The other comments are correct. This does not mean that the goodness or badness involved in creating people does not add together. It simply means that when you create someone, you need to take into account the fact that you have created a person, not only the torture, while in the first case you have to take into account only the torture, since the people are already there.
As I said in my edit: the purpose of this post is simply to show that there is a difference between certain reasoning for already existing and potential people. I don’t argue that aggregation is the only difference, nor (in this post) that total utilitarianism for potential people is wrong. Simply that the case for existing people is stronger than for potential people.
The other comments are correct. This does not mean that the goodness or badness involved in creating people does not add together. It simply means that when you create someone, you need to take into account the fact that you have created a person, not only the torture, while in the first case you have to take into account only the torture, since the people are already there.
As I said in my edit: the purpose of this post is simply to show that there is a difference between certain reasoning for already existing and potential people. I don’t argue that aggregation is the only difference, nor (in this post) that total utilitarianism for potential people is wrong. Simply that the case for existing people is stronger than for potential people.