Re: Has anyone responded to Bostrom's argument against aggregative ethics?
On 10/20/2011 11:12 PM, meekerdb wrote: On 10/20/2011 7:20 PM, nihil0 wrote: I think most consequentialists, especially utilitarians, consider all sentient beings to have moral status. But *equal* moral status? I cannot believe anyone has ever even attempted to live by such an ethic. Great question! It can be easily shown that postulating an equal moral status on beings does nothing to constrain the actions of those beings. An object has no moral value in itself, but a sentient being is, among other things, a chooser of value. Such equanimity theories, when applied to the Real world, always degenerate into a might makes right situation. It is no wonder all forms of socialism that have been attempted in the real world tend to degenerate into some form of tyranny. Witness the current difficulty with the Greek government in the EU. Utilitarians say an action is morally better to the extent that it produces more well-being in the world. But measured over what time period? And that is the rub! These theoreticians seem to neglect the limitations that the physical world imposes upon moral choices. Anyway I would prefer to focus on whether act consequentialism implies that all actions as morally equivalent, if the universe might be canonically infinite. There seems to an inconsistency at the heart of this. The multiverse is postulated to avoid wave-function collapse, so the world evolves strictly unitarily, which is to say deterministically. So you have no libertarian free will with which to make choices anyway. Maybe that is the point that the moral theory is aimed at anyway. Once the concept of free will is banished, all notions of social responsibility vanish with it and all that it left is intellectual word games seeking to define some ruling elite's right to decide moral choices for the masses. How much fat can your food have, how much sugar What color can one's house be painted. How much water in the toilet's reservoir ... All of this nonsense could be demolished by the simple acknowledgement of the finite mind and will of the individual sentient being. With Rights come Responsibilities. And with Responsibilities, Rights. Onward! Stephen Brent Jon On Oct 21, 2:50 am, meekerdbmeeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 10/20/2011 6:37 PM, nihil0 wrote: However, this class action argument assumes that the value-density approach is an acceptable way to measure the value in a world. There are a few problems with the value-density approach. First of all, it seems to give up aggregationism (total consequentialism) in favor of average consequentialism. Average consequentialism has the counterintuitive implication that we should kill people who have below- average utility and few friends or loved ones, such as some hermits and homeless people. Secondly, the value-density approach places ethical significance on the spatiotemporal distribution of value. This is at odds with consequentialism's commitment to impartiality (the idea that equal amounts of value are equally good to promote, no matter who or where the beneficiaries are). But this kind of consequentialism is already unworkable. Who counts as a beneficiary? a fetus? someone not yet conceived? chimpanzees? dogs? spiders? In practice we value the well-being of some people a lot more than others and we do so for the simple reason that it makes our life better. Brent Third, the value-density approach fails to apply to inhomogeneous infinite worlds . . . because value-density is undefined for such worlds. (16) -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Has anyone responded to Bostrom's argument against aggregative ethics?
On 20 Oct 2011, at 20:46, meekerdb wrote: On 10/20/2011 11:23 AM, nihil0 wrote: Hi, Here is the abstract of Bostrom's Infinitarian Challenge to Aggregative Ethics Aggregative consequentialism and several other popular moral theories are threatened with paralysis: when coupled with some plausible assumptions, they seem to imply that it is always ethically indifferent what you do. Wow! Good news for those who take pleasure in torturing other people. Modern cosmology teaches that the world might well contain an infinite number of happy and sad people and other candidate value‐bearing locations. *Speculative* modern cosmology *hypostesizes* that the world *might*... Good point. To base ethics on cosmology is a sort of category error, of the super-aristotelian kind. Aggregative ethics implies that such a world contains an infinite amount of positive value and an infinite amount of negative value. You can affect only a finite amount of good or bad. But the part you can affect is the part most likely to affect you. Right. What counts in ethics is you and the people you care about. If you want to make all creature happy, you will make them all unhappy. I tend to agree with Ayn Rand (and Lewis Carroll) on this. If you want to make all creature the less unhappy as possible, just mind your own business. With comp, ethical value are protegorean: you cannot put them in theories, you can only apply them in your everyday life, and with some luck some other will get the lesson. They obey, like PA self-consistency: Bx - ~x. Bruno Brent In standard cardinal arithmetic, an infinite quantity is unchanged by the addition or subtraction of any finite quantity. So it appears you cannot change the value of the world. Modifications of aggregationism aimed at resolving the paralysis are only partially effective and cause severe side effects, including problems of “fanaticism”, “distortion”, and erosion of the intuitions that originally motivated the theory. Is the infinitarian challenge fatal? www.nickbostrom.com/ethics/infinite.pdf Bostrom's argument seems pretty solid to me. But I am not a mathematician. What do you guys think? http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Has anyone responded to Bostrom's argument against aggregative ethics?
