Fair point that the concern is only about hypothetical people who would genuinely try to optimize for the weird consequences of hedonic utilitarianism—I guess it’s an open question how much any actual person is like them.
That distinction is helpful. It sounds like you might hold the view I mentioned was possible but seemed implausible to me, namely thinking utility has to be instantiated in something approximately like a life for it to make the world a better place? Maybe one advantage of an objective list view over a hedonist view in that connection is that it seems more plausible for the objective list theorist to maintain that the stuff on the list has to be instantiated in a certain kind of entity before it actually matters (i.e. contributes to something’s well-being) than it would be for the hedonist to maintain that. E.g. you can pretty comfortably say knowledge is valuable in humans, but not in large language models, whereas it seems a little harder to say pleasure is valuable in humans but not in momentary instantiations of a human or whatever. Obviously the questions “what does a thing’s well-being consist in” and “what does a thing have to be like for it to have well-being at all” are in principle distinct, but if you think well-being consists entirely in pleasure it seems harder to say “and also the pleasure needs to be in a special kind of thing.”
Fair point that the concern is only about hypothetical people who would genuinely try to optimize for the weird consequences of hedonic utilitarianism—I guess it’s an open question how much any actual person is like them.
That distinction is helpful. It sounds like you might hold the view I mentioned was possible but seemed implausible to me, namely thinking utility has to be instantiated in something approximately like a life for it to make the world a better place? Maybe one advantage of an objective list view over a hedonist view in that connection is that it seems more plausible for the objective list theorist to maintain that the stuff on the list has to be instantiated in a certain kind of entity before it actually matters (i.e. contributes to something’s well-being) than it would be for the hedonist to maintain that. E.g. you can pretty comfortably say knowledge is valuable in humans, but not in large language models, whereas it seems a little harder to say pleasure is valuable in humans but not in momentary instantiations of a human or whatever. Obviously the questions “what does a thing’s well-being consist in” and “what does a thing have to be like for it to have well-being at all” are in principle distinct, but if you think well-being consists entirely in pleasure it seems harder to say “and also the pleasure needs to be in a special kind of thing.”
I’ll have to check out the paper!