If we don’t allow potential people to carry weight, and if we are preference rather than hedonic utilitarians, then the only thing we are checking when deciding to create all these new people is whether or not existing people would prefer to do so.
That’s Peter Singer’s view, prior-existence instead of total. A problem here seems to be that creating a being in intense suffering would be ethically neutral, and if even the slightest preference for doing so exists, and if there were no resource trade-offs in regard to other preferences, then creating that miserable being would be the right thing to do. One can argue that in the first millisecond after creating the miserable being, one would be obliged to kill it, and that, foreseeing this, one ought not have created it in the first place. But that seems not very elegant. And one could further imagine creating the being somewhere unreachable, where it’s impossible to kill it afterwards.
One can avoid this conclusion by axiomatically stating that it is bad to bring into existence a being with a “life not worth living”. But that still leaves problems, for one thing, it seems ad hoc, and for another, it would then not matter whether one brings a happy child into existence or one with a neutral life, and that again seems highly counterintuitive.
The only way to solve this, as I see it, is to count all unsatisfied preferences negatively. You’d end up with negative total preference-utiltiarianism, which usually has quite strong reasons against bringing beings into existence. Depending on how much pre-existing beings want to have children, it wouldn’t necessarily entail complete anti-natalism, but the overall goal would at some point be a universe without unsatisfied preferences. Or is there another way out?
The only way to solve this, as I see it, is to count all unsatisfied preferences negatively. You’d end up with negative total preference-utiltiarianism, which usually has quite strong reasons against bringing beings into existence.
A potential major problem with this approach has occurred to me, namely, the fact that people tend to have infinite or near infinite preferences. We always want more. I don’t see anything wrong with that, but it does create headaches for the ethical system under discussion.
The human race’s insatiable desires makes negative total preference-utilitarianism vulnerable to an interesting variant of the various problems of infinity in ethics. Once you’ve created a person, who then dies, it is impossible to do any more harm. There’s already an infinite amount of unsatisfied preferences in the world from their existence and death. Creating more people will result in the same total amount of unsatisfied preferences as before: infinity. This would render negative utilitarianism as always indifferent to whether one should create more people, obviously not what we want.
Even if you posit that our preferences are not infinite, but merely very large, this still runs into problems. I think most people, even anti-natalists, would agree that it is sometimes acceptable to create a new person in order to prevent the suffering of existing people. For instance, I think even an antinatalist would be willing to create one person who will live a life with what an upper-class 21st Century American would consider a “normal” amount of suffering, if doing so would prevent 7 billion people from being tortured for 50 years. But if you posit that the new person has a very large, but not infinite amount of preferences (say, a googol) then it’s still possible for the badness of creating them to outweigh the torture of all those people. Again, not what we want.
Hedonic negative utilitarianism doesn’t have this problem, but it’s even worse, it implies we should painlessly kill everyone ASAP! Since most antinatalists I know believe death to be a negative thing, rather than a neutral thing, they must be at least partial preference utilitarians.
Now, I’m sure that negative utilitarians have some way around this problem. There wouldn’t be so many passionate advocates for it if it could be killed by a logical conundrum like this. But I can’t find any discussion of this problem after doing some searching on the topic. I’m really curious to know what the proposed solution is, and would appreciate it if someone told me.
Sure, existing people tend to have such preferences. But hypothetically it’s possible that they didn’t, and the mere possibility is enough to bring down an ethical theory if you can show that it would generate absurd results.
One possibility might be phrasing it as “Maximize preference satisfaction for everyone who exists and ever will exist, but not for everyone who could possibly exist..”
This captures the intuition that it is bad to create people who have low levels of preference satisfaction, even if they don’t exist yet and hence can’t object to being created, while preserving the belief that existing people have a right to not create new people whose existence would seriously interfere with their desires. It does this without implying anti-natalism. I admit that the phrasing is a little clunky and needs refinement, and I’m sure a clever enough UFAI could find some way to screw it up, but I think it’s a big step towards resolving the issues you point out.
EDIT: Another possibility that I thought of is setting “creating new worthwhile lives” and “improving already worthwhile lives” as two separate values that have diminishing returns relative to each other. This is still vulnerable to some forms of repugant-conclusion type arguments, but it totally eliminates what I think is the most repugnant aspect of the RC—the idea that a Malthusian society might be morally optimal.
Thank you. Apparently total utilitarianism really is scary, and I had routed around it by replacing it with something more useable and assuming that was what everyone else meant when they said “total utilitarianism”.