On 10/21/2011 8:24 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 20 Oct 2011, at 20:46, meekerdb wrote: On 10/20/2011 11:23 AM, nihil0 wrote: Hi, Here is the abstract of Bostrom's Infinitarian Challenge to Aggregative Ethics Aggregative consequentialism and several other popular moral theories are threatened with paralysis: when coupled with some plausible assumptions, they seem to imply that it is always ethically indifferent what you do. Wow! Good news for those who take pleasure in torturing other people. Modern cosmology teaches that the world might well contain an infinite number of happy and sad people and other candidate value‐bearing locations. *Speculative* modern cosmology *hypostesizes* that the world *might*... Good point. To base ethics on cosmology is a sort of category error, of the super-aristotelian kind. Aggregative ethics implies that such a world contains an infinite amount of positive value and an infinite amount of negative value. You can affect only a finite amount of good or bad. But the part you can affect is the part most likely to affect you. Right. What counts in ethics is you and the people you care about. If you want to make all creature happy, you will make them all unhappy. I tend to agree with Ayn Rand (and Lewis Carroll) on this. If you want to make all creature the less unhappy as possible, just mind your own business. With comp, ethical value are protegorean: you cannot put them in theories, you can only apply them in your everyday life, and with some luck some other will get the lesson. They obey, like PA self-consistency: Bx - ~x. Bruno Amen brother! Onward! Stephen Brent In standard cardinal arithmetic, an infinite quantity is unchanged by the addition or subtraction of any finite quantity. So it appears you cannot change the value of the world. Modifications of aggregationism aimed at resolving the paralysis are only partially effective and cause severe side effects, including problems of “fanaticism”, “distortion”, and erosion of the intuitions that originally motivated the theory. Is the infinitarian challenge fatal? www.nickbostrom.com/ethics/infinite.pdf Bostrom's argument seems pretty solid to me. But I am not a mathematician. What do you guys think? http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Has anyone responded to Bostrom's argument against aggregative ethics?
Hi, Here is the abstract of Bostrom's Infinitarian Challenge to Aggregative Ethics Aggregative consequentialism and several other popular moral theories are threatened with paralysis: when coupled with some plausible assumptions, they seem to imply that it is always ethically indifferent what you do. Modern cosmology teaches that the world might well contain an infinite number of happy and sad people and other candidate value‐bearing locations. Aggregative ethics implies that such a world contains an infinite amount of positive value and an infinite amount of negative value. You can affect only a finite amount of good or bad. In standard cardinal arithmetic, an infinite quantity is unchanged by the addition or subtraction of any finite quantity. So it appears you cannot change the value of the world. Modifications of aggregationism aimed at resolving the paralysis are only partially effective and cause severe side effects, including problems of “fanaticism”, “distortion”, and erosion of the intuitions that originally motivated the theory. Is the infinitarian challenge fatal? www.nickbostrom.com/ethics/infinite.pdf Bostrom's argument seems pretty solid to me. But I am not a mathematician. What do you guys think? -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Has anyone responded to Bostrom's argument against aggregative ethics?
On 10/20/2011 11:23 AM, nihil0 wrote: Hi, Here is the abstract of Bostrom's Infinitarian Challenge to Aggregative Ethics Aggregative consequentialism and several other popular moral theories are threatened with paralysis: when coupled with some plausible assumptions, they seem to imply that it is always ethically indifferent what you do. Modern cosmology teaches that the world might well contain an infinite number of happy and sad people and other candidate value‐bearing locations. *Speculative* modern cosmology *hypostesizes* that the world *might*... Aggregative ethics implies that such a world contains an infinite amount of positive value and an infinite amount of negative value. You can affect only a finite amount of good or bad. But the part you can affect is the part most likely to affect you. Brent In standard cardinal arithmetic, an infinite quantity is unchanged by the addition or subtraction of any finite quantity. So it appears you cannot change the value of the world. Modifications of aggregationism aimed at resolving the paralysis are only partially effective and cause severe side effects, including problems of “fanaticism”, “distortion”, and erosion of the intuitions that originally motivated the theory. Is the infinitarian challenge fatal? www.nickbostrom.com/ethics/infinite.pdf Bostrom's argument seems pretty solid to me. But I am not a mathematician. What do you guys think? -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Has anyone responded to Bostrom's argument against aggregative ethics?
