For NU (including lexical threshold NU), this can mean adding an arbitrarily huge number of new people to hell to barely reduce the suffering for each person in a sufficiently large population already in hell. (And also not getting the very positive lives, but NU treats them as 0 welfare anyway.)
This may be counterintuitive to an extent, but to me it doesn’t reach “very repugnant” territory. Misery is still reduced here; an epsilon change of the “reducing extreme suffering” sort, evenly if barely so, doesn’t seem morally frivolous like the creation of an epsilon-happy life or, worse, creation of an epsilon roller coaster life. But I’ll have to think about this more. It’s a good point, thanks for bringing it to my attention.
For NU (including lexical threshold NU), this can mean adding an arbitrarily huge number of new people to hell to barely reduce the suffering for each person in a sufficiently large population already in hell.
What would it mean to repeat this step (up to an infinite number of times)?
Intuitively, it sounds to me like the suffering gets divided more equally between those who already exist and those who do not, which ultimately leads to an infinite population where everyone has a subjectively perfect experience.
In the finite case, it leads to an extremely large population of almost perfectly untroubled lives.
If extrapolated in this way, it seems quite plausible that the population we eventually get by repeating this step is much better than the initial population.
This may be counterintuitive to an extent, but to me it doesn’t reach “very repugnant” territory. Misery is still reduced here; an epsilon change of the “reducing extreme suffering” sort, evenly if barely so, doesn’t seem morally frivolous like the creation of an epsilon-happy life or, worse, creation of an epsilon roller coaster life. But I’ll have to think about this more. It’s a good point, thanks for bringing it to my attention.
What would it mean to repeat this step (up to an infinite number of times)?
Intuitively, it sounds to me like the suffering gets divided more equally between those who already exist and those who do not, which ultimately leads to an infinite population where everyone has a subjectively perfect experience.
In the finite case, it leads to an extremely large population of almost perfectly untroubled lives.
If extrapolated in this way, it seems quite plausible that the population we eventually get by repeating this step is much better than the initial population.
I wrote some more about this here in reply to Jack.