Yes, I guess it would’ve been more accurate to say “I’m one of those confused people jackmalde was referring to, who intellectually thinks that very deprived lives are still worth living but nevertheless feels uncomfortable and conflicted about the obvious logical implications of that.”
Potential sources of this conflictedness:
Maybe my mental picture of a deprived but barely worth-it life is cartoonishly exaggerated in its badness. Poor people that I have met IRL in rural India did not have the best lives, but most of them were basically happy such that it does seem like a moral boon rather than repugnant to imagine creating trillions of others like them.
Maybe I am still having difficulty extricating myself from practical/political concerns. In the real world, if a new continent magically appeared full of many new barely-worth-living people, we would feel morally obligated to share with them and help improve their lives. This is a good instinct which is at the core of EA itself, but the inevitability of this empathetic response does mean that the appearance of new large barely-worth-it populations seems like a threat to the ongoing wellbeing of Population A. But of course in the thought experiment the populations are totally separate.
I am definitely (and understandably) uncertain about how to figure what kind of life is barely worth living. I am strongly anti-death to a greater extent than you are in your comment, but even I would not endorse things like “tortured forever” as being necessarily better than nothing, so I do want to set a threshold somewhere. (But again maybe this is just political concerns and my own personal spoiledness?? If I was God deciding whether to create the universe, and it was either going to be torture-hell or no universes whatsoever, maybe I’d create hell rather than there being nothing at all. But if I got to create a normal happy universe first, I’d definitely stick with happy universe plus nothing else rather than happy + hell.) On the other hand, the “creation test” seems suspicious to me—wouldn’t everyone just benchmark off their own quality of life? I’d be happy to create educated rich-world citizens, but immortal cyberhumans from the 23rd century would probably say that life isn’t worth creating if you’re not immortal and at the very least 50% cyber.
You have misunderstood my comment. Perhaps I have not been clear enough. Feel free to have another read and I would be happy to answer any questions.
Yes, I guess it would’ve been more accurate to say “I’m one of those confused people jackmalde was referring to, who intellectually thinks that very deprived lives are still worth living but nevertheless feels uncomfortable and conflicted about the obvious logical implications of that.”
Potential sources of this conflictedness:
Maybe my mental picture of a deprived but barely worth-it life is cartoonishly exaggerated in its badness. Poor people that I have met IRL in rural India did not have the best lives, but most of them were basically happy such that it does seem like a moral boon rather than repugnant to imagine creating trillions of others like them.
Maybe I am still having difficulty extricating myself from practical/political concerns. In the real world, if a new continent magically appeared full of many new barely-worth-living people, we would feel morally obligated to share with them and help improve their lives. This is a good instinct which is at the core of EA itself, but the inevitability of this empathetic response does mean that the appearance of new large barely-worth-it populations seems like a threat to the ongoing wellbeing of Population A. But of course in the thought experiment the populations are totally separate.
I am definitely (and understandably) uncertain about how to figure what kind of life is barely worth living. I am strongly anti-death to a greater extent than you are in your comment, but even I would not endorse things like “tortured forever” as being necessarily better than nothing, so I do want to set a threshold somewhere. (But again maybe this is just political concerns and my own personal spoiledness?? If I was God deciding whether to create the universe, and it was either going to be torture-hell or no universes whatsoever, maybe I’d create hell rather than there being nothing at all. But if I got to create a normal happy universe first, I’d definitely stick with happy universe plus nothing else rather than happy + hell.) On the other hand, the “creation test” seems suspicious to me—wouldn’t everyone just benchmark off their own quality of life? I’d be happy to create educated rich-world citizens, but immortal cyberhumans from the 23rd century would probably say that life isn’t worth creating if you’re not immortal and at the very least 50% cyber.