I only skimmed, but on the view that we should focus on the very worst experience (or very worst life, say), consider a thought experiment, where x is an extremely horrible experience and y is another extremely horrible experience, but slightly better:
Alice suffers x, and 100 people live great lives without suffering.
Alice suffers y, and the 100 people also each suffer y.
I would choose 1, even though the worst experience in it is worse than the worst experience in 2. I think modest tradeoffs between intensity and number should be made at least for similar intensities. Or, perhaps, we should care about the differences, not improving the worst experience, e.g. y-x, what’s at stake for Alice, is actually much smaller in magnitude than y, (at least) what’s at stake for each of the other 100 people.
Even if I find full aggregation and especially summation counterintuitive, at least some modest tradeoffs seem right to me. You might be interested in “partial aggregation”.
Appreciate the response! And yeah, that’s exactly the problem one can arise at with this line of thinking.
Caring about differences is an interesting perspective. Not sure what to make of it at the moment, but I’ll let that settle in.
I’ll take a look at partial aggregation. I’m looking at the first few search results I find, but let me know if you have any recommendations of things to read.
I only skimmed, but on the view that we should focus on the very worst experience (or very worst life, say), consider a thought experiment, where x is an extremely horrible experience and y is another extremely horrible experience, but slightly better:
Alice suffers x, and 100 people live great lives without suffering.
Alice suffers y, and the 100 people also each suffer y.
I would choose 1, even though the worst experience in it is worse than the worst experience in 2. I think modest tradeoffs between intensity and number should be made at least for similar intensities. Or, perhaps, we should care about the differences, not improving the worst experience, e.g. y-x, what’s at stake for Alice, is actually much smaller in magnitude than y, (at least) what’s at stake for each of the other 100 people.
Even if I find full aggregation and especially summation counterintuitive, at least some modest tradeoffs seem right to me. You might be interested in “partial aggregation”.
Appreciate the response! And yeah, that’s exactly the problem one can arise at with this line of thinking.
Caring about differences is an interesting perspective. Not sure what to make of it at the moment, but I’ll let that settle in.
I’ll take a look at partial aggregation. I’m looking at the first few search results I find, but let me know if you have any recommendations of things to read.