Total Utility is Illusionary

Instead, every time you arrive at a decision point, evaluate what action to take by checking the utility of your constituents from each action. I propose that we call this "delta utilitarianism", because it isn't looking at the total or the average, just at the delta in utility from each action.

If you look at the sum of all of the actions if you choose option A minus the sum of all the actions if you take option B, then all of the actions until then will cancel out, and you get just the difference in utility between option A and option B. They're equivalent.

Technically, delta utilitarianism is slightly more resistant to infinities. As long as any two actions have a finite difference, you can calculate it, even if the total utility is infinite. I don't think that would be very helpful.

If, as you propose, you completely ignore the welfare of people who don't exist yet, then it seems to me you will give rather odd answers to questions like this: You and your partner are going to have a baby. There is some spiffy new technology that enables you to ensure that the baby will not have nasty genetic conditions like Down's syndrome, cystic fibrosis, spina bifida, etc. For some reason the risk of these is otherwise rather high. How much are you willing to pay for the new technology to be applied?

Your system will presumably not make the answer be zero because the parents will probably be happier with a healthier child. But it seems like the numbers it produces will be underestimates.

(There are other things I find confusing and possibly-wrong in this proposal, but that may simply indicate that I haven't understood it. But I'll list some of them anyway. I don't think anyone -- "total utilitarian" or not -- wants to do utility calculations in much like the way your hypothetical Bob does; your proposal still needs a way of aggregating utilities across people, and that's at least as problematic as aggregating utilities over time; the argument for the "repugnant conclusion" doesn't in fact depend on aggregating utilities over time anyway; your system is plainly incomplete since it says nothing about how it does aggregate the utilities of "your constituents" when making a decision.)

I can't figure out what you're trying to say.

When people talk about utility, they often end up plagued by ambiguity in their definitions. In the context of decision theory, the domain of a utility function has to take into account everything that the agent cares about and that their decisions effect (including events that happen in the future, so it doesn't make sense to talk about the utility an agent is experiencing at a particular time), and the agent prefers probability distributions over outcomes that have higher expected utility. In the context of classical utilitarianism, utility is basically just a synonym for happiness. How are you trying to use the term here?

Edit: From your clarification, it sounds like you're actually talking about aggregated group utility, rather than individual utility, and just claiming that the utilities being aggregated should consist of the utility functions of the people who currently exist, not the utility functions of the people who will exist in the outcome being considered. But I'm still confused because your original example only referred to a single person.

It's not obvious that you've gained anything here. We can reduce to total utilitarianism -- just assume that everyone's utility is zero at the decision point. You still have the repugnant conclusion issue where you're trying to decide whether to create more people or not based on summing utilities across populations.

Sorry for posting a comment despite not really thinking about the matter very strenuously.

It seems to me that the post is about the formalisms of temporary utility and constant utility.

It would seem to me that the stamps, as used in the text, would actually provide temporary utility whenever they would make the person collecting them happy for a limited period of time, the same with watching movies.

So if you want to do this total utility thing, then perhaps it simply needs to be formulated in the manner of utility over time. And total utility would be expected or average utility over time.

We have the notion of total utilitarianism, in which the government tries to maximize the sum of the utility values of each of its constituents. This leads to "repugnant conclusion" issues in which the government generates new constituents at a high rate until all of them are miserable.

We also have the notion of average utilitarianism, in which the government tries to maximize the average of the utility values of each of its constituents. This leads to issues -- I'm not sure if there's a snappy name -- where the government tries to kill off the least happy constituents so as to bring the average up.

Not quite. If our societal utility function S(n) = n x U(n), where n is the number of people in the society, and U(n) is the average utility gain per year per person (which decreases as n increases, for high n, because of over crowding and resource scarcity), then you don't maximise S(n) by just increasing n until U(n) reaches 0. There will be an optimum n, for which 1 x U(n+1) - the utility from yet one more citizen, is less than n x ( U(n) - U(n+1) ) - the loss of utility by the other n citizens from adding that person.

It might be useful to distinguish between the actual total utility experienced so far, and the estimates of that which can be worked out from various view points.

Suppose we break it down by week. If during the first week of March 2014, Bob finds utility (eg pleasure) in watching movies, collecting stamps, and in owning stamp collections, and in having watched movies (4 different things), then you'd multiply the duration (1 week) by the rate at which those things add to his utility experienced to get how much you add to his total lifetime utility experienced.

If, during the second week of March, a fire destroys his stamp collection, that wouldn't reduce his lifetime total. What it would do is reduce the rate at which he added to that total during the following weeks.

"Instead, every time you arrive at a decision point, evaluate what action to take by checking the utility of your constituents from each action. I propose that we call this "delta utilitarianism", because it isn't looking at the total or the average, just at the delta in utility from each action."

Perhaps we could call it "marginal utility."