To capture anti-death intuitions, include memory in utilitarianism

If we pick an appropriate value for the "not alive anymore" penalty, then it won't be so large as to outweigh all other considerations, but enough that situations with unnecessary death will be evaluated as clearly worse than ones where that death could have been prevented.

Under your solution, every life created implies infinite negative utility. Due to thermodynamics or whatever (big rip? other cosmological disaster that happens before heat death?) we can't keep anyone alive forever. No matter how slow the rate of disutility accumulation, the infinite time after the end of all sentience makes it dominate everything else.

If I understand you correctly, then your solution is that the utility function actually changes every time someone is created, so before that person is created, you don't care about their death. One weird result of this is that if there will soon be a factory that rapidly creates and then painlessly destroys people, we don't object (And while the factory is running, we are feeling terrible about everything that has happened in it so far, but we still don't care to stop it). Or to put it in less weird terms, we won't object to spreading some kind of poison which affects newly developing zygotes, reducing their future lifespan painlessly.

There's also the incentive for an agent with this system to self-modify to stop changing their utility function over time.

If a living person X is painlessly murdered at time T, then this is worse than if the X's parents had simply chosen not to have a child at time T-20, even though both acts would have resulted in X not existing at time T+1.

Example 1:

On a planet Utopia, people live 1000 years in perfect health and happiness. There is no war, starvation, pain, or other things typical on the planet Earth. Just a life full of pleasures, and then a quick and painless death. Mr. and Ms. A decided to have children.

Example 2:

Mr. and Ms. B think that babies are cute, but teenagers are super annoying. They don't care about being alone when they are old; they just want to maximize their pleasures of parenthood. They decided to have a lot of babies, give them a perfect life while they are small, and to kill them painlessly when they start being annoying.

Both examples could be seen as instances of the same problem, namely -- whether it is morally good to create a happy life that must end at some time -- and yet, my feelings about them are very different.

What your article basically shows is that to keep utilitarianism consistent with our moral intuition we have to introduce a fudge factor that favors people (such as us) who are or were alive. Having made this explicit next we should ask if this preference is morally justified. For me, however, it doesn't seem all that far from someone saying "I'm a utilitarian but my intuition strongly tells me that people with characteristic X are more important than everyone else so I'm going to amend utilitarianism by giving greater weight to the welfare of X-men." Although since the "Repugnant Conclusion" has never seemed repugnant to me, I'm probably an atypical utilitarian.

I've written earlier that utilitarianism* completely breaks down if you try to go specific enough.

Just consider brain simulators, where a new state is computer from the current state, then the current state is overwritten. So the utility of new state has to be greater than the utility of current state. At which point you'd want to find a way to compute maximum utility state without computing intermediate steps. The trade-offs between needs of different simulators of different ages also end up working wrongly.

• i assume that utilitarianism has some actual content, beyond trivialities such as assigning utility of 1 to actions prescribed by some kind of virtue ethics and 0 to all other actions, and then claiming that it is utilitarian.

Seems to me like having a continuance bonus rather than a death penalty would make more sense. And of course you'd need to encode a mutual information penalty so you don't overwrite everyone with the same oldest person.

At each time, score 1 for each distinct memory in a living person? (not complete UFU, just one term)

incorporating a history to the utility function.

That should definitely be part of the solution. In fact, I would say that utility functions defined over individual world-states, rather than entire future-histories, should not have ever been considered in the first place. The effects of your actions are not restricted to a single time-slice of the universe, so you cannot maximize expected utility if your utility function takes only a single time-slice as input. (Also because special relativity.)

Suppose that a person X is born at time T: we enter the fact of "X was born" into the utility function's memory. From now, for every future state the UF checks whether or not X is still alive. If yes, good, if not, that state loses one point of utility.

maintaining a memory of the amount of peak well-being that anyone has ever had, and if they fall below their past peak well-being, apply the difference as a penalty. So if X used to have 50 points of well-being but now only has 25, then we apply an extra -25 to the utility of that scenario.

These are kludge-y answers to special cases of a more general issue: we care about the preferences existing people have for the future. Presumably X himself would prefer a future in which he keeps his 50 points of well-being over a future where he has 25 and Y pops into existence with 25 as well, whereas Y is not yet around to have a preference. I don't see what the peak well-being that X has ever experienced has anything to do with it. If we were considering whether to give X an additional 50 units of well-being (for a total of 100), or bring into existence Y with 50 units of well-being, it seems to me that exactly the same considerations would come into play.

We can fix this by incorporating a history to the utility function.

I think this is a sensible modelling as we value life exactly because of the continuity over time.

This does complicate matters a lot thought because it is not clear how the history should be taken into account. At least no obvious model as for the UFUs suggests itself (except for the trivial one to ignore the history).

Your examples sound plausible but I guess that trying to model human intuition of this leads to very complex functions.

If a living person X is painlessly murdered at time T, then this is worse than if the X's parents had simply chosen not to have a child at time T-20, even though both acts would have resulted in X not existing at time T+1.

I don't share this intuition.

We can fix this by incorporating a history to the utility function. ...

Or tl;dr: you are changing the utility function to fit it more closely to your experienced desires. Well, your utility function can be anything at all, it's "not up for grabs", as we say, which means that it is totally up for grabs by the person whose function it is.

But there's a meta-issue here. If you have a moral theory, whether utilitarianism of any sort or something else, and you find it yields conclusions that you find morally repugnant, from what standpoint can you resolve the conflict?

You can't just say "the theory says this, therefore it's right," because where did the theory come from? Neither can you say "my inner moral sense trumps the theory," or what was the theory for? Modus ponens versus modus tollens. When a theory derived from your intuitions has implications that contradict your intuitions, how do you resolve the conflict? Where can you stand, to do so?

As Socrates might ask a modern Euthyphro, "are the injunctions of your theory good because they follow from the theory, or do they follow from the theory because they are good?" In the first case, whence the theory? In the second, whence the good?

Why the time factor? I don't find it particularly matches my intuitions directly, and as pointed out it makes having children arbitrarily bad (which also doesn't match my intuitions). Say we give each person's death a particular negative utility - histories in which they die get that single penalty regardless of time (though other independent time factors might apply, such as the sadness of their loved ones). Does that fit any better or worse with your conception of death morality?

(Incidentally, I was thinking about this just a few hours ago. Interesting how reading the same comment can trigger similar lines of thought.)

Devil as always, seems to lie in the details, but as I see it some people may see it as a feature:

Assuming I am a forward looking agent who aims to maximize long term, not short term utility.

What is the utility of a person that is being currently preserved in suspended animation with hope of future revival? Am I being penalized as much as for a person who was, say, cremated?

Are we justified to make all current humans unhappy (without sacrificing their lives of course), so that means of reviving dead people are created faster, so that we can stop being penalized for their ended lifespans?

Wouldn't it be only prudent to stop creation of new humans, until we can ensure their lifespans would reach end of the universe, to avoid taking negative points?

Antinatalism is the claim that because life will always include suffering then death, conception is as bad as murder.