Look. Simple utilitarianism doesn’t have to be correct. It looks like a wrong idea to me. Often, when reasoning informally, people confabulate wrong formal sounding things that loosely match their intuitions. And then declare that normative.
Is a library of copies of one book worth the same to you? Is a library of books of 1 author worth as much? Does variety ever truly count for nothing? There’s no reason why u(“AB”) should be equal to u(“A”)+u(“B”). People pick + because they are bad at math , or perhaps bad at knowing when they are being bad at math. edit: When you try to math-ize your morality, poor knowledge of math serves as Orwellian newspeak, it defines the way you think. It is hard to choose correct function even if there was any, and years of practice on too simple problems make wrong functions pop into your head.
Look. Simple utilitarianism doesn’t have to be correct. It looks like a wrong idea to me. Often, when reasoning informally, people confabulate wrong formal sounding things that loosely match their intuitions. And then declare that normative.
Is a library of copies of one book worth the same to you? Is a library of books of 1 author worth as much? Does variety ever truly count for nothing? There’s no reason why u(“AB”) should be equal to u(“A”)+u(“B”). People pick + because they are bad at math , or perhaps bad at knowing when they are being bad at math. edit: When you try to math-ize your morality, poor knowledge of math serves as Orwellian newspeak, it defines the way you think. It is hard to choose correct function even if there was any, and years of practice on too simple problems make wrong functions pop into your head.
The lifespan dilemma applies to all unbounded utility functions combined with expected value maximization, it does not require simple utilitarianism.