1) I don’t find utility monsters hugely counter-intuitive for total util. If you replace the standard utility monster with something like “extremely efficient simulation of many consciousnesses”, then converting all our inefficient fleshy beings into a much greater number of (lets say) similarly happy other beings seems a good deal to me. The bite of a utility monster case to mean seems to arise mainly out of the fact we are choosing between one really happy being versus lots of not-so-happy beings.
2) Diminishing marginal returns with lifespan don’t strike me as absurd—indeed, they strike me as obvious. A priori, there seem empirical reasons to think in the very long run added lifespan will add less value, as you will do the most important/fun things first, and so extra increments of life will add elements of less value. Perhaps more persuasive is it does capture why we are (generally) risk averse with respect to lifetime gambles (certainty of 20 more years, or half chance at 40?) If marginal returns from lifespan were increasing, then implies we should be risk seeking on these gambles, which seems wrong.
My first reply to you focused on point number 2. But in retrospect, I’ve realized that your point 1 has utterly horrifying implications.
I don’t find utility monsters hugely counter-intuitive for total util. If you replace the standard utility monster with something like “extremely efficient simulation of many consciousnesses”, then converting all our inefficient fleshy beings into a much greater number of (lets say) similarly happy other beings seems a good deal to me.
If you want a more grounded form of the utility monster thought experiment there’s no need to invoke futuristic technology. You need only consider the many disutility monsters who actually exist right now, in real life. The world is full of handicapped people whose disabilities make their lives harder than normal, but still worth living. If I am not mistaken the ethical theory you are proposing would recommend killing all of them and replacing them by conceiving new healthy people.
Any ethical theory that suggests we ought to kill handicapped people (who are leading worthwhile lives) and replace them with healthy people has totally failed at being an ethical theory [1].
When people have severe health problems or disabilities we do not kill them and use the money we save to pay some young couple to conceive a replacement. We take care of them. True, we don’t devote all the resources we possibly can to caring for them but we still try harder than one would expect when taking the total view.
Why do we do this? I’d suspect it would be because people’s ethics are more in line with prioritarianism than utilitarianism. Helping the least well off is good even if they are bad at converting resources into utility. Helping the least well off might not have infinite value, there might be some sufficiently huge amount of regular utility that could override it. But it is really, really important.
And no, “not existing” does not count as a form of being “least well off.” Human beings who exist have desires and feelings. They have future-directed preferences. If they die they cannot be replaced. Nonexistant people do not have these properties. If they ever do come into existence they will, so it makes sense to make sure the future will be a good place for future people. But since nonexistant people are replaceable it makes sense to sometimes not create them for the sake of those who already do exist.
Now, you might rightly point out that while people seem to favor “prior existance” or “person affecting” viewpoints like this, there is a certain point after which they stop. For instance, most people would find it bad if the human race went extinct in the future, even if its extinction benefited existing people. What that suggests to me is that having a decent amount of worthwhile lives in existence is an important value for people, but one that has diminishing returns relative to other values. Preventing the human race from going extinct is a good thing, but once you’ve assured a decent amount of people will exist other things become important.
I think that this establishes at least three different values in play, which have diminishing returns relative to each other:
Amount of utility (I am unsure whether that is total or average. It may be some combo of both).
Prioritarianism, (I am unsure as to whether that is traditional prioritarianism, or whether something like Amartya Sen’s “capabilities approach” is better).
Number of worthwhile lives (I’m not sure whether having a large number of worthwhile lives is literally what is valuable, or if what is actually valuable is things like love, friendship, diversity, etc. that can only be achieved by having large amounts of worthwhile lives. I suspect the later).
This ethical system can explain why people are willing to not create new people in order to benefit existing people in situations where the population is large, but would not do so if it would cause the human race to go extinct. It can explain why people feel we should still share resources even in “utility monster” scenarios. And it explains why it is bad to kill handicapped people.
(1]. I know Peter Singer has gained some notoriety for suggesting it might be acceptable to kill handicapped infants. However, his argument was based on the idea that the infants had not matured enough to attain personhood yet, not on the idea that it’s okay to kill a fully developed person and replace them with someone who might enjoy their life slightly more. Your ethical theory would endorse killing fully grown adult people with normal cognitive skills merely because they possess some physical disability or health problem.
A priori, there seem empirical reasons to think in the very long run added lifespan will add less value, as you will do the most important/fun things first, and so extra increments of life will add elements of less value
I think a more obvious reason is that your risk of developing a health problem that kills you or destroys your quality of life increases as you age. I think an implicit part of the dilemma is that these risks are largely eliminated. I also think that society is currently pretty good at generating new fun and important things to do. Maybe in the very long run it’ll run out of steam, but I think adding decades or centuries of healthy years would be about as fun as your first few years of life.
Plus suggesting that lifespan has diminishing marginal returns has the rather unpleasant implication that at some point you’d get more utility by killing someone and replacing them with someone new (who will live the same amount of time as the dead person would have lived), which seems very wrong.
Perhaps more persuasive is it does capture why we are (generally) risk averse with respect to lifetime gambles (certainty of 20 more years, or half chance at 40?)
It seems more likely to me that this is due to the Endowment Effect. I don’t know if this is a bias or if it just means that risk aversion with your life is a terminal value.
I think you’ll agree that even if lifespan does have diminishing returns, it probably has smaller diminishing returns (past a certain point) than money. Yet people take insanely stupid risks to get huge amounts of money. Maybe that means that risk aversion isn’t 100% correlated with diminishing marginal utility.
If marginal returns from lifespan were increasing, then implies we should be risk seeking on these gambles, which seems wrong.
