Children eat less than adults, so you can feed more children at the same time than adults with the same amount of food. If they’re young enough (or otherwise unaware), they won’t understand or expect their deaths. Children also seem more hedonistically reactive than adults, both positively and negatively, so if you ensure they are happy (good food, play, affection), they’d plausibly be happier than adults treated just as well.
So, it’s not clear that letting people decide when they die is better from a classical utilitarian perspective and ignoring indirect effects, e.g. the productivity of adults and how it contributes to others’ welfare. Adults are also more self-sufficient, which counts further in their favour.
Great points, Michael. I found the situation intuitively quite bad, and therefore stumbled into some motivated reasoning. I would be okay with the situation described by matty as long as the lives of the children were sufficiently good (to offset the negative effects to the mothers, and the pain involved in the murders), and neglecting indirect effects.
Nevertheless, in practice, if a bunch of humans contacted me describing their great plan to produce lots of utility along the lines described by matty, I would just report them to the police. I think having such plans in real life correlates with bad outcomes (compared to non-existence), even if the plan itself describes a good outcome (compared to non-existence).
Children eat less than adults, so you can feed more children at the same time than adults with the same amount of food. If they’re young enough (or otherwise unaware), they won’t understand or expect their deaths. Children also seem more hedonistically reactive than adults, both positively and negatively, so if you ensure they are happy (good food, play, affection), they’d plausibly be happier than adults treated just as well.
So, it’s not clear that letting people decide when they die is better from a classical utilitarian perspective and ignoring indirect effects, e.g. the productivity of adults and how it contributes to others’ welfare. Adults are also more self-sufficient, which counts further in their favour.
Great points, Michael. I found the situation intuitively quite bad, and therefore stumbled into some motivated reasoning. I would be okay with the situation described by matty as long as the lives of the children were sufficiently good (to offset the negative effects to the mothers, and the pain involved in the murders), and neglecting indirect effects.
Nevertheless, in practice, if a bunch of humans contacted me describing their great plan to produce lots of utility along the lines described by matty, I would just report them to the police. I think having such plans in real life correlates with bad outcomes (compared to non-existence), even if the plan itself describes a good outcome (compared to non-existence).