Hi Zack. Great work! I have one clarificatory question. It is unclear to me whether you use your model to yield predictions about net average welfare or about net total welfare. Sometimes you seem to speak about one and sometimes about the other (on average, on the whole, etc.). Thanks!
Thanks for this comment. I think the model equally yields predictions on both. In no way does the model give any sense of scale or units. The only thing it’s useful for at this stage is saying whether suffering exceeds enjoyment or vice versa, and that should be true on average if and only if it’s true on the whole, unless I’m missing something.
Thanks for the reply! I think you are not missing anything: if there’s total net positive/negative value then, necessarily, there’s average net positive/negative value, and viceversa. But average net negative value can be lower than total net negative due to some individuals having much better lives than others. Some axiologies care for average, some for total, so it would be interesting to have separate measurements of each.
Hi Zack. Great work! I have one clarificatory question. It is unclear to me whether you use your model to yield predictions about net average welfare or about net total welfare. Sometimes you seem to speak about one and sometimes about the other (on average, on the whole, etc.). Thanks!
Thanks for this comment. I think the model equally yields predictions on both. In no way does the model give any sense of scale or units. The only thing it’s useful for at this stage is saying whether suffering exceeds enjoyment or vice versa, and that should be true on average if and only if it’s true on the whole, unless I’m missing something.
Thanks for the reply! I think you are not missing anything: if there’s total net positive/negative value then, necessarily, there’s average net positive/negative value, and viceversa. But average net negative value can be lower than total net negative due to some individuals having much better lives than others. Some axiologies care for average, some for total, so it would be interesting to have separate measurements of each.