I don’t think they’re increasing, I think they’re fairly constant. I think that if you add another 20 years to someone’s life, then, providing they are healthy years and other factors like income and social connectedness stay constant, they will probably produce about the same amount of utility as the previous 20 years would have. In spite of this, I agree with you that it seems wrong to be risk-seeking, but I don’t know why. Maybe the endowment effect again.
1) I don’t find utility monsters hugely counter-intuitive for total util. If you replace the standard utility monster with something like “extremely efficient simulation of many consciousnesses”, then converting all our inefficient fleshy beings into a much greater number of (lets say) similarly happy other beings seems a good deal to me. The bite of a utility monster case to mean seems to arise mainly out of the fact we are choosing between one really happy being versus lots of not-so-happy beings.
2) Diminishing marginal returns with lifespan don’t strike me as absurd—indeed, they strike me as obvious. A priori, there seem empirical reasons to think in the very long run added lifespan will add less value, as you will do the most important/fun things first, and so extra increments of life will add elements of less value. Perhaps more persuasive is it does capture why we are (generally) risk averse with respect to lifetime gambles (certainty of 20 more years, or half chance at 40?) If marginal returns from lifespan were increasing, then implies we should be risk seeking on these gambles, which seems wrong.
My first reply to you focused on point number 2. But in retrospect, I’ve realized that your point 1 has utterly horrifying implications.
If you want a more grounded form of the utility monster thought experiment there’s no need to invoke futuristic technology. You need only consider the many disutility monsters who actually exist right now, in real life. The world is full of handicapped people whose disabilities make their lives harder than normal, but still worth living. If I am not mistaken the ethical theory you are proposing would recommend killing all of them and replacing them by conceiving new healthy people.
Any ethical theory that suggests we ought to kill handicapped people (who are leading worthwhile lives) and replace them with healthy people has totally failed at being an ethical theory [1].
When people have severe health problems or disabilities we do not kill them and use the money we save to pay some young couple to conceive a replacement. We take care of them. True, we don’t devote all the resources we possibly can to caring for them but we still try harder than one would expect when taking the total view.
Why do we do this? I’d suspect it would be because people’s ethics are more in line with prioritarianism than utilitarianism. Helping the least well off is good even if they are bad at converting resources into utility. Helping the least well off might not have infinite value, there might be some sufficiently huge amount of regular utility that could override it. But it is really, really important.
And no, “not existing” does not count as a form of being “least well off.” Human beings who exist have desires and feelings. They have future-directed preferences. If they die they cannot be replaced. Nonexistant people do not have these properties. If they ever do come into existence they will, so it makes sense to make sure the future will be a good place for future people. But since nonexistant people are replaceable it makes sense to sometimes not create them for the sake of those who already do exist.
Now, you might rightly point out that while people seem to favor “prior existance” or “person affecting” viewpoints like this, there is a certain point after which they stop. For instance, most people would find it bad if the human race went extinct in the future, even if its extinction benefited existing people. What that suggests to me is that having a decent amount of worthwhile lives in existence is an important value for people, but one that has diminishing returns relative to other values. Preventing the human race from going extinct is a good thing, but once you’ve assured a decent amount of people will exist other things become important.
I think that this establishes at least three different values in play, which have diminishing returns relative to each other:
Amount of utility (I am unsure whether that is total or average. It may be some combo of both).
Prioritarianism, (I am unsure as to whether that is traditional prioritarianism, or whether something like Amartya Sen’s “capabilities approach” is better).
Number of worthwhile lives (I’m not sure whether having a large number of worthwhile lives is literally what is valuable, or if what is actually valuable is things like love, friendship, diversity, etc. that can only be achieved by having large amounts of worthwhile lives. I suspect the later).
This ethical system can explain why people are willing to not create new people in order to benefit existing people in situations where the population is large, but would not do so if it would cause the human race to go extinct. It can explain why people feel we should still share resources even in “utility monster” scenarios. And it explains why it is bad to kill handicapped people.
(1]. I know Peter Singer has gained some notoriety for suggesting it might be acceptable to kill handicapped infants. However, his argument was based on the idea that the infants had not matured enough to attain personhood yet, not on the idea that it’s okay to kill a fully developed person and replace them with someone who might enjoy their life slightly more. Your ethical theory would endorse killing fully grown adult people with normal cognitive skills merely because they possess some physical disability or health problem.
I think a more obvious reason is that your risk of developing a health problem that kills you or destroys your quality of life increases as you age. I think an implicit part of the dilemma is that these risks are largely eliminated. I also think that society is currently pretty good at generating new fun and important things to do. Maybe in the very long run it’ll run out of steam, but I think adding decades or centuries of healthy years would be about as fun as your first few years of life.
Plus suggesting that lifespan has diminishing marginal returns has the rather unpleasant implication that at some point you’d get more utility by killing someone and replacing them with someone new (who will live the same amount of time as the dead person would have lived), which seems very wrong.
It seems more likely to me that this is due to the Endowment Effect. I don’t know if this is a bias or if it just means that risk aversion with your life is a terminal value.
I think you’ll agree that even if lifespan does have diminishing returns, it probably has smaller diminishing returns (past a certain point) than money. Yet people take insanely stupid risks to get huge amounts of money. Maybe that means that risk aversion isn’t 100% correlated with diminishing marginal utility.
I don’t think they’re increasing, I think they’re fairly constant. I think that if you add another 20 years to someone’s life, then, providing they are healthy years and other factors like income and social connectedness stay constant, they will probably produce about the same amount of utility as the previous 20 years would have. In spite of this, I agree with you that it seems wrong to be risk-seeking, but I don’t know why. Maybe the endowment effect again.