One other worry; this dramatically underspecifies population ethics. Presumably two lives with net score 1/2 wouldn't be as good as one with score 1. This seems especially weird with utilitarian aggregation that happens if we have the intuition that one should act as they would if they lived everyone's life and experienced everything that was experienced.
One other worry; this dramatically underspecifies population ethics. Presumably two lives with net score 1/2 wouldn't be as good as one with score 1. This seems especially weird with utilitarian aggregation that happens if we have the intuition that one should act as they would if they lived everyone's life and experienced everything that was experienced.
I think the "act as if you were to sequentially live everyone's life" heuristic implicitly assumes a simple aggregative (total) view. But one who rejects this axiology could nonetheless build it into an "as if" clause for the sake of the heuristic. I don't have any independent intuition that the boundaries between people don't matter. Quite the opposite: it seems obvious that we've distinctive reasons to regret uncompensated harms (e.g. to the child in Omelas) that we wouldn't have if it was just a passing harm to one stage of a super-person that was more than compensated by larger benefits to other stages.
One other worry; this dramatically underspecifies population ethics. Presumably two lives with net score 1/2 wouldn't be as good as one with score 1. This seems especially weird with utilitarian aggregation that happens if we have the intuition that one should act as they would if they lived everyone's life and experienced everything that was experienced.
Yeah, I flagged some related issues with the 'capped' view in my 'double or nothing' post: https://rychappell.substack.com/p/double-or-nothing-existence-gambles
I think the "act as if you were to sequentially live everyone's life" heuristic implicitly assumes a simple aggregative (total) view. But one who rejects this axiology could nonetheless build it into an "as if" clause for the sake of the heuristic. I don't have any independent intuition that the boundaries between people don't matter. Quite the opposite: it seems obvious that we've distinctive reasons to regret uncompensated harms (e.g. to the child in Omelas) that we wouldn't have if it was just a passing harm to one stage of a super-person that was more than compensated by larger benefits to other stages.