Utilitarianism wins outright part 12

Defending the future

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“The question is not can they speak, nor can they talk, nor can they suffer, but will they be able to suffer and experience happiness.”

—Similar to something cool that Bentham said

I, like most of your, rarely encounter the trolley problem in real life. It’s been at least six months before I’ve had to decide whether or not to give a cookie to Ted Bundy over Mother Teresa. But alongside its many injunctions in hypothetical cases, utilitarianism has significant implications in real world cases. It is, unsurprisingly, correct in all of those cases.

But the number of cases where utilitarianism gets the right answer in the real world surpasses the number of grains of sand on a beach and the number of stars in the sky, which, contra old testament are different numbers. This article shall discuss just one class of cases—cases which both demonstrate the superiority of utilitarianism and why the spread of utilitarianism is so important. It is no exaggeration to say the fate of the world hangs in the balance—utilitarians are the most ardent advocates for making it no longer hanging precariously on the precipice.

The verdict here relates to considerations discussed in the repugnant conclusion post. It can be thought of as a real life version of the repugnant conclusion—but with a much more intuitive result.

Eliezer Yudkowsky once remarked that if people spent five hours a day bashing themselves with baseball bats, they’d come up with convenient excuses for why it gives value to life. He thinks death is similar—we only think crazy things like “death gives meaning to life,” because death is already here. In the absence of death, no one would support bringing it into the world.

This is a partial explanation. However, people also say dumb things about phenomena that don’t exist yet—and they get praised as deep for doing so. When discussing the end of the world people start spouting crazy nonsense. If you google quotes about the end of the world, most of them are stupid.

“It's the end of the world every day, for someone.”

― Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin

What? The end of the world for someone? The end of the world is not “for someone.” It does not describe the end of one life. It, as the words “the world,” suggests denotes the end of the world. One person is not the world.

“End of the human race is just part of an endless life cycle.”

― Toba Beta, Master of Stupidity¹

Things being part of an endless life cycle don’t vindicate them. Getting malaria and dying is part of the life cycle but I think it’s safe to say most of us are not big fans of malaria.

However, beyond even this inane trite about the end of the world being neutral or being part of some natural cycle that Very Serious People understand shouldn’t be worried about, people have moronic views about the end of the world. Utilitarianism correctly identifies that (assuming we predict the future will have positive utility) the end of the world would be very very bad—the worst thing in history by orders of magnitude.

One reason people are opposed to the end of the world is because they think it’s bad when billions of people die. I agree—it is bad when billions die in agony and terror. Yet this is not the main reason to oppose the end of the world. The value of preventing the deaths of everyone currently is far outweighed by the value of humanity’s continued preservation.

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Utilitarianism argues that we should give immense weight to the happiness of future people given the vast number of future people that are likely to exist and their immense capacity for value. 

How many people could exist? Well, Bostrom estimates that with future technology there could be 10^54 years of experience, equivalent to 10^52 hundred year lives. Those lives could be very good. But let’s say you grant this thesis. Well, utilitarianism prescribes that, if this is true, reducing existential threats should be the world’s top priority by orders of magnitude. It is not close. A 1 in a billion chance of 10^52 people is still 10^43. That’s a lot of people. If you tried to fit them all in a boat, you’d need a very big boat.

In order to deny this thesis you’d have to hold that it is not morally good to bring people with good lives into existence. It is, as Narveson says, good to make people happy, but not good to make happy people. However, this view, despite it’s snappy slogan and superficial appeal is disastrously wrong. Horrendously, mind-bendingly wrong. Let’s see the insane things that this entails.

Well, if there’s nothing morally good about making future happy people then if you had a choice of either bringing someone into existence with 10!!! units of happiness or with zero, it would be morally neutral to bring the person with zero units of happiness into existence. This is an insane view. If you could make your child less happy by a factor of infinity, that is bad. These views have to accept that if given the choice, one has no reason to prefer having a happier child, assuming there’s no suffering. This is already an insane implication. It gets crazier.