What about the idea that the choices you make are likely to reflect those of an infinite number of similar individuals? It's sort of like the issue of voting or trying to minimize your energy usage to help the environment, even if your individual choice makes very little difference, if everyone decides their choices don't matter and choose the less beneficial option, then this does significantly change the outcome for the worse. It makes me think of Douglas Hofstadter's notion of superrationality which he discusses in an essay in Metamagical Themas: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superrationality Hofstadter's idea here seems like a variation on Kant's idea that the moral choice is the one that it would make sense for *everyone* to adopt (see http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-moral/#ForUniLawNat )--I just skimmed Bostrom's paper but I didn't see any detailed discussion of this sort of ethical theory, which is odd since Bostrom is a philosopher and this has been a pretty influential idea in ethics. Physicist (and many-worlds advocate) David Deutsch also makes a somewhat similar point about morality in a quantum multiverse in this article: http://www.kurzweilai.net/taming-the-multiverse “By making good choices, doing the right thing, we thicken the stack of universes in which versions of us live reasonable lives,” he says. “When you succeed, all the copies of you who made the same decision succeed too. What you do for the better increases the portion of the multiverse where good things happen.” Jesse On Thu, Oct 20, 2011 at 2:23 PM, nihil0 jonathan.wol...@gmail.com wrote: Hi, Here is the abstract of Bostrom's Infinitarian Challenge to Aggregative Ethics Aggregative consequentialism and several other popular moral theories are threatened with paralysis: when coupled with some plausible assumptions, they seem to imply that it is always ethically indifferent what you do. Modern cosmology teaches that the world might well contain an infinite number of happy and sad people and other candidate value‐bearing locations. Aggregative ethics implies that such a world contains an infinite amount of positive value and an infinite amount of negative value. You can affect only a finite amount of good or bad. In standard cardinal arithmetic, an infinite quantity is unchanged by the addition or subtraction of any finite quantity. So it appears you cannot change the value of the world. Modifications of aggregationism aimed at resolving the paralysis are only partially effective and cause severe side effects, including problems of “fanaticism”, “distortion”, and erosion of the intuitions that originally motivated the theory. Is the infinitarian challenge fatal? www.nickbostrom.com/ethics/infinite.pdf Bostrom's argument seems pretty solid to me. But I am not a mathematician. What do you guys think? -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Has anyone responded to Bostrom's argument against aggregative ethics?
Thanks for your response. Bostrom considers just the idea you mention in section 4.6 called Class Action. He uses the term YOU to represent all your qualitatively identical duplicates throughout the (Level 1) multiverse. According to the class action selection rule, Even though your actions may have only finite consequences, YOUR actions will be infinite. If the various constituent person-parts of YOU are distributed roughly evenly throughout spacetime, then it is possible for you to affect the world's value-density. For example, if each person-part of YOU acts kindly, YOU may increase the well-being of an infinite number of persons such that the density of well-being in the world increases by some finite amount. (p. 39) However, this class action argument assumes that the value-density approach is an acceptable way to measure the value in a world. There are a few problems with the value-density approach. First of all, it seems to give up aggregationism (total consequentialism) in favor of average consequentialism. Average consequentialism has the counterintuitive implication that we should kill people who have below- average utility and few friends or loved ones, such as some hermits and homeless people. Secondly, the value-density approach places ethical significance on the spatiotemporal distribution of value. This is at odds with consequentialism's commitment to impartiality (the idea that equal amounts of value are equally good to promote, no matter who or where the beneficiaries are). Third, the value-density approach fails to apply to inhomogeneous infinite worlds . . . because value-density is undefined for such worlds. (16) Perhaps some other combination of approaches will be more promising. On Oct 20, 3:04 pm, Jesse Mazer laserma...@gmail.com wrote: What about the idea that the choices you make are likely to reflect those of an infinite number of similar individuals? It's sort of like the issue of voting or trying to minimize your energy usage to help the environment, even if your individual choice makes very little difference, if everyone decides their choices don't matter and choose the less beneficial option, then this does significantly change the outcome for the worse. It makes me think of Douglas Hofstadter's notion of superrationality which he discusses in an essay in Metamagical Themas: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superrationality Hofstadter's idea here seems like a variation on Kant's idea that the moral choice is the one that it would make sense for *everyone* to adopt (seehttp://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-moral/#ForUniLawNat)--I just skimmed Bostrom's paper but I didn't see any detailed discussion of this sort of ethical theory, which is odd since Bostrom is a philosopher and this has been a pretty influential idea in ethics. Physicist (and many-worlds advocate) David Deutsch also makes a somewhat similar point about morality in a quantum multiverse in this article:http://www.kurzweilai.net/taming-the-multiverse “By making good choices, doing the right thing, we thicken the stack of universes in which versions of us live reasonable lives,” he says. “When you succeed, all the copies of you who made the same decision succeed too. What you do for the better increases the portion of the multiverse where good things happen.” Jesse On Thu, Oct 20, 2011 at 2:23 PM, nihil0 jonathan.wol...@gmail.com wrote: Hi, Here is the abstract of Bostrom's Infinitarian Challenge to Aggregative Ethics Aggregative consequentialism and several other popular moral theories are threatened with paralysis: when coupled with some plausible assumptions, they seem to imply that it is always ethically indifferent what you do. Modern cosmology teaches that the world might well contain an infinite number of happy and sad people and other candidate value‐bearing locations. Aggregative ethics implies that such a world contains an infinite amount of positive value and an infinite amount of negative value. You can affect only a finite amount of good or bad. In standard cardinal arithmetic, an infinite quantity is unchanged by the addition or subtraction of any finite quantity. So it appears you cannot change the value of the world. Modifications of aggregationism aimed at resolving the paralysis are only partially effective and cause severe side effects, including problems of “fanaticism”, “distortion”, and erosion of the intuitions that originally motivated the theory. Is the infinitarian challenge fatal? www.nickbostrom.com/ethics/infinite.pdf Bostrom's argument seems pretty solid to me. But I am not a mathematician. What do you guys think? -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more
Re: Has anyone responded to Bostrom's argument against aggregative ethics?
