Ah, that’s a nice point. I discuss in 5.5 in the paper. Quote:
The final condition is whether different individuals use the same endpoints at a time [. There are two types of concern here.
The first is whether there are what Nozick (1974, 41) called ‘utility monsters’, individuals who can and do experience much greater magnitudes of happiness (or any other sort of subjective state), than others.
I won’t dwell on this as it seems unlikely there would be substantial differences in humans’ capacities for subjective experiences. Presumably there are evolutionary pressures for each species to have range of sensitivity that is optimal for survival. To return to an example noted earlier, being immune to pain is an extremely problematic condition that would put someone at an evolutionary disadvantage. Further, even if there are differences, we would expect these to be randomly distributed, in which case they would wash out in large samples
So to generate a serious worry that there’s a problem at the level of group averages (which is the relevant level for most relevant decision-making) you’d have to argue for and explain the existence of non-trivial difference between groups. It’s tricky to think of real life cases outside people who have genetic conditions. But this wouldn’t motivate us thinking, say, members of two nations have different capacities.
Ah, that’s a nice point. I discuss in 5.5 in the paper. Quote:
So to generate a serious worry that there’s a problem at the level of group averages (which is the relevant level for most relevant decision-making) you’d have to argue for and explain the existence of non-trivial difference between groups. It’s tricky to think of real life cases outside people who have genetic conditions. But this wouldn’t motivate us thinking, say, members of two nations have different capacities.