Well, now lets add suffering to the picture. Each person will be guaranteed to have 5 units of suffering. On this view, unless the happiness gains value only in virtue of the suffering, it would be morally neutral to bring about a child with 10!!! units of happiness and 5 units of suffering over one with 0 units of happiness and 5 units of suffering. Thus, this view has the troubling implication of making it morally neutral to press a button that would make no one who will be born in the future ever happy again. This is very implausible.

Maybe you think there’s an easy way of getting out of this, by saying that happiness can offset suffering, such that if there’s more happiness than suffering then a persons suffering is offset. However, this has a very troubling implication, namely, that it would be morally neutral to reduce everyone who experiences more happiness than misery over the course of their life to the precise threshold at which their happiness equals their misery. If happiness only offsets misery then happiness above the threshold needed to offset all the misery is just an optional extra, with no moral significance, that can be removed without harm. This also required biting the bullet on the first reductio.

Perhaps you think that suffering is a prerequisite for the value of happiness. I see no reason to accept this claim, but if true, it has no significant implications. Future people will undoubtedly have some suffering in their lives. On this account their happiness will still be good given the existence of this. This also requires biting the bullet on the first reductio.

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Presumably we’d all accept that bringing a being into existence who lives a horrific, tortured existence, would be morally bad. It would be seriously morally wrong to press a button which created a child, and then left them to be brutally tortured to death. A libertarian who I once argued with bit the bullet on creating a spawning pit that creates lots of babies directly above furnaces, who fall directly into the furnace, should be legal. I think it’s safe to say, dear reader, that you have more sane sensibilities, and would not bite such an enormous bullet.

So we know that bringing a being with a terrible life into existence is wrong. If we accept that bringing a being with a great life into existence is morally neutral, then it would be wrong to have kids if they had a 99.999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999% chance of having a fantastic life, experiencing more happiness than all humans in history combined, and a miniscule chance (100- the aforementioned number)% of having a slightly bad life, which consisted of getting one papercut. This is an insane view that would also incidentally condemn all having of children, because children are not guaranteed to have good lives.

One could take the view, as many economists do, that we ought to discount the future. However, this view runs into difficulty.  If we take the view that we should  discount the future at a rate of 2% per year, we’d have to hold that 1 person's death today has more moral significance than 1,682,967,360 people dying a thousand years from now, which is deeply counterintuitive.  

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One could take the view that for something to be bad it must be bad for a person.  However, this view runs into problems as well.  If the government passes climate legislation that makes the lives of people in 100 years better, the people will be different because climate policy will change the population.  Thus, this passage of climate policy will be better for no individual.  However, it seems clear that we still have reason to not cause suffering to future people, even though future people would have a changed composition if we improved their lives.  This also requires biting the bullet on all the above reductios.

I am a child of the Montreal protocol. I was born long after it was implemented. It is almost certainly the case that, in the absence of it, I wouldn’t exist. The Montreal protocol almost certainly had a big enough impact on the world to produce the unlikely chain of events that caused my existence. This is true of basically everyone born after Montreal. However, despite that, the Montreal protocol was still good for the future. While I wouldn’t exist sans Montreal, someone else would, and they’d probably have a worse life on average.

This problem, called the non-identity problem, avails all such accounts which ignore the quality of life of future people. If making happy people is not good, then no action which improves the future is good. This is unintuitive to say the least.

There’s a certain intuitive symmetry between pleasure and pain that they who disagree with the case for reducing existential risks must deny. They have to hold that future pleasure is good, but future pain is bad—a strange and ad hoc asymmetry which conflicts with our best judgements.

If one’s life is good, the universe is better for them having been. Contra Benatar, it would not be better for them never to have been.

Perhaps this still seems unintuitive—the notion that reducing existential threats a fraction of a percent is more important than saving millions of lives. There is an obvious explanation of this—it is hard to sympathize with the non existent. Yet as we’ve seen, failure to expand one’s moral circle to everyone is a failing on their part with an incredibly poor track record. Our intuitions are not reliable. We should follow utilitarianism, include everyone in our moral circle, and shut up and multiply.

1. That is actually the title of the book. I haven’t read it but hopefully this was an example of stupidity.