This is interesting, I’m especially interested in the idea of applying voting methods to ranking dilemmas like this, which I’m noticing is getting more common. On the other hand it sounds to me like person-affecting views mostly solve transitivity problems by functionally becoming less person-affecting in a strong, principled sense, except in toy cases. Meacham sounds like it converges to averagism on steroids from your description as you test it against a larger and more open range of possibilities (worse off people loses a world points, but so does more people, since it sums the differences up). If you modify it to look at the average of these differences, then the theory seems like it becomes vulnerable to the repugnant conclusion again, as the quantity of added people who are better off in one step in the argument than the last can wash out the larger per-individual difference for those who existed since earlier steps. Meanwhile the necessitarian view as you describe it seems to yield either no results in practice if taken as described in a large set of worlds with no one common to every world, or if reinterpreted to only include the people common to the very most worlds, sort of gives you a utility monster situation in which a single person, or some small range of possible people, determine almost all of the value across all different worlds. All of this does avoid intransitivity though as you say.
This is interesting, I’m especially interested in the idea of applying voting methods to ranking dilemmas like this, which I’m noticing is getting more common. On the other hand it sounds to me like person-affecting views mostly solve transitivity problems by functionally becoming less person-affecting in a strong, principled sense, except in toy cases. Meacham sounds like it converges to averagism on steroids from your description as you test it against a larger and more open range of possibilities (worse off people loses a world points, but so does more people, since it sums the differences up). If you modify it to look at the average of these differences, then the theory seems like it becomes vulnerable to the repugnant conclusion again, as the quantity of added people who are better off in one step in the argument than the last can wash out the larger per-individual difference for those who existed since earlier steps. Meanwhile the necessitarian view as you describe it seems to yield either no results in practice if taken as described in a large set of worlds with no one common to every world, or if reinterpreted to only include the people common to the very most worlds, sort of gives you a utility monster situation in which a single person, or some small range of possible people, determine almost all of the value across all different worlds. All of this does avoid intransitivity though as you say.