There’s this thing, “the repugnant conclusion”. It’s about how, if you use aggregate measures of utility for people in a population, and consider it important that more people each getting the same utility means more total utility, and you think it’s good to maximize total utility, then you ought to favor giant populations of people living lives barely worth living.
Yes, it’s a paradox. I don’t care about it because there’s no reason to want to maximize total utility by increasing a population’s size that I can see. However, by thinking so, I’m led down a different path. I’m not a utilitarian, but I check in with the utilitarian perspective to understand some things better.
The form of utilitarianism that I introduce below is my best utilitarian perspective. I created it as part of rejecting the repugnant conclusion. I’ll let you ask the interested questions, if you have any, lol. Here it is.
Imagine an accounting system that, for each person, measures the utility, positive and negative, of that person’s actions for other people. Your own personal utilitarian ledger, but lets assume someone else keeps it for you. That other person knows every action you take and what positive or negative utility that your actions create.
If the term “utility” confuses you, think of other terms, like:
benefit or harm
happiness or suffering
gain or loss
pleasure or pain
improvement or decline
For example, positive utility that you create for someone could be an improvement in their health.
Your ledger holds information about what you cause people everywhere, millions, billions, even trillions of people, now and in the future. Well, OK, that’s only if you consider individuals from various other species as deserving a page in your ledger.
How would I make this ledger work? Here’s what I would do:
Put aside the mathematical convenience of aggregate measures in favor of an individual accounting of utility. If you can track the utility you cause for even two other people, your ledger keeper should be able to do it for two hundred billion, right? Sure.
Set up a few rules to handle when people cease to exist. Those rules should include:
Once a person’s existence ends, you can no longer create utility for that person. Accordingly, there should be no new entries onto your ledger about that person. Prior utility accounting associated with a person from when they were alive can be kept but not altered unless to better reflect utility that you created for the person when the person was still living.
Ledger entries associated with people who were expected to be conceived but are no longer expected to be conceived must be deleted entirely from the ledger, because those entries apply to a never-existent person. They are bogus.
Entries about the utility of termination of existence (death) that you (inadvertently) cause others should be full and complete, applying to all those affected by a death who are not the dead person, including everyone still living and who will be conceived that get positive or negative utility from the person’s death.
The suffering or happiness involved in the person’s going through the process of dying should also be considered negative or positive utility and accounted for accordingly. A painful, slow death is a large negative harm to inflict on someone, whereas a quick, painless death in the presence of loving family is an improvement over a painful slow death, all other things equal.
Do not record death itself as a change in utility. The fact of death itself should not be recorded as a negative (or positive) utility applying to the now nonexistent person. There are still all the harms of death noted previously. Aside from those however, the only change recorded on the ledger to the dead person’s utility is that there are no longer events generating new utility for the person because the person no longer exists.[1]
Do not record intended consequences as creating utility just because they were intended. That is a different form of morality tracking, to do with keeping a record of a person’s character. On the utilitarian ledger, only actual utility gets recorded in an entry.
Other than those changes, I think you can go ahead and practice utilitarianism as you otherwise would, that is, doing the the greatest good for the greatest number, and considering all people as equally deserving of consideration.
Utilitarianism developed in that way does not offer the typical problems of:
aggregate measures (average, total, variance) screwing up determination of utility maximization for many individuals
bogus accounting of utility intended for nonexistent or never-existent people.
bogus accounting of utility intended to be created for existent people but not actually created.
This personal utilitarian ledger only tells you about actual utility created in a single shared timeline for a population of individuals. Intentions and alternatives are irrelevant. Disliking death or liking for having children are similarly irrelevant unless contradiction of those values is considered a negative utility created for existent people. Of course there’s still the harms to existent others associated with death or absence of conception that are recorded in the ledger. And, the welfare of the population as a whole is never actually considered.
An extension to the accounting ledger, one that tracks consequences of actions for your utility, would record your actions including such interesting ones as actions to make hypothetical people real or to extend the lives of existing people. The extension would record actual consequences for you even if those actions create no utility for other existing people. You might find this extension useful if, as someone with a ledger, you want to treat your own interests as deserving equal consideration compared to other’s interests.
For me, a utilitarian ledger of this sort, or a character ledger that tracks my intentions and faithfully records evidence of my character, would provide a reference point for me to make moral judgments about me. Not a big deal, but when you look at something like the repugnant conclusion, you could ask yourself, “Who does this apply to and how?” I don’t require that I practice utilitarianism, but in a context where utilitarian considerations apply, for example, public policy, I would use this approach to it. Of course, I’m no policy-maker, so this ledger is little more than a thought experiment.
[1]
The only exception would be error-correction events to revise old utility information from when the person was living. Error-correction events only occur when the ledger keeper corrects a mistake.
