1. What do you think are the best arguments for cardinal welfare over merely ordinal welfare? I’m pretty sympathetic to the claim that there’s no real fact of the matter as to whether some experience of suffering is 2 or 3 or 100 times worse than another, or that the sum of some pleasure and some experience of suffering takes any particular value, positive, negative or 0. Do you think some individual experience of suffering could be infinitely worse than another?
2. A few years ago, you left preference utilitarianism for hedonistic utilitarianism. Do you consider yourself a classical utilitarian specifically?
3. What are your thoughts on
a. negative utilitarianism (preference or hedonistic),
b. person-affecting views, the procreation asymmetry, and
c. other forms of aggregation other than straight addition, like prioritarianism, egalitarianism (satisfying Pareto or not), maximin/​leximin?
1. What do you think are the best arguments for cardinal welfare over merely ordinal welfare? I’m pretty sympathetic to the claim that there’s no real fact of the matter as to whether some experience of suffering is 2 or 3 or 100 times worse than another, or that the sum of some pleasure and some experience of suffering takes any particular value, positive, negative or 0. Do you think some individual experience of suffering could be infinitely worse than another?
2. A few years ago, you left preference utilitarianism for hedonistic utilitarianism. Do you consider yourself a classical utilitarian specifically?
3. What are your thoughts on
a. negative utilitarianism (preference or hedonistic),
b. person-affecting views, the procreation asymmetry, and
c. other forms of aggregation other than straight addition, like prioritarianism, egalitarianism (satisfying Pareto or not), maximin/​leximin?