It's not true that views which put all wellbeing on equal footing imply that Monoculture is better than Variety. Monoculture would be a version of the experience machine, where everyone's relationships are 100% fake (since they're all qualitative duplicates of the best-off person in Variety, that means that none of the other people from Variety exist, so all their experiences of having a relationship with those other people must be fake). On either a preference or objective list theory of wellbeing, this is going to leave them much worse-off than the people in Variety. On the other hand, if you try to modify the scenario so that people in Monoculture aren't radically deceived about everything in their entire lives, then there's no longer any reason to think they'll be happier than the average person in Variety - most likely, they will be much less happy, since they live in a much more boring world and don't meet anyone who's different from them, so they get no interesting social interactions. I think this latter case is what leads to the intuition that a diverse world is much better than a homogenous one - it's because it's better for the individual people in the world for it to be diverse, not because the distribution of types of wellbeing matters for its own sake.
I also think the saturation view has its own version of the Repugnant Conclusion, which is much, much worse than the original version. You have to accept that an arbitrarily small increase of wellbeing for a single person could outweigh an arbitrarily large increase of wellbeing for arbitrarily many people as long as the latter was a type of wellbeing that had been experienced many times already and the former wasn't. On this view, it would be better to give one person a single M&M, rather than to give infinitely many people lives of perfect bliss (who currently live lives not worth living) as long as no one has ever eaten an M&M or something similar to it before, while many people have already had lives of perfect bliss of the same sort you're going to give to the infinity people. So we still end up with a situation where it could be better for lots of people to live lives barely worth living (or even not worth living at all), rather than everyone living lives of perfect bliss, except that now the tradeoff is not a massively larger population, but a single person experiencing the tiniest of pleasures. If negative wellbeing is handled the same way as positive wellbeing, you can get even worse implications - it could be good to take infinitely many people living lives of perfect eternal bliss, and instead send them to lives of eternal torment, all so that a single person can eat an M&M, so long as the space in the wellbeing landscape for the particular kinds of bliss and torment in question are already saturated by other people.
It also doesn't solve infinite ethics, but makes it much worse. On the Saturation view, if infinitely many people have already had some kind of experience, then its marginal value goes to zero. So in an infinite world, nothing would matter at all - every type of wellbeing is already saturated, so any marginal change in wellbeing makes no difference whatsoever. You can go around murdering people, and it will make no difference at all to how good the world is.
I also think that, structurally, this theory just doesn't match up with what really matters. There's a common objection to utilitarianism that says that it ignores the separateness of persons, and while that argument is complete nonsense when it comes to traditional versions of utilitarianism, which treat every individual's wellbeing as a distinct token of goodness that matters for the sake of that individual, and whose value isn't affected by others' wellbeing, the objection applies in full force against the Saturation view. Different individuals' wellbeing can't be treated separately here, because it turns out your wellbeing doesn't matter as much if it's a type others have already experienced. Wellbeing is no longer good for the sake of the individual experiencing it, but for the sake of making to total collection of pleasures in the world as diverse as possible.
I really enjoy your thinking around philosophy and this piece specifically. However, I fear the Saturation View makes a large incorrect assumption which causes many of its benefits to disappear.
You write that "There’s an upper bound on brightness that can never quite be reached" clarifying that "Total achievable value is bounded above". I agree that a genuine upper bound resolves issues of fanaticism and the repugnant conclusion. But what motivates a hard ceiling compared to a logarithm which is also concave with diminishing returns; but unbounded? With an unbounded function this means the problem of the repugnant conclusion returns: Instead of trading n barely happy lives for a utopia, we could now trade 10^n (or whatever the discount rate implies).
I think intuitions in base utilitarianism push against such a ceiling. Regarding your analogy, it would say the brightness limit is in the eye and not the territory. The Point of View of the Universe would delight in a new happy person existing, no matter how many similar minds there are already.
This isn't to endorse pure maximizing EV utilitarianism for population ethics however. I think moral uncertainty and risk aversion can resolve some of these problems more naturally. Having diversity of minds hedges for uncertainty given both what is good and the uncertainty around sentience.
These also resolve repugnant conclusion worries in particular. Different moral theories have different definitions of "a life barely worth living". It ranges from hedonistic utilitarianism's sum Planck second of epsilon utility to Mill's hours at the opera, to something even more demanding. If you have credence across many theories and are risk averse, then satisfying "a life barely worth living" leads to a dimensional and rich life; removing the repugnancy from the repugnant conclusion's Z world.
