re: 1, do you think it's possible to come up with an alternative formula for incentivizing "well-roundedness" that doesn't have this reverse-prioritarian implication?
re: 2, I wonder if that might be considered a feature rather than a bug? Seems to help with "double or nothing" existence gambles, for exam…
re: 1, do you think it's possible to come up with an alternative formula for incentivizing "well-roundedness" that doesn't have this reverse-prioritarian implication?
re: 2, I wonder if that might be considered a feature rather than a bug? Seems to help with "double or nothing" existence gambles, for example -- https://rychappell.substack.com/p/double-or-nothing-existence-gambles -- and in general, unbounded value seems to create significant difficulties for decision theory (fanaticism, etc.). Are there comparable problems for bounded value? I guess it eventually starts to seem *insufficiently* sensitive to additional increments of dis/value -- maybe especially problematic in the negative direction. E.g. if it implied that someone with a sufficiently terrible life should be willing to take a 50/50 gamble that would either bring them back to neutral or extend their suffering by a zillion times as long, that sure couldn't be right.
3. Yeah, I definitely feel the appeal of hybrid views that take *appreciation* of objective goods to be what's really valuable here. If we understand "appreciation" in terms of positive value *judgments* (rather than hedonically positive feelings), I wonder if that might help avoid the double-counting worry?
FWIW, I do think a hedonically mildly-negative life could, with appropriate appreciation of non-hedonic goods, count as positive overall.
Did you intend for this to be lifetime welfare or momentary welfare?
Re 1, I think Josh's suggestion avoids the reverse-prioritarian problem and promotes well-roundedness. If I understand correctly, it's (equivalent to) the Euclidean distance between the empty life/moment and the maximal life/moment minus the Euclidean distance between a maximal life/moment:
Where x is hedonic value and y is non-hedonic, and each is 0 when absent the corresponding goods and bads
It also works intuitively for miserable lives with neutral hedonic-value: such individuals should focus on their hedonic welfare.
I was also thinking
-(x-x_max)*(y-y_max) + x_max*y_max, which basically reverses your function, but I think Josh's distance function is a cleaner solution to the problem of y not mattering when x=x_max and x not mattering when y=y_max.
Re 2, I assumed that you were assuming pleasure and suffering were cardinally measurable and bounded per experience, and this seems to be an empirical claim we might not want to commit to (e.g. maybe suffering can be unbounded). If you're instead taking pleasure and suffering and squashing their lifetime totals to be bounded for each individual (e.g. with a sigmoid function https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sigmoid_function) and summing across individuals, then this worsens the Repugnant Conclusion and replaceability: given a positive life, it's better to have two positive lives each with half the total (unsquashed) hedonic and non-hedonic welfare. If you're only squashing the value per person per moment, then this doesn't solve the double or nothing problem.
I agree maximizing EV is problematic whether value is bounded or unbounded. Your example with the negative life is interesting. I'm sympathetic to maximizing the EV of a bounded function of the difference, and I think that can avoid fanaticism, implausible insensitivity, and is more psychologically plausible, but it's problematic in other ways, too. There's also just stochastic dominance instead of EV maximization: https://arxiv.org/abs/1807.10895
There's also a broader objection here, which is that once we start dealing with such arbitrary functional forms, it seems we've either given up moral realism (not that I was ever very sympathetic) or accepted moral indeterminacy.
Re 3, "If we understand "appreciation" in terms of positive value *judgments* (rather than hedonically positive feelings), I wonder if that might help avoid the double-counting worry?"
I would guess a hedonically positive feeling is actually a kind of positive value judgement, if we tried to define pleasure in functional terms. But I suppose there could be other kinds of positive value judgements.
Also, maybe it's just fine anyway: double-counting is just amplifying the value. If something is an objective good, then appreciating it hedonically should count more than appreciating something that isn't an objective good hedonically.
