I share a lot of your concerns about hedonism. But, given their appreciation of normative uncertainty, Iām optimistic that the actual hedonist utilitarians in longtermist EA would not in fact choose to replace wonderfully rich, happy lives with a bland universe tiled with āhedoniumā. If thatās right, then we neednāt worry too much about hedonistic utilitarian*s* even if we would worry about hedonistic utilitarian*ism*.
Also, maybe worth more cleanly separating out two issues:
(i) What is the correct theory of well-being? (N.B. utilitarianism per se is completely neutral on this. I, personally, am most drawn to pluralistic objective list theories.)
(ii) Is utility (happiness or whatever) what matters fundamentally, or does it matter just because (and insofar as) it makes individualsā lives better, and those individuals matter fundamentally? (In my paper āValue Receptaclesā, I characterize this as the choice between āutility fundamentalismā and āwelfarismā, and recommend the latter.)
On the first point, just wanted to add a quote from utilitarianism.net that I think vibes well with the argument of the OP:
Even if [different theories of well-being] currently coincide in practice, their differences could become more practically significant as technology advances, and with it, our ability to manipulate our own minds. If we one day face the prospect of engineering our descendants so that they experience bliss in total passivity, it will be important to determine whether we would thereby be doing them a favor, or robbing them of much of what makes for a truly flourishing life.
Fair point that the concern is only about hypothetical people who would genuinely try to optimize for the weird consequences of hedonic utilitarianismāI guess itās 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 somethingās 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 āwhat does a thingās well-being consist inā and āwhat does a thing have to be like for it to have well-being at allā are in principle distinct, but if you think well-being consists entirely in pleasure it seems harder to say āand also the pleasure needs to be in a special kind of thing.ā
I share a lot of your concerns about hedonism. But, given their appreciation of normative uncertainty, Iām optimistic that the actual hedonist utilitarians in longtermist EA would not in fact choose to replace wonderfully rich, happy lives with a bland universe tiled with āhedoniumā. If thatās right, then we neednāt worry too much about hedonistic utilitarian*s* even if we would worry about hedonistic utilitarian*ism*.
Also, maybe worth more cleanly separating out two issues:
(i) What is the correct theory of well-being? (N.B. utilitarianism per se is completely neutral on this. I, personally, am most drawn to pluralistic objective list theories.)
(ii) Is utility (happiness or whatever) what matters fundamentally, or does it matter just because (and insofar as) it makes individualsā lives better, and those individuals matter fundamentally? (In my paper āValue Receptaclesā, I characterize this as the choice between āutility fundamentalismā and āwelfarismā, and recommend the latter.)
On the first point, just wanted to add a quote from utilitarianism.net that I think vibes well with the argument of the OP:
Fair point that the concern is only about hypothetical people who would genuinely try to optimize for the weird consequences of hedonic utilitarianismāI guess itās 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 somethingās 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 āwhat does a thingās well-being consist inā and āwhat does a thing have to be like for it to have well-being at allā are in principle distinct, but if you think well-being consists entirely in pleasure it seems harder to say āand also the pleasure needs to be in a special kind of thing.ā
Iāll have to check out the paper!