Thanks for your response. Bostrom considers the idea you mention in section 4.6 called Class Action. He uses the term YOU to represent all your qualitatively identical duplicates throughout the (Level 1) multiverse. According to the class action selection rule, Even though your actions may have only finite consequences, YOUR actions will be infinite. If the various constituent person-parts of YOU are distributed roughly evenly throughout spacetime, then it is possible for you to affect the world's value-density. For example, if each person-part of YOU acts kindly, YOU may increase the well-being of an infinite number of persons such that the density of well-being in the world increases by some finite amount. (p. 39) However, this class action argument assumes that the value-density approach is an acceptable way to measure the value in a world. There are a few problems with the value-density approach. First of all, it seems to give up aggregationism (total consequentialism) in favor of average consequentialism. Average consequentialism has the counterintuitive implication that we should kill people who have below- average utility and few friends or loved ones, such as some hermits and homeless people. Secondly, the value-density approach places ethical significance on the spatiotemporal distribution of value. (p. 16) This is at odds with consequentialism's commitment to impartiality (the idea that equal amounts of value are equally good to promote, no matter who or where the beneficiaries are). Third, the value-density approach fails to apply to inhomogeneous infinite worlds . . . because value-density is undefined for such worlds. (p. 16) Hopefully some other combination of approaches will be more promising. On Oct 20, 3:04 pm, Jesse Mazer laserma...@gmail.com wrote: What about the idea that the choices you make are likely to reflect those of an infinite number of similar individuals? It's sort of like the issue of voting or trying to minimize your energy usage to help the environment, even if your individual choice makes very little difference, if everyone decides their choices don't matter and choose the less beneficial option, then this does significantly change the outcome for the worse. It makes me think of Douglas Hofstadter's notion of superrationality which he discusses in an essay in Metamagical Themas: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superrationality Hofstadter's idea here seems like a variation on Kant's idea that the moral choice is the one that it would make sense for *everyone* to adopt (seehttp://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-moral/#ForUniLawNat)--I just skimmed Bostrom's paper but I didn't see any detailed discussion of this sort of ethical theory, which is odd since Bostrom is a philosopher and this has been a pretty influential idea in ethics. Physicist (and many-worlds advocate) David Deutsch also makes a somewhat similar point about morality in a quantum multiverse in this article:http://www.kurzweilai.net/taming-the-multiverse “By making good choices, doing the right thing, we thicken the stack of universes in which versions of us live reasonable lives,” he says. “When you succeed, all the copies of you who made the same decision succeed too. What you do for the better increases the portion of the multiverse where good things happen.” Jesse On Thu, Oct 20, 2011 at 2:23 PM, nihil0 jonathan.wol...@gmail.com wrote: Hi, Here is the abstract of Bostrom's Infinitarian Challenge to Aggregative Ethics Aggregative consequentialism and several other popular moral theories are threatened with paralysis: when coupled with some plausible assumptions, they seem to imply that it is always ethically indifferent what you do. Modern cosmology teaches that the world might well contain an infinite number of happy and sad people and other candidate value‐bearing locations. Aggregative ethics implies that such a world contains an infinite amount of positive value and an infinite amount of negative value. You can affect only a finite amount of good or bad. In standard cardinal arithmetic, an infinite quantity is unchanged by the addition or subtraction of any finite quantity. So it appears you cannot change the value of the world. Modifications of aggregationism aimed at resolving the paralysis are only partially effective and cause severe side effects, including problems of “fanaticism”, “distortion”, and erosion of the intuitions that originally motivated the theory. Is the infinitarian challenge fatal? www.nickbostrom.com/ethics/infinite.pdf Bostrom's argument seems pretty solid to me. But I am not a mathematician. What do you guys think? -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For
Re: Has anyone responded to Bostrom's argument against aggregative ethics?
