As someone with a mathematical background, I see a claim about a general implication (the RC) arising from Total Utilitarianism. I ask ‘what is Total Utilitarianism?’ I understand ‘add up all the utilities’. I ask ‘what would the utility functions have to look like for the claim to hold?’ The answer is, ‘quite special’.
I don’t think any of us should be comfortable with not checking the claim works at a gears level. The claim here being, approximately, that the RC is implied under Total Utilitarianism regardless of the choice of utility function. Which is false, as demonstrated above.
> This subdiscipline treats distributions of wellbeing across individuals in different hypothetical worlds as a given input, and seeks to find a function that outputs a plausible ranking of those worlds.
If you’d be interested formalising what this means, I could try and show that either the formalisation is uninteresting or that some form of my counterexamples to the RC still holds.
As someone with a mathematical background, I see a claim about a general implication (the RC) arising from Total Utilitarianism. I ask ‘what is Total Utilitarianism?’ I understand ‘add up all the utilities’. I ask ‘what would the utility functions have to look like for the claim to hold?’ The answer is, ‘quite special’.
I don’t think any of us should be comfortable with not checking the claim works at a gears level. The claim here being, approximately, that the RC is implied under Total Utilitarianism regardless of the choice of utility function. Which is false, as demonstrated above.
> This subdiscipline treats distributions of wellbeing across individuals in different hypothetical worlds as a given input, and seeks to find a function that outputs a plausible ranking of those worlds.
If you’d be interested formalising what this means, I could try and show that either the formalisation is uninteresting or that some form of my counterexamples to the RC still holds.