Thanks, some good objections here!
re: 1, do you think it's possible to come up with an alternative formula for incentivizing "well-roundedness" that doesn't have this reverse-prioritarian implication?
re: 2, I wonder if that might be considered a feature rather than a bug? Seems to help with "double or nothing" existence gambles, for example -- https://rychappell.substack.com/p/double-or-nothing-existence-gambles -- and in general, unbounded value seems to create significant difficulties for decision theory (fanaticism, etc.). Are there comparable problems for bounded value? I guess it eventually starts to seem *insufficiently* sensitive to additional increments of dis/value -- maybe especially problematic in the negative direction. E.g. if it implied that someone with a sufficiently terrible life should be willing to take a 50/50 gamble that would either bring them back to neutral or extend their suffering by a zillion times as long, that sure couldn't be right.
3. Yeah, I definitely feel the appeal of hybrid views that take *appreciation* of objective goods to be what's really valuable here. If we understand "appreciation" in terms of positive value *judgments* (rather than hedonically positive feelings), I wonder if that might help avoid the double-counting worry?
FWIW, I do think a hedonically mildly-negative life could, with appropriate appreciation of non-hedonic goods, count as positive overall.
Update re:1, check out Josh Gillon's helpful suggestion for a better model, here: https://www.facebook.com/richard.chappell/posts/pfbid02Ed3NPmXxU4HVJDpAKdxwBePKQYUHhwtz5ZxpinphGcPfS9fh1E64VnyXfNZGHsMPl?comment_id=839654837405668&__cft__[0]=AZVupEdS8WOzaeK4NRczUtxQjOlRegPtbq8tNvH7s6XyULNBA_FK-3eVAmtYxyk9rHkJrBGrj3tICqKvAE1COQgGkDhOMT8yvtwcI7ezgUMU9AGRfQumASmNMc5npZFPW0o&__tn__=R]-R
Sorry for the late response.
Did you intend for this to be lifetime welfare or momentary welfare?
Re 1, I think Josh's suggestion avoids the reverse-prioritarian problem and promotes well-roundedness. If I understand correctly, it's (equivalent to) the Euclidean distance between the empty life/moment and the maximal life/moment minus the Euclidean distance between a maximal life/moment:
Where x is hedonic value and y is non-hedonic, and each is 0 when absent the corresponding goods and bads
-sqrt((x-x_max)^2 + (y-y_max)^2) + sqrt(x_max^2 + y_max^2)
It also works intuitively for miserable lives with neutral hedonic-value: such individuals should focus on their hedonic welfare.
I was also thinking
-(x-x_max)*(y-y_max) + x_max*y_max, which basically reverses your function, but I think Josh's distance function is a cleaner solution to the problem of y not mattering when x=x_max and x not mattering when y=y_max.
Re 2, I assumed that you were assuming pleasure and suffering were cardinally measurable and bounded per experience, and this seems to be an empirical claim we might not want to commit to (e.g. maybe suffering can be unbounded). If you're instead taking pleasure and suffering and squashing their lifetime totals to be bounded for each individual (e.g. with a sigmoid function https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sigmoid_function) and summing across individuals, then this worsens the Repugnant Conclusion and replaceability: given a positive life, it's better to have two positive lives each with half the total (unsquashed) hedonic and non-hedonic welfare. If you're only squashing the value per person per moment, then this doesn't solve the double or nothing problem.
I agree maximizing EV is problematic whether value is bounded or unbounded. Your example with the negative life is interesting. I'm sympathetic to maximizing the EV of a bounded function of the difference, and I think that can avoid fanaticism, implausible insensitivity, and is more psychologically plausible, but it's problematic in other ways, too. There's also just stochastic dominance instead of EV maximization: https://arxiv.org/abs/1807.10895
There's also a broader objection here, which is that once we start dealing with such arbitrary functional forms, it seems we've either given up moral realism (not that I was ever very sympathetic) or accepted moral indeterminacy.
Re 3, "If we understand "appreciation" in terms of positive value *judgments* (rather than hedonically positive feelings), I wonder if that might help avoid the double-counting worry?"
I would guess a hedonically positive feeling is actually a kind of positive value judgement, if we tried to define pleasure in functional terms. But I suppose there could be other kinds of positive value judgements.
Also, maybe it's just fine anyway: double-counting is just amplifying the value. If something is an objective good, then appreciating it hedonically should count more than appreciating something that isn't an objective good hedonically.