There’s this thing, “the repugnant conclusion”. It’s about how, if you use aggregate measures of utility for people in a population, and consider it important that more people each getting the same utility means more total utility, and you think it’s good to maximize total utility, then you ought to favor giant populations of people living lives barely worth living.
Yes, it’s a paradox. I don’t care about it because there’s no reason to want to maximize total utility by increasing a population’s size that I can see. However, by thinking so, I’m led down a different path. I’m not a utilitarian, but I check in with the utilitarian perspective to understand some things better.
The form of utilitarianism that I introduce below is my best utilitarian perspective. I created it as part of rejecting the repugnant conclusion. I’ll let you ask the interested questions, if you have any, lol. Here it is.
Imagine an accounting system that, for each person, measures the utility, positive and negative, of that person’s actions for other people. Your own personal utilitarian ledger, but lets assume someone else keeps it for you. That other person knows every action you take and what positive or negative utility that your actions create.
If the term “utility” confuses you, think of other terms, like:
benefit or harm
happiness or suffering
gain or loss
pleasure or pain
improvement or decline
For example, positive utility that you create for someone could be an improvement in their health.
Your ledger holds information about what you cause people everywhere, millions, billions, even trillions of people, now and in the future. Well, OK, that’s only if you consider individuals from various other species as deserving a page in your ledger.
How would I make this ledger work? Here’s what I would do:
Put aside the mathematical convenience of aggregate measures in favor of an individual accounting of utility. If you can track the utility you cause for even two other people, your ledger keeper should be able to do it for two hundred billion, right? Sure.
Set up a few rules to handle when people cease to exist. Those rules should include:
Once a person’s existence ends, you can no longer create utility for that person. Accordingly, there should be no new entries onto your ledger about that person. Prior utility accounting associated with a person from when they were alive can be kept but not altered unless to better reflect utility that you created for the person when the person was still living.
Ledger entries associated with people who were expected to be conceived but are no longer expected to be conceived must be deleted entirely from the ledger, because those entries apply to a never-existent person. They are bogus.
Entries about the utility of termination of existence (death) that you (inadvertently) cause others should be full and complete, applying to all those affected by a death who are not the dead person, including everyone still living and who will be conceived that get positive or negative utility from the person’s death.
The suffering or happiness involved in the person’s going through the process of dying should also be considered negative or positive utility and accounted for accordingly. A painful, slow death is a large negative harm to inflict on someone, whereas a quick, painless death in the presence of loving family is an improvement over a painful slow death, all other things equal.
Do not record death itself as a change in utility. The fact of death itself should not be recorded as a negative (or positive) utility applying to the now nonexistent person. There are still all the harms of death noted previously. Aside from those however, the only change recorded on the ledger to the dead person’s utility is that there are no longer events generating new utility for the person because the person no longer exists.[1]
Do not record intended consequences as creating utility just because they were intended. That is a different form of morality tracking, to do with keeping a record of a person’s character. On the utilitarian ledger, only actual utility gets recorded in an entry.
Other than those changes, I think you can go ahead and practice utilitarianism as you otherwise would, that is, doing the the greatest good for the greatest number, and considering all people as equally deserving of consideration.
Utilitarianism developed in that way does not offer the typical problems of:
aggregate measures (average, total, variance) screwing up determination of utility maximization for many individuals
bogus accounting of utility intended for nonexistent or never-existent people.
bogus accounting of utility intended to be created for existent people but not actually created.
This personal utilitarian ledger only tells you about actual utility created in a single shared timeline for a population of individuals. Intentions and alternatives are irrelevant. Disliking death or liking for having children are similarly irrelevant unless contradiction of those values is considered a negative utility created for existent people. Of course there’s still the harms to existent others associated with death or absence of conception that are recorded in the ledger. And, the welfare of the population as a whole is never actually considered.
An extension to the accounting ledger, one that tracks consequences of actions for your utility, would record your actions including such interesting ones as actions to make hypothetical people real or to extend the lives of existing people. The extension would record actual consequences for you even if those actions create no utility for other existing people. You might find this extension useful if, as someone with a ledger, you want to treat your own interests as deserving equal consideration compared to other’s interests.
For me, a utilitarian ledger of this sort, or a character ledger that tracks my intentions and faithfully records evidence of my character, would provide a reference point for me to make moral judgments about me. Not a big deal, but when you look at something like the repugnant conclusion, you could ask yourself, “Who does this apply to and how?” I don’t require that I practice utilitarianism, but in a context where utilitarian considerations apply, for example, public policy, I would use this approach to it. Of course, I’m no policy-maker, so this ledger is little more than a thought experiment.
[1] The only exception would be error-correction events to revise old utility information from when the person was living. Error-correction events only occur when the ledger keeper corrects a mistake.