Seems to me there are a few meaningful possibilities here.
The first is that diversity actually is something we value. If so, then trading away all of our diversity in exchange for more years of life (or of simulated life, or whatever) for one individual is a mistake, and our intuition that there’s something wrong with doing that can be justified on utilitarian grounds, and there’s no paradox.
The second is that diversity actually isn’t something we value. If so, then trading away all of our diversity for more years of life (etc) is not a mistake, and our intuition that there’s something wrong with doing that is simply false on utilitarian grounds (just like many of our other intuitions are false), and there’s still no paradox.
It certainly seems to me that diversity is something I value, so I lean towards the former. But I can imagine being convinced that this is just a cached judgment and not actually something I really value on reflection.
Of course, if it turns out that there’s some objective judge of value in the world, such that it might turn out that we don’t value diversity but that it’s still wrong to trade it all away, or that we do value diversity but it turns out the right thing to do is nevertheless to trade it all away, then there would be a problem. But I don’t think that idea is worth taking seriously.
Another possibility is that some of us value it and some of us don’t. In which case we ultimately will get some sort of negotiation between the groups over how the drug/emulator/whatever is used. But this will be a negotiation between opposed groups, not a moral argument. (Though of course uttering moral arguments can certainly be part of a negotiation.)
Seems to me there are a few meaningful possibilities here.
The first is that diversity actually is something we value. If so, then trading away all of our diversity in exchange for more years of life (or of simulated life, or whatever) for one individual is a mistake, and our intuition that there’s something wrong with doing that can be justified on utilitarian grounds, and there’s no paradox.
The second is that diversity actually isn’t something we value. If so, then trading away all of our diversity for more years of life (etc) is not a mistake, and our intuition that there’s something wrong with doing that is simply false on utilitarian grounds (just like many of our other intuitions are false), and there’s still no paradox.
It certainly seems to me that diversity is something I value, so I lean towards the former. But I can imagine being convinced that this is just a cached judgment and not actually something I really value on reflection.
Of course, if it turns out that there’s some objective judge of value in the world, such that it might turn out that we don’t value diversity but that it’s still wrong to trade it all away, or that we do value diversity but it turns out the right thing to do is nevertheless to trade it all away, then there would be a problem. But I don’t think that idea is worth taking seriously.
Another possibility is that some of us value it and some of us don’t. In which case we ultimately will get some sort of negotiation between the groups over how the drug/emulator/whatever is used. But this will be a negotiation between opposed groups, not a moral argument. (Though of course uttering moral arguments can certainly be part of a negotiation.)