This is exciting and I look forward to the paper. The homogeneity problem seems really important and indeed unappreciated. But I don’t see how it avoids the repugnant conclusion. You write:
“But, on the Saturation view, barely-positive lives can only illuminate a tiny corner of the landscape.”
This might be true for lives at a constant low level of wellbeing but not for lives that have lots of ups and downs and are barely positive on balance, right? Such lives could have all the variety and diversity we like, just add enough pain alongside (or before or after) it in the life. Sufficiently many of those lives, which are barely worth living at all, would still be better, on your view, than a billion marvelous lives.
Interesting analysis, but doesn’t this view suffer from the major drawback that whether or not it’s good to help people in the here and now and how good different things are compared to each other becomes dependent on what’s going on in galaxy‘s far away or other universes. Seems problematic, especially since we actually have very little idea of what’s going on outside the visible universe or in other universes which implies a radical level of uncertainty about what to do in the here and now.
The Saturation View is neat and it's great to get something genuinely new in population ethics, but it seems obvious to me that Homogeneity is better than Variety.
To move from Homogeneity to Variety, you have to make some particular person's life worse without making anyone else's life better. And what can you say to that harmed person? You can point to the increased variety in the universe, but the facts of the case imply that absolutely no one benefits from this variety. No one cares about this increased variety, at least in some sense of the word 'care.' You yourself -- the person choosing Variety over Homogeneity -- wouldn't care if you were incarnated into this universe.
I think Bostrom puts a thought like this pretty well in Deep Utopia: "the question is not 'How interesting is a utopia to look at?' but rather 'How good is it to live in?'."
Interesting theory, and it does solve a lot of paradoxes. But, just to play the devil's advocate: I have an identical twin brother, our lives and experiences are eerily similar. Do I now have less moral worth than normal people?
This seems similar to Scott Alexander's (tongue-in-cheek) answer to Theodicy that God creates evil because there are only so many sufficiently distinguishable worlds with above-zero quality.
- What would falsify or refine your particular selection of saturation curve?
- How would you refine it under knightian uncertainty in terms of civ or X-risk...and how would it differ from the fractal distribution of diversity we see across the tree of life and human cultures?
- I greatly look forward to getting your reaction to a manuscript I'm working on, 'The Questionable Conclusion', the first half of which works through the utilitarian frame...under pragmatic finitude constraints:
Interesting read. Why does maximising utility necessarily imply a monoculture? Couldn't there be many ways of being that maximise utility per unit of resource - multiple peaks in ways-of-being space?
While I share the intuition that a diversity of experience is better than homogeneity, all else being equal, I believe making diversity a terminal value in this saturation view creates more problems than it solves.
As other comments have pointed out, there are still similarly unintuitive problems with infinity ethics and highly repugnant conclusions.
Furthermore, defining the saturation landscape and function appears quite arbitrary.
Total utilitarianism, in contrast, strikes me as far more elegant. It can easily motivate the instrumental promotion of diversity, as you mentioned yourself in your article, because a more diverse society is better able to generate new ideas, is more resistant to detrimental lock-in scenarios, and offers many other benefits.
The classic repugnant conclusion in total utilitarianism can, I believe, be fairly convincingly argued away by employing instrumental logic, including but not limited to:
1. A population with low average welfare but significant variance would presumably include a non-negligible fraction of people with negative welfare. Such individuals would likely be significantly less motivated to contribute constructively to society.
2. Similarly, people with low, albeit positive, welfare might believe they have little to lose and much to gain from engaging in dangerous, reckless, or antisocial behavior, or perhaps drug use. These actions would generate negative externalities for society, which were likely not included in the original welfare calculation.
For these reasons, a simplistic application of the repugnant conclusion would not yield the total long-term welfare one might initially expect.
However, when the repugnant conclusion scenario is adjusted with these practical considerations, and assuming the average long-term welfare, all things considered, is indeed as specified, I find it far less repugnant.
In practice, one should still avoid proposing a reduction in the welfare of a current population in favor of creating more, less happy people. This, too, can be explained instrumentally. If people were to expect you would later take actions to reduce their welfare, they would be less likely to cooperate with you. So, in a sense, we owe it to existing people not to unnecessarily worsen their lives.
And then, there is moral uncertainty as well as moral trade, which are practical considerations that motivate one to avoid extreme actions, particularly fanaticism.
However, all these instrumental considerations are compatible with classic total utilitarianism, in my view.
Super cool theory here. It gels with my belief that consciousness is the substrate and locus of all possible value, but that the variety of possible valuable experiences is infinitely expansive.
It offends my sensibilities to imagine the universe being tiled with exact copies of Life A, even if we stipulate that Life A is full of the highest possible welfare experiences a person can have. But I don’t trust my sensibilities here because I believe I’m relying on heuristics about the ordinary value of differences between lives.
But my question about the Saturation View is this.
Imagine again Life A: a full finite life tuned to such a high level of welfare that it is very hard to improve upon it as a finite life. In Life A, the subject experiences every major kind of valuable experience we could identify: friendship, romantic and erotic satisfaction, athleticism, scholarship, art, beauty, moral effort, and so on. Say the subject is a sort of “master of all trades.”
How much of a problem is it, then, to copy that life infinitely many times, as formal welfarism would recommend? If varied high welfare is what matters, by stipulation Life A already gets us a lot of variety. What it doesn’t do is exhaust every possibility on the landscape. The intuition against copying a life infinitely many times, I think, comes from the ordinary-world fact that repeated templates are usually impoverished and thin. But in this thought experiment, the repeated template isn’t impoverished. It is highly varied and rich.
Does it matter that this rich, balanced life doesn’t include infinitely many different kinds of lives that are less balanced but still high welfare? For example, Life B, the artistic ascetic who only does one very specific kind of painting and lives like a monk. Life A includes art, but it doesn’t include a whole (high-welfare) life organized around one narrow artistic obsession. Pick any other example you please. Does it matter that these highly varied lives are excluded from the Life-A-copied-over-and-over universe?
If the grain of the relevant value-space is broad, Life A may cover the important territory and thus be copyable. If the grain is extremely fine, then every specialized or lopsided life adds something new. But then the view risks fetishizing novelty, as opposed to just variegated welfare. And if it’s fetishizing novelty, it seems like we’re just collecting permutations rather than valuing morally important forms of flourishing.
Variety seems to matter, but perhaps the monoculture objection is strongest when it applies to thin lives and weaker when it applies to very rich lives. Which outcome is more desirable: tiling the universe with one maximally rich and high-welfare life, or tiling the universe with instantiations of every possible variation worth distinguishing, because the variation itself is valuable?
Like nearly all of today's systems of value, this one also presumes in advance that conscious experience is all that matters -- the life experience, the movie, of separate "beings" that "have" consciousness. Where do contemporary people get such assumptions?
It raises interesting questions about the conditions for experience identicality. Can two identical -- in first person subjective experience -- qualia be nevertheless distinct?
I don’t know about the math, but in maybe almost the same model we can be agnostic, or undecided about utility. We don’t know how to live, and so living the maximum variety of possible lives, is a good strategy—you feel around if it’s dark. As a moral aim, the goal to increase the territory of possible lives is in some situations more instructive than the slipperiness of utility. I think that there is also an interesting angle here in the bounds that are created, when contingently flung beings aim towards boundlessness. Some types of life experience are not compatible with others. Some moves constrict possibility rather than expand it. We can get pretty far I think by considering which types of lives or actions in a life increase the potential for variety, and which decrease. When we’ve gotten that far and look up, did we need some concept of utility at all to get us there?
Hi Dhruva—yes! This is what I was maybe trying to articulate in a way. Not at all my discipline, so I find your linked post hard to follow, despite its clear exposition. I don’t think that I’ll ever be in a position to comment intelligently on Lineage Filtration Theory, from an evolutionary science perspective. However, it maybe accords or at least resonates with my intuitions about morality in response to MacAskill’s post here. I think that maximizing the plurality of that which persists is a moral end, and maybe even sufficient to drop the utility portion of MacAskill’s theory. An architecture which gets the greater variance of lineages through filtration events is more moral, than an architecture in which the lineages are less varied. My not-fully-explored intuition is that this is enough normative content—and we maybe don’t also need to look at and count the positive utility of individuals living within that architecture, to judge one possible world as better. Variety has inherent bounds due to evolutionary pressures, starting conditions etc. However, I think those bounds are maybe enough normative content to work with?There is something restrictive about evil. Murder and slavery, limit possibility in obvious senses. There might be ways of re-framing immoral actions as variance/ possessing possibility limiting, rather than as negative utility/value. If we work on maximizing the possible variety of that which persists (recognizing this isn’t unbounded), then I think that maybe this isn’t meaningfully different from working on some mixture of variety and positive utility as prescribed by MacAskill here. I know that this is a leap, and I don’t have it fleshed out enough to argue for it fulsomely. Maybe, even if we don’t thing of it as such our moral sense is a kind of architecture to navigate through Lineage Extinction Filters? Just spit balling here.
As there is neither infinite energy nor certainty *unbounded variance seeking* is a path to ruin. Sexual reproduction shows how you balance homogeneity with variety