not coming to exist at all would be strictly worse than coming to exist with non-maximal utility
The transitivity argument you presented shows that it’s strictly better.
Nitpicks aside, thank you for sharing these ideas! I think identifying that interests (or desires associated with experiences) are the morally relevant objects rather than persons is crucial.
I think you can still treat persons as morally relevant, on top of their interests. In particular, you could think that we should weight interests within a person differently from how we weight them across persons, so that personal and interpersonal trade-offs can be treated differently. The principle of Comparative Interests I put forward doesn’t make any claims about how interests should be weighted.
If you accept empty individualism, then you might just respond that each interest (or preference or experience, etc.) should be its own person, so that all trade-offs are interpersonal.
I think the following is a typo:
The transitivity argument you presented shows that it’s strictly better.
Nitpicks aside, thank you for sharing these ideas! I think identifying that interests (or desires associated with experiences) are the morally relevant objects rather than persons is crucial.
Thanks for pointing that out.
I think you can still treat persons as morally relevant, on top of their interests. In particular, you could think that we should weight interests within a person differently from how we weight them across persons, so that personal and interpersonal trade-offs can be treated differently. The principle of Comparative Interests I put forward doesn’t make any claims about how interests should be weighted.
If you accept empty individualism, then you might just respond that each interest (or preference or experience, etc.) should be its own person, so that all trade-offs are interpersonal.