That raises another question—do we count average utility by people, or by duration? Is utility averaged over persons, or person-hours? In such a case, how would we compare the utilities of long-lived and short-lived people? Should we be more willing to harm the long-lived person, because the experience is a relatively small slice of their average utility, or treat both the long-lived and short-lived equally, as if both of their hours were of equal value?
We should count by people. We should add up all the utility we predict each person will experience over their whole lifetime, and then divide by the number of people there are.
If we don’t do this we get weird suggestions like (as you said) we should be more willing to harm the long-lived.
Also, we need to add another patch: If the average utility is highly negative (say −50) it is not good to add a miserable person with a horrible life that is slightly above the average (say a person with a utility of −45). That will technically raise the average, but is still obviously bad. Only adding people with positive lifetime utility is good (and not always even then), adding someone with negative utility is always bad.
No. Our goal is to make people have much more happiness than sadness in their lives, not no sadness at all. I’ve done things that make me moderately sad because they will later make me extremely happy.
In more formal terms, suppose that sadness is measured in negative utilons, and happiness in utilons. Suppose I am a happy person who will have 50 utilons. The only other person on Earth is a sad person with −10 utilons. The average utility is then 20 utilons.
Suppose I help the sad person. I endure −5 utilons of sadness in order to give the sad person 20 utilons of happiness. I now have 45 utilons, the sad person has 10. Now the average utility is 27.5. A definite improvement.
If someone’s entire future will contain nothing but negative utility they aren’t just “sad.” They’re living a life so tortured and horrible that they would literally wish they were dead.
Your mental picture of that situation is wrong, you shouldn’t be thinking of executing an innocent person for the horrible crime of being sad. You should be thinking of a cancer patient ravaged by disease whose every moment is agony, and who is begging you to kill them and end their suffering. Both total and average utilitarianism agree that honoring their request and killing them is the right thing to do.
Of course, helping the tortured person recover, so that their future is full of positive utility instead of negative, is much much better than killing them.
Possibly I was placing the zero point between positive and negative higher than you. I don’t see sadness as merely a low positive but a negative. But then I’m not using averages anyway, so I guess that may cover the difference between us.
I definitely consider the experience of sadness a negative. But just because someone is having something negative happen to them at the moment does not mean their entire utility at the moment is negative.
To make an analogy, imagine I am at the movie theater watching a really good movie, but also really have to pee. Having to pee is painful, it is an experience I consider negative and I want it to stop. But I don’t leave the movie to go to the bathroom. Why? Because I am also enjoying the movie, and that more than balances out the pain.
This is especially relevant if you consider that humans value many other things than emotional states. To name a fairly mundane instance, I’ve sometimes watched bad movies I did not enjoy, and that made me angry, because they were part of a body of work that I wanted to view in its complete form. I did not enjoy watching Halloween 5 or 6, I knew I would not enjoy them ahead of time, but I watched them anyway because that is what I wanted to do.
To be honest, I’m not even sure if it’s meaningful to try to measure someone’s exact utility at the moment, out of relation to their whole life. It seems like there are lots of instances where the exact time of a utility and disutility are hard to place.
For instance, imagine a museum employee who spends the last years of their life restoring paintings, so that people can enjoy them in the future. Shortly after they die, vandals destroy the paintings. This has certainly made the deceased museum employee’s life worse, it retroactively made their efforts futile. But was the disutility inflicted after their death? Was the act of restoring the paintings a disutility that they mistakenly believed was a utility?
It’s meaningful to say “this is good for someone” or “this is bad for someone,” but I don’t think you can necessarily treat goodness and badness like some sort of river whose level can be measured at any given time. I think you have to take whole events and timelessly add them up.
Considering timelessly, should it not also disprove helping the least happy, because they will always have been sad?
That raises another question—do we count average utility by people, or by duration? Is utility averaged over persons, or person-hours? In such a case, how would we compare the utilities of long-lived and short-lived people? Should we be more willing to harm the long-lived person, because the experience is a relatively small slice of their average utility, or treat both the long-lived and short-lived equally, as if both of their hours were of equal value?
We should count by people. We should add up all the utility we predict each person will experience over their whole lifetime, and then divide by the number of people there are.
If we don’t do this we get weird suggestions like (as you said) we should be more willing to harm the long-lived.
Also, we need to add another patch: If the average utility is highly negative (say −50) it is not good to add a miserable person with a horrible life that is slightly above the average (say a person with a utility of −45). That will technically raise the average, but is still obviously bad. Only adding people with positive lifetime utility is good (and not always even then), adding someone with negative utility is always bad.
No. Our goal is to make people have much more happiness than sadness in their lives, not no sadness at all. I’ve done things that make me moderately sad because they will later make me extremely happy.
In more formal terms, suppose that sadness is measured in negative utilons, and happiness in utilons. Suppose I am a happy person who will have 50 utilons. The only other person on Earth is a sad person with −10 utilons. The average utility is then 20 utilons.
Suppose I help the sad person. I endure −5 utilons of sadness in order to give the sad person 20 utilons of happiness. I now have 45 utilons, the sad person has 10. Now the average utility is 27.5. A definite improvement.
But then you kill sad people to get “neutral happiness” …
If someone’s entire future will contain nothing but negative utility they aren’t just “sad.” They’re living a life so tortured and horrible that they would literally wish they were dead.
Your mental picture of that situation is wrong, you shouldn’t be thinking of executing an innocent person for the horrible crime of being sad. You should be thinking of a cancer patient ravaged by disease whose every moment is agony, and who is begging you to kill them and end their suffering. Both total and average utilitarianism agree that honoring their request and killing them is the right thing to do.
Of course, helping the tortured person recover, so that their future is full of positive utility instead of negative, is much much better than killing them.
Possibly I was placing the zero point between positive and negative higher than you. I don’t see sadness as merely a low positive but a negative. But then I’m not using averages anyway, so I guess that may cover the difference between us.
I definitely consider the experience of sadness a negative. But just because someone is having something negative happen to them at the moment does not mean their entire utility at the moment is negative.
To make an analogy, imagine I am at the movie theater watching a really good movie, but also really have to pee. Having to pee is painful, it is an experience I consider negative and I want it to stop. But I don’t leave the movie to go to the bathroom. Why? Because I am also enjoying the movie, and that more than balances out the pain.
This is especially relevant if you consider that humans value many other things than emotional states. To name a fairly mundane instance, I’ve sometimes watched bad movies I did not enjoy, and that made me angry, because they were part of a body of work that I wanted to view in its complete form. I did not enjoy watching Halloween 5 or 6, I knew I would not enjoy them ahead of time, but I watched them anyway because that is what I wanted to do.
To be honest, I’m not even sure if it’s meaningful to try to measure someone’s exact utility at the moment, out of relation to their whole life. It seems like there are lots of instances where the exact time of a utility and disutility are hard to place.
For instance, imagine a museum employee who spends the last years of their life restoring paintings, so that people can enjoy them in the future. Shortly after they die, vandals destroy the paintings. This has certainly made the deceased museum employee’s life worse, it retroactively made their efforts futile. But was the disutility inflicted after their death? Was the act of restoring the paintings a disutility that they mistakenly believed was a utility?
It’s meaningful to say “this is good for someone” or “this is bad for someone,” but I don’t think you can necessarily treat goodness and badness like some sort of river whose level can be measured at any given time. I think you have to take whole events and timelessly add them up.