility over the course of their lifetimes.
If you kill the guy now average utility will be 99.25. If you let him live and accumulate 5 more utility average utility will be 99.3. A small, but definite improvement.
I think the mistake you’re making is that after you kill the person you divide by 99 instead of 100. But that’s absurd, why would someone stop counting as part of the average just because they’re dead? Once someone is added to the population they count as part of it forever.
It’s true that some sort of normalization assumption is needed to compare VNM utility between agents. But that doesn’t defeat utilitarianism, it just shows that you need to include a meta-moral obligation to make such an assumption (and to make sure that assumption is consistent with common human moral intuitions about how such assumptions should be made).
As it happens, I do interpersonal utility comparisons all the time in my day-to-day life using the mental capacity commonly referred to as “empathy.” The normalizing assumption I seem to be making is to assume that others people’s minds are similar to mine, and match their utility to mine on a one to one basis, doing tweaks as necessary if I observe that they value different things than I do.
If one averages across all time, the strong preference of people to not be killed would suffice to more than cancel the benefits of their non-participation in the future averages.
I don’t know what you mean by “average across time”. You typically discount across time.
Anyway, utilitarianism is a form of consequentialism in that it assigns moral preferences to world states rather than transitions. Being killed is a transition in any description at any meaningful level of abstraction, hence you can’t assign an utility to it. If you do, then you have an essentially dentological ethics, not utilitarianism.
I mean calculating the average utility of the whole timeline, not of particular discrete moments in time.
An example. Let’s say we’re in the year 2020 and considering whether it’s cool to murder 7 billion people in order to let a person-of-maximum-utility lead an optimal life from 2021 onwards. By utility in this case I mean “satisfaction of preferences” (preference utilitarianism) rather than “happiness”.
If we do so, a calculation that treats 2020 and 2021 as separate “worlds” might say “If 7 billion people are killed, 2021 will have a much higher average utility than 2020, so we should do it in order to transit to the world of 2021″
But I’d calculate it differently: If 7 billion people are killed between 2020 and 2021, the people of 2020 have far less utility because they very strongly prefer to not be killed, and their killings would therefore grossly reduce the satisfaction of their preferences. Therefore the average utility in the timeline as a whole would be vastly reduced by their murders.
One just needs treat ‘world-states’ 4-dimensionally, as ‘timeline-states’...
If you could genetically modify future humans to make them indifferent to being killed, would you do that, since it would facilitate the mass murder?
Rather than counting on other factors (people’s preferences) to avoid outcomes we feel are bad, I think it would be better to encode the badness of these outcomes directly.