The value of uniqueness
Nathan ( @NathanpmYoung ), a Twitterist, has conducted an experiment in which he asked people:
Which is better:
A) 1000 people living great lives OR
B) 1 million isolated copies of 1 guy living the same great life.
And found many people picked A, however when he switched the valence and asked:
Which is worse:
A) 1000 people being tortured OR
B) 1 million isolated copies of the one guy being tortured in the same way
He finds the opposite result. Many people picked B as worse.
Mostly I write this post to keep a record of Nathan’s finding, because it seems important, and I am not sure he will write it up himself.
But to say something about the philosophy briefly. Nathan says these intuitions are “somewhat incoherent”. I myself feel only the barest hint of tension between them. I am (*approximately*- counterexamples are possible- even real counterexamples) a eudemonic diversity utilitarian, holding that:
The good= The quantum of flourishing experienced by agents, reduced by some function that represents how repetitive or same their collective experiences are.
But the bad is a much simpler concept. While I think that the good is measured by flourishing- a complex state with many facets- ordinary suffering defines the bad. The absence of flourishing alone isn’t necessarily bad. Consider a safe heroin addict, experiencing perpetual bliss. Such a person isn’t flourishing, but that doesn’t imply their life isn’t bad per se on the eudemonic view- indeed it is a net positive.
In the spirit that the bad is already asymmetric to the good on my view anyway, I see nothing wrong with leaving out the diversity multiplier from badness. Why think the bad needs to be a perfect mirror of the good anyway?
Sometimes intuitions straight forwardly contradict a view, but it is harder to make sense of what is going on when they are said to be “in tension” with a view or “in tension” with other intuitions, as I think Nathan is suggesting about these intuitions (I don’t think he’s really saying they’re incoherent).
My best guess as to what it means to say two intuitions are in tension is that they are not compatible in straightforwardly parsimonious way. However, if parsimony is a virtue in ethics, it seems only very marginally so. Perhaps the realist who thinks ethics is an external set of truths, like chemistry, will be more concerned about such- an interesting way in which metaethics might impinge on first order ethical debate.
Here's a link to the tweet, for anyone looking: https://twitter.com/NathanpmYoung/status/1656731102218682381
(In general I'd recommend including links to any mentioned sources in the body of the post. Unless this was an intentional omission, in which case sorry for undoing your carefully laid plans.)
I think the more important question (and possibly the one Nathan was intending to illicit, though I don't know) is how you count unique individuals at all.
The naive view of uniqueness, where a single person is a single computation being instantiated somewhere, has serious flaws. For example, there was a paper (I forget the name) that pointed out that you can build a two-dimensional water computer and run a human on it. You could then split the computer down the middle with the water flow completely undisrupted and now have two identical yet separate computers; does that suddenly create a second person? Or is the original water computer actually millions of people, one for each atomic width? Seems unintuitive either way.
The usual solution is to go with an informational conception of uniqueness, where a single person is defined by the information that comprises their mental states and experiences. Under this system, 1 million identical people are morally equivalent to a single person, regardless of whether their experiences are positive or negative. But this has its own problems, since it implies that simply creating a bitstring that describes a person experiencing suffering is the same as causing actual suffering.
I imagine you're already familiar with this field, but if not, WaitButWhy has a nice intro: https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/12/what-makes-you-you.html