Embracing the "sadistic" conclusion

The debate about the zero level is interesting - Anders told me his zero is lower than I described, that you can get worse and still have a life worth living.

Your idea has merit, but the hedonistic treadmill is a problem - people would not want to dream a life much worse than their own, whatever the absolute value of it.

If this means what it appears to, that takes you outside the realm of welfarist axiologies -- in which case Arrhenius' impossibility results don't even apply.

My understanding is that they would apply even stronger - more extraneous factors you add, the more likely you are to get one or more of the impossibility results (eg you can get the sadist conclusion in "total utilitarianism + intrinsic value for art").

However, this view can lie well within the realm of welfarist. Only personal preferences need be counted (the welfarist assumption makes no requirement about how they be aggregated).

When I said "non-personal preferences", I did not put the cut directly at the welfarist-non-welfarist boundary. But anyway, here are some things I suspect would make it into my finale population ethics:

• Some value to more equal systems (also between groups).
• Some value to diversity of existing beings.
• In contrast, some very broad set of criteria that encompass "the human condition" and possibly reduced value to entities outside that.
• Some small value to cultural entities such as cultures and tradition groups (though this may be contained within diversity).
• Some small value to the continued existence of certain human practices that seem worthwhile (eg making stories, valuing truth to some extent).
• Some intrinsic value to the "individual liberties" of today.
• Possibly some value to continued society progress.
• Avoidance of the repugnant conclusion.
• Asymmetry between birth and death.

As you can see, it's far from a well formed whole, yet! Most of these (apart from the birth-death asymmetry, not rep concl, and possibly diversity) I don't hold particularly strongly, and would just prefer some accommodation. ie if most people are part of the same huge, happy monoculture, a much smaller number of people in alternate cultures (with the possibility of others joining them) would be fine.

I think trying to be clinical is useful in terms of slicing up the space of interacting factors and discovering which are actually driving our intuitions, and which merely get swept up along the way and tainted by association because of the examples we first thought of.

There definitely a need for clinical detachment, but I think there's also a time for emotional engagement. Decomposing our intuitions may sometimes just destroy them for no good reason (eg how bureaucracies can commit atrocities because responsibility is diffused, and no individual component is doing something strongly wrong).

Several different points:

First of all, the general point is that reducing a (standard, western) human to "zero welfare" would involve inflicting great pain and suffering upon them, which would get you reviled and imprisoned, with judges unlikely to be impressed by your philosophical justification.

I find that a rather odd statement. Isn't "zero welfare", by definition, the amount of welfare such that any life with greater welfare is a life which it is good to create?

That's a bit question begging, as some ethical systems have zero welfare, but don't generally advocate creating people at that level. My favourite definition, for what it's worth, would be that "lives below zero welfare are not worth creating in any circumstances (unless as instrumental goals for something else)".

Similarly, if creating a just-barely-worth-living life is repugnant, then creating any life is repugnant.

Most ethical system that reject the repugnant conclusion also reject that argument. How do they do it? Generally by making the decision on the creation of lives dependent on the existence of other lives. Average utilitarianism would advocate against creating lives below the average, advocate for creating lives above the average (indeed average utilitrianism, uniquely among population ethics as far as I can tell, does not need a "zero" level). Egalitarianism would advocate creating any life above zero that didn't decrease equality, etc...

So all these systems would have some situation in which creating a life just above zero would be good, and (many) situations in which it would be bad.

There's no particular reason why we should expect highly abstract aspects of our random-walk psychological presets to be elegant or simply defined. As such, it's practically guaranteed that they won't be.

Maybe a better phrasing would be that we don't a priori expect them to be simple...

Yes, but this is the "consider my population unchangeable" case I mentioned, wherein "average" and "total" cease being distinct. Certainly if we calculate average utility by summing 1 won-at-roulette future with 37 killed-myself futures and dividing by 38, then we get a lousy result, but it (as well as the result of any other hypothetical future plans) is isomorphic to what we'd have gotten if we'd obtained total utility by summing those futures and then not dividing. To distinguish average utility from total utility we have to be able to make plans which affect the denominator of that average.

Not for hedonistic utlitarianism - there only fear of death is bad (or the death of people who don't get replaced by others of equivalent or equal happiness).

So is the sadist conclusion - that specific issues hasn't come up in reality, though analogues may have (similar to the trolley problem)

Yes, disrupting perfect equality is a good thing in itself. I think that moral systems are not in any way laws of nature, but social constructs, and should be evaluated not by some higher principles, but by their effect on society. In practice equality mean stagnation, therefore any moral system that holds perfect equality as an ideal is flawed. There is an optimal level of inequality for any given circumstances, and it is never zero.