Is this necessary? I feel like many people judge their lives as worth living even though their day-to-day experiences contain mostly pain. I wonder if we’re imagining different definitions for “barely-net-positive”. Maybe you mean “adding up the magnitude of moment-to-moment negative or positive qualia over someone’s entire life” (hedonistic utilitarianism) whereas I am usually imagining something more like “on reflection, the person judges their life as worth living” (kinda preference utilitarian).
My sense is that people choose to weather currently-net-negative lives for at least two reasons that they might endorse on reflection:
The negative parts of their life may be solvable, such that the EV of their future is plausibly positive
Ending their life has a few terrible externalities, e.g. the impact it would have on their close loved ones
Eliminating those considerations, I would expect the bar for World Z to be much better than the worst lives people reflectively consider worth living today.
Is this necessary? I feel like many people judge their lives as worth living even though their day-to-day experiences contain mostly pain. I wonder if we’re imagining different definitions for “barely-net-positive”. Maybe you mean “adding up the magnitude of moment-to-moment negative or positive qualia over someone’s entire life” (hedonistic utilitarianism) whereas I am usually imagining something more like “on reflection, the person judges their life as worth living” (kinda preference utilitarian).
My sense is that people choose to weather currently-net-negative lives for at least two reasons that they might endorse on reflection:
The negative parts of their life may be solvable, such that the EV of their future is plausibly positive
Ending their life has a few terrible externalities, e.g. the impact it would have on their close loved ones
Eliminating those considerations, I would expect the bar for World Z to be much better than the worst lives people reflectively consider worth living today.