Whether the move from A to A+ improves things depends on whether or not B is available.
In my mind, whether A+ is better than A only depends on the goodness of the difference between them:
1) Increase in wellbeing for 10 M people.
2) Additional 10 M people with positive wellbeing.
I think both 1) and 2) are good, so their combination is also good. Do you consider 1) good, but 2) neutral? If so, I would argue the combination of something good with something neutral is something good.
Would you replace your excellent moments with marginally good ones to marginally improve all of the marginal ones and marginally increase your overall average and total welfare?
I definitely would, but I can see why my intuition would push against that. For a typical life expectancy, and magnitude of excellent moments, marginally increasing the goodness of the marginally good moments would probably not be enough to increase total welfare.
The aggregation required in NAE depends on welfare being cardinally measurable on a common scale across all individuals so that we can take sums and averages, which seems plausibly false.
I agree a common scale is required. However, at a fundamental level, I believe wellbeing is a function of the laws of physics and elementary particles. So, as all humans are subject to the same laws of physics, and have very similar compositions, I expect there is a (very complicated unknown) welfare function which applies quite well to almost all individuals.
It’s assumed there is positive welfare and net positive lives, contrary to negative axiologies, like antifrustrationism or in negative utilitariaism.
In 2 or 3 surveys in the UK, Kenya and Ghana, most people said they would prefer having lived their lives rather than not having been born (see Chapter 9 of What We Owe to the Future). Naturally, this does not mean that most people have net positive lives, but I would say it is strong evidence that it is possible to have net positive lives (e.g. I think there is at least 1 person in the world with a net positive life). If not in the present, at least in the future.
You need to separately rule out this kind of lexicality with another assumption (e.g. welfare is represented by (some subset of) the real numbers with the usual order and the usual operation of addition used to take the total and average), or replace NAE with something slightly different.
I agree, but I do not think that kind of lexicality is plausible. How can one produce something infinitely valuable from finite resources?
Thanks for all the detailed explanations!
In my mind, whether A+ is better than A only depends on the goodness of the difference between them:
1) Increase in wellbeing for 10 M people.
2) Additional 10 M people with positive wellbeing.
I think both 1) and 2) are good, so their combination is also good. Do you consider 1) good, but 2) neutral? If so, I would argue the combination of something good with something neutral is something good.
I definitely would, but I can see why my intuition would push against that. For a typical life expectancy, and magnitude of excellent moments, marginally increasing the goodness of the marginally good moments would probably not be enough to increase total welfare.
I agree a common scale is required. However, at a fundamental level, I believe wellbeing is a function of the laws of physics and elementary particles. So, as all humans are subject to the same laws of physics, and have very similar compositions, I expect there is a (very complicated unknown) welfare function which applies quite well to almost all individuals.
In 2 or 3 surveys in the UK, Kenya and Ghana, most people said they would prefer having lived their lives rather than not having been born (see Chapter 9 of What We Owe to the Future). Naturally, this does not mean that most people have net positive lives, but I would say it is strong evidence that it is possible to have net positive lives (e.g. I think there is at least 1 person in the world with a net positive life). If not in the present, at least in the future.
I agree, but I do not think that kind of lexicality is plausible. How can one produce something infinitely valuable from finite resources?