Ya, this would be denying the hypothetical. There may be ways to prevent this, though, by making descriptions of lives more explicit and suffering-free, like extremely short joyful lives, or happy animal lives, for animals with much narrower welfare ranges each.
Yeah these are good ideas, although they come with their own complications. (A related thought experiment is how you feel about two short lives vs. one long life, with the same total lifetime and the same moment-to-moment quality of experience. I think they’re equally valuable, but I sympathise with people finding this counterintuitive, especially as you subdivide further.)
It could be that their intuitions about “net positive” are the biased ones, or, more plausibly, in my view, there’s no objective fact of the matter (denying moral realism).
The sense in which I’d want to call the view I described “objectively” biased / irrational, is that it says “this state of affairs is undesirable because a better state is possible”, but in fact the better state of affairs is not possible. Again, it’s denying the hypothetical, but may be doing so implicitly or subconsciously. The error is not a moral error but an epistemic one, so I don’t think you need moral realism.
Yeah these are good ideas, although they come with their own complications. (A related thought experiment is how you feel about two short lives vs. one long life, with the same total lifetime and the same moment-to-moment quality of experience. I think they’re equally valuable, but I sympathise with people finding this counterintuitive, especially as you subdivide further.)
The sense in which I’d want to call the view I described “objectively” biased / irrational, is that it says “this state of affairs is undesirable because a better state is possible”, but in fact the better state of affairs is not possible. Again, it’s denying the hypothetical, but may be doing so implicitly or subconsciously. The error is not a moral error but an epistemic one, so I don’t think you need moral realism.