just simply, shouldn’t we measure impact by averages, rather than in an additive way? i.e. what is the mean wellbeing of people, instead of adding up everyone’s wellbeing scores out of 10.
The former encourages making people happy, the latter making happy people.
The thing you’re looking to maximise is the happiness of people, rather than the abstract of “happiness”. The latter treats humans as just vessels to carry this “happiness” around in the world, rather than something which is worthwhile because of the effect that it has on people.
If you’re maximising making happy people then surely you would also be for having as many children as possible, against abortion etc. (talking about welfare of “the unborn” is also...uncomfortable.)
Totalism does have some of these issues, at least under certain circumstances, but I don’t think averagism does any better. Arguably it has all of these same problems as totalism, plus some worse ones. On the point of interfering with reproductive choices for instance, totalism might be used to justify telling people to have more kids, but averagism will likewise tell people that if a child they want is expected to have a life even a little worse than average, then they are obligated not to have the child, and if they can expect to have a child with a life a little better than average, then they are obligated to have this child. Likewise, arguably averagism treats people as vessels to a greater degree than totalism. On totalism, at least people can introspectively connect with the value they contribute to the total, i.e. how much they value their own life. By comparison the value people contribute to the average is highly extrinsic, because it depends on how well off others are. This feature in fact leads to some of its more worrying implications, like that it can, between two possible worlds, choose the one in which no one is better off and some are worse off, as I bring up in my previous comment:
The view that tries to do better on all of these counts is person-affecting, which has its own, different costs and problems, but I think both total and person-affecting are better than average in most ways of thinking about it.
just simply, shouldn’t we measure impact by averages, rather than in an additive way? i.e. what is the mean wellbeing of people, instead of adding up everyone’s wellbeing scores out of 10.
The former encourages making people happy, the latter making happy people.
The thing you’re looking to maximise is the happiness of people, rather than the abstract of “happiness”. The latter treats humans as just vessels to carry this “happiness” around in the world, rather than something which is worthwhile because of the effect that it has on people.
If you’re maximising making happy people then surely you would also be for having as many children as possible, against abortion etc. (talking about welfare of “the unborn” is also...uncomfortable.)
Totalism does have some of these issues, at least under certain circumstances, but I don’t think averagism does any better. Arguably it has all of these same problems as totalism, plus some worse ones. On the point of interfering with reproductive choices for instance, totalism might be used to justify telling people to have more kids, but averagism will likewise tell people that if a child they want is expected to have a life even a little worse than average, then they are obligated not to have the child, and if they can expect to have a child with a life a little better than average, then they are obligated to have this child. Likewise, arguably averagism treats people as vessels to a greater degree than totalism. On totalism, at least people can introspectively connect with the value they contribute to the total, i.e. how much they value their own life. By comparison the value people contribute to the average is highly extrinsic, because it depends on how well off others are. This feature in fact leads to some of its more worrying implications, like that it can, between two possible worlds, choose the one in which no one is better off and some are worse off, as I bring up in my previous comment:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/BLcyqjiXaKg7BCSxj/?commentId=yaxuPctqobNmQ4EEX
The view that tries to do better on all of these counts is person-affecting, which has its own, different costs and problems, but I think both total and person-affecting are better than average in most ways of thinking about it.