Conservatives, like deontologists, should be moderates rather than absolutists. They should be open to the possibility that a *sufficiently* better outcome can justify replacement. They just don't think it should be as cheap/easy as utilitarianism implies. So I don't think that one-shot conservatives should be too bothered by the objection that replacement is still possible on their view. The moderate "spirit" of their view just requires that replacement is not justified by merely *marginal* improvements.
Your counterexample to long term conservatism doesn't hold water for me. It seems to me like a world where people live forever is much more of a utopia than one where people die, even if the people who die are happier moment to moment.
Remember that when assessing how positive a life is, you add up how positive it is over a person's entire life. So when comparing the "utopia" of very happy people to the world of moderately happy immortals, you wouldn't compare 100 years of the immortals' lives to the lives of the very happy people. You'd compare the immortals' entire lives to the very happy peoples' entire lives. Since the immortals live a very long time in your example, they are probably far, far happier than the people in the "utopia." Even if the very happy peoples' lives are 10, 100, even 1000 times better, moment to moment, the immortal has lived so long that their cumulative life is far better.
I think in general your framing of both long term and short term conservatism suffer from relying too much on time, rather than taking a timeless view of people's lives. I think a better framing would be to have two types of conservatism: one in which when someone is replaced there is a fixed penalty in value for doing so, and one where the penalty is a ratio of however much value the replaced person would have generated had they not been replaced. I suppose there could also be a hybrid view that has a fixed penalty to start with that then increases in severity relative to how happy a person's life was. I am not sure which of these best captures Cohen's intuition best and has the least counterintuitive conclusions, but they definitely seem better than standard utilitarianism.
1) The lack of realistic examples makes this far less compelling, at least to me.
2) The demonstrated reliability of a valued thing is itself be a source of value that a new, apparently more valuable, desired object may not be able to demonstrate immediately, since it hasn't had the time to show it is just as reliable. This can apply to new gadgets or interpersonal relationships.
3) The discussion of value seems one-dimensional and not in keeping with human nature. It also isn't clear who is doing the valuing at times, and it isn't clear how we can actually compare the various scenarios you describe in anything other than fairly superficial ways.
The words 'conservatism' and 'liberalism' appear too freighted with other meaning. Let's say that some thought-experiment superintelligence selects a human at random to set global policy, and this individual indicates society should be reverted to the way it was in the 1920s, or the 1320s, or the mesolithic because of a belief that older ways of doing things and being human provided more overall happiness, though in ways that sometimes are repugnant to modern folk. This would appear a kind of radical choice against conserving existing value for the sake of greater future value, even though that future would look like the past. And yet precisely the argument against 'conservatives' isn't that they want to keep everything exactly as it is today, but that they want to turn back time, to roll back civilization to when you could refuse to serve blacks or hire women. Is there -anyone- on earth saying "Yes this 2023 version is perfect we must conserve it", or is everyone supposing that replacing it with something else (whether it looks futuristic or retrograde) would cause more happiness?
Conservatives, like deontologists, should be moderates rather than absolutists. They should be open to the possibility that a *sufficiently* better outcome can justify replacement. They just don't think it should be as cheap/easy as utilitarianism implies. So I don't think that one-shot conservatives should be too bothered by the objection that replacement is still possible on their view. The moderate "spirit" of their view just requires that replacement is not justified by merely *marginal* improvements.
Your counterexample to long term conservatism doesn't hold water for me. It seems to me like a world where people live forever is much more of a utopia than one where people die, even if the people who die are happier moment to moment.
Remember that when assessing how positive a life is, you add up how positive it is over a person's entire life. So when comparing the "utopia" of very happy people to the world of moderately happy immortals, you wouldn't compare 100 years of the immortals' lives to the lives of the very happy people. You'd compare the immortals' entire lives to the very happy peoples' entire lives. Since the immortals live a very long time in your example, they are probably far, far happier than the people in the "utopia." Even if the very happy peoples' lives are 10, 100, even 1000 times better, moment to moment, the immortal has lived so long that their cumulative life is far better.
I think in general your framing of both long term and short term conservatism suffer from relying too much on time, rather than taking a timeless view of people's lives. I think a better framing would be to have two types of conservatism: one in which when someone is replaced there is a fixed penalty in value for doing so, and one where the penalty is a ratio of however much value the replaced person would have generated had they not been replaced. I suppose there could also be a hybrid view that has a fixed penalty to start with that then increases in severity relative to how happy a person's life was. I am not sure which of these best captures Cohen's intuition best and has the least counterintuitive conclusions, but they definitely seem better than standard utilitarianism.
A few thoughts—
1) The lack of realistic examples makes this far less compelling, at least to me.
2) The demonstrated reliability of a valued thing is itself be a source of value that a new, apparently more valuable, desired object may not be able to demonstrate immediately, since it hasn't had the time to show it is just as reliable. This can apply to new gadgets or interpersonal relationships.
3) The discussion of value seems one-dimensional and not in keeping with human nature. It also isn't clear who is doing the valuing at times, and it isn't clear how we can actually compare the various scenarios you describe in anything other than fairly superficial ways.
The words 'conservatism' and 'liberalism' appear too freighted with other meaning. Let's say that some thought-experiment superintelligence selects a human at random to set global policy, and this individual indicates society should be reverted to the way it was in the 1920s, or the 1320s, or the mesolithic because of a belief that older ways of doing things and being human provided more overall happiness, though in ways that sometimes are repugnant to modern folk. This would appear a kind of radical choice against conserving existing value for the sake of greater future value, even though that future would look like the past. And yet precisely the argument against 'conservatives' isn't that they want to keep everything exactly as it is today, but that they want to turn back time, to roll back civilization to when you could refuse to serve blacks or hire women. Is there -anyone- on earth saying "Yes this 2023 version is perfect we must conserve it", or is everyone supposing that replacing it with something else (whether it looks futuristic or retrograde) would cause more happiness?