That’s Peter Singer’s view, prior-existence instead of total. A problem here seems to be that creating a being in intense suffering would be ethically neutral, and if even the slightest preference for doing so exists, and if there were no resource trade-offs in regard to other preferences, then creating that miserable being would be the right thing to do. One can argue that in the first millisecond after creating the miserable being, one would be obliged to kill it, and that, foreseeing this, one ought not have created it in the first place. But that seems not very elegant. And one could further imagine creating the being somewhere unreachable, where it’s impossible to kill it afterwards.
One can avoid this conclusion by axiomatically stating that it is bad to bring into existence a being with a “life not worth living”. But that still leaves problems, for one thing, it seems ad hoc, and for another, it would then not matter whether one brings a happy child into existence or one with a neutral life, and that again seems highly counterintuitive.
The only way to solve this, as I see it, is to count all unsatisfied preferences negatively. You’d end up with negative total preference-utiltiarianism, which usually has quite strong reasons against bringing beings into existence. Depending on how much pre-existing beings want to have children, it wouldn’t necessarily entail complete anti-natalism, but the overall goal would at some point be a universe without unsatisfied preferences. Or is there another way out?
A potential major problem with this approach has occurred to me, namely, the fact that people tend to have infinite or near infinite preferences. We always want more. I don’t see anything wrong with that, but it does create headaches for the ethical system under discussion.
The human race’s insatiable desires makes negative total preference-utilitarianism vulnerable to an interesting variant of the various problems of infinity in ethics. Once you’ve created a person, who then dies, it is impossible to do any more harm. There’s already an infinite amount of unsatisfied preferences in the world from their existence and death. Creating more people will result in the same total amount of unsatisfied preferences as before: infinity. This would render negative utilitarianism as always indifferent to whether one should create more people, obviously not what we want.
Even if you posit that our preferences are not infinite, but merely very large, this still runs into problems. I think most people, even anti-natalists, would agree that it is sometimes acceptable to create a new person in order to prevent the suffering of existing people. For instance, I think even an antinatalist would be willing to create one person who will live a life with what an upper-class 21st Century American would consider a “normal” amount of suffering, if doing so would prevent 7 billion people from being tortured for 50 years. But if you posit that the new person has a very large, but not infinite amount of preferences (say, a googol) then it’s still possible for the badness of creating them to outweigh the torture of all those people. Again, not what we want.
Hedonic negative utilitarianism doesn’t have this problem, but it’s even worse, it implies we should painlessly kill everyone ASAP! Since most antinatalists I know believe death to be a negative thing, rather than a neutral thing, they must be at least partial preference utilitarians.
Now, I’m sure that negative utilitarians have some way around this problem. There wouldn’t be so many passionate advocates for it if it could be killed by a logical conundrum like this. But I can’t find any discussion of this problem after doing some searching on the topic. I’m really curious to know what the proposed solution is, and would appreciate it if someone told me.
Well don’t existing people have a preference about there not being such creatures? You can have preferences that are about other people, right?
Sure, existing people tend to have such preferences. But hypothetically it’s possible that they didn’t, and the mere possibility is enough to bring down an ethical theory if you can show that it would generate absurd results.
This might be one reason why Eliezer talks about morality as a fixed computation.
P.S. Also, doesn’t the being itself have a preference for not-suffering?
One possibility might be phrasing it as “Maximize preference satisfaction for everyone who exists and ever will exist, but not for everyone who could possibly exist..”
This captures the intuition that it is bad to create people who have low levels of preference satisfaction, even if they don’t exist yet and hence can’t object to being created, while preserving the belief that existing people have a right to not create new people whose existence would seriously interfere with their desires. It does this without implying anti-natalism. I admit that the phrasing is a little clunky and needs refinement, and I’m sure a clever enough UFAI could find some way to screw it up, but I think it’s a big step towards resolving the issues you point out.
EDIT: Another possibility that I thought of is setting “creating new worthwhile lives” and “improving already worthwhile lives” as two separate values that have diminishing returns relative to each other. This is still vulnerable to some forms of repugant-conclusion type arguments, but it totally eliminates what I think is the most repugnant aspect of the RC—the idea that a Malthusian society might be morally optimal.
Thank you. Apparently total utilitarianism really is scary, and I had routed around it by replacing it with something more useable and assuming that was what everyone else meant when they said “total utilitarianism”.