On 10/20/2011 6:37 PM, nihil0 wrote: However, this class action argument assumes that the value-density approach is an acceptable way to measure the value in a world. There are a few problems with the value-density approach. First of all, it seems to give up aggregationism (total consequentialism) in favor of average consequentialism. Average consequentialism has the counterintuitive implication that we should kill people who have below- average utility and few friends or loved ones, such as some hermits and homeless people. Secondly, the value-density approach places ethical significance on the spatiotemporal distribution of value. This is at odds with consequentialism's commitment to impartiality (the idea that equal amounts of value are equally good to promote, no matter who or where the beneficiaries are). But this kind of consequentialism is already unworkable. Who counts as a beneficiary? a fetus? someone not yet conceived? chimpanzees? dogs? spiders? In practice we value the well-being of some people a lot more than others and we do so for the simple reason that it makes our life better. Brent Third, the value-density approach fails to apply to inhomogeneous infinite worlds . . . because value-density is undefined for such worlds. (16) -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Has anyone responded to Bostrom's argument against aggregative ethics?
I think most consequentialists, especially utilitarians, consider all sentient beings to have moral status. Utilitarians say an action is morally better to the extent that it produces more well-being in the world. Anyway I would prefer to focus on whether act consequentialism implies that all actions as morally equivalent, if the universe might be canonically infinite. Jon On Oct 21, 2:50 am, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 10/20/2011 6:37 PM, nihil0 wrote: However, this class action argument assumes that the value-density approach is an acceptable way to measure the value in a world. There are a few problems with the value-density approach. First of all, it seems to give up aggregationism (total consequentialism) in favor of average consequentialism. Average consequentialism has the counterintuitive implication that we should kill people who have below- average utility and few friends or loved ones, such as some hermits and homeless people. Secondly, the value-density approach places ethical significance on the spatiotemporal distribution of value. This is at odds with consequentialism's commitment to impartiality (the idea that equal amounts of value are equally good to promote, no matter who or where the beneficiaries are). But this kind of consequentialism is already unworkable. Who counts as a beneficiary? a fetus? someone not yet conceived? chimpanzees? dogs? spiders? In practice we value the well-being of some people a lot more than others and we do so for the simple reason that it makes our life better. Brent Third, the value-density approach fails to apply to inhomogeneous infinite worlds . . . because value-density is undefined for such worlds. (16) -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Has anyone responded to Bostrom's argument against aggregative ethics?
On 10/20/2011 7:20 PM, nihil0 wrote: I think most consequentialists, especially utilitarians, consider all sentient beings to have moral status. But *equal* moral status? I cannot believe anyone has ever even attempted to live by such an ethic. Utilitarians say an action is morally better to the extent that it produces more well-being in the world. But measured over what time period? Anyway I would prefer to focus on whether act consequentialism implies that all actions as morally equivalent, if the universe might be canonically infinite. There seems to an inconsistency at the heart of this. The multiverse is postulated to avoid wave-function collapse, so the world evolves strictly unitarily, which is to say deterministically. So you have no libertarian free will with which to make choices anyway. Brent Jon On Oct 21, 2:50 am, meekerdbmeeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 10/20/2011 6:37 PM, nihil0 wrote: However, this class action argument assumes that the value-density approach is an acceptable way to measure the value in a world. There are a few problems with the value-density approach. First of all, it seems to give up aggregationism (total consequentialism) in favor of average consequentialism. Average consequentialism has the counterintuitive implication that we should kill people who have below- average utility and few friends or loved ones, such as some hermits and homeless people. Secondly, the value-density approach places ethical significance on the spatiotemporal distribution of value. This is at odds with consequentialism's commitment to impartiality (the idea that equal amounts of value are equally good to promote, no matter who or where the beneficiaries are). But this kind of consequentialism is already unworkable. Who counts as a beneficiary? a fetus? someone not yet conceived? chimpanzees? dogs? spiders? In practice we value the well-being of some people a lot more than others and we do so for the simple reason that it makes our life better. Brent Third, the value-density approach fails to apply to inhomogeneous infinite worlds . . . because value-density is undefined for such worlds. (16) -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
