I agree that this feels too harsh. My first reaction to the extreme numbers would be to claim that expected values are actually not the right way to deal with uncertainty (without offering a better alternative). I think you could use a probability of 0.1 for an amazing life (even infinitely good), and I would arrive at the same conclusion: giving them little weight is too harsh. Because this remains true in my view no matter how great the value of the amazing life, I do think this is still a problem for expected values, or at least expected values applied directly to affective wellbeing.
I also do lean towards a preference-based account of wellbeing, which allows individuals to be risk-averse. Some people are just not that risk-averse, and (if something like closed individualism were true and their preferences never changed), giving greater weight to worse states is basically asserting that they are mistaken for not being more risk-averse. However, I also suspect most people wouldn’t value anything at values ≥ 3^^^^3 (or ≤ −3^^^^3, for that matter) if they were vNM-rational, and most of them are probably risk-averse to some degree.
Maybe ex ante prioritarianism makes more sense with a preference-based account of wellbeing?
Also, FWIW, it’s possible to blend ex ante and ex post views. An individual’s actual utility (treated as a random variable) and their expected utility could be combined in some way (weighted average, minimum of the two, etc.) before aggregating and taking the expected value. This seems very ad hoc, though.
giving greater weight to worse states is basically asserting that they are mistaken for not being more risk-averse.
I was thinking that it’s not just a matter of risk aversion, because regular utilitarianism would also favor helping the person with a terrible life if doing so were cheap enough. The perverse behavior of the ex ante view in my example comes from the concave f function.
I agree that this feels too harsh. My first reaction to the extreme numbers would be to claim that expected values are actually not the right way to deal with uncertainty (without offering a better alternative). I think you could use a probability of 0.1 for an amazing life (even infinitely good), and I would arrive at the same conclusion: giving them little weight is too harsh. Because this remains true in my view no matter how great the value of the amazing life, I do think this is still a problem for expected values, or at least expected values applied directly to affective wellbeing.
I also do lean towards a preference-based account of wellbeing, which allows individuals to be risk-averse. Some people are just not that risk-averse, and (if something like closed individualism were true and their preferences never changed), giving greater weight to worse states is basically asserting that they are mistaken for not being more risk-averse. However, I also suspect most people wouldn’t value anything at values ≥ 3^^^^3 (or ≤ −3^^^^3, for that matter) if they were vNM-rational, and most of them are probably risk-averse to some degree.
Maybe ex ante prioritarianism makes more sense with a preference-based account of wellbeing?
Also, FWIW, it’s possible to blend ex ante and ex post views. An individual’s actual utility (treated as a random variable) and their expected utility could be combined in some way (weighted average, minimum of the two, etc.) before aggregating and taking the expected value. This seems very ad hoc, though.
Interesting. :)
I was thinking that it’s not just a matter of risk aversion, because regular utilitarianism would also favor helping the person with a terrible life if doing so were cheap enough. The perverse behavior of the ex ante view in my example comes from the concave f function.