Ah, great, I understand more now—the linchpin is the premise that what we really want, is to preserve order when we add another person. So what sort of premise would lead to average utilitarianism?
How about—order should be preserved if we shift the zero-point of our happiness measurement. That seems pretty common-sense. And yet it rules out total utilitarianism. (2,2,2) > (5), but (1,1,1) < (4).
Or maybe we could allow average utilitarianism just by weakening the premise—so that we want to preserve the ordering only if we add an average member.
How about—order should be preserved if we shift the zero-point of our happiness measurement. That seems pretty common-sense. And yet it rules out total utilitarianism. (2,2,2) > (5), but (1,1,1) < (4).
The usual definition of “zero-point” is “it doesn’t matter whether that person exists or not”. By that definition, there is no (universal) zero-point in average utilitarianism. (2,2,0) != (2,2) etc.
By the way, it’s true you can’t shift by a constant in total utilitarianism, but you can scale by a constant/
Ah, great, I understand more now—the linchpin is the premise that what we really want, is to preserve order when we add another person. So what sort of premise would lead to average utilitarianism?
How about—order should be preserved if we shift the zero-point of our happiness measurement. That seems pretty common-sense. And yet it rules out total utilitarianism. (2,2,2) > (5), but (1,1,1) < (4).
Or maybe we could allow average utilitarianism just by weakening the premise—so that we want to preserve the ordering only if we add an average member.
The usual definition of “zero-point” is “it doesn’t matter whether that person exists or not”. By that definition, there is no (universal) zero-point in average utilitarianism. (2,2,0) != (2,2) etc.
By the way, it’s true you can’t shift by a constant in total utilitarianism, but you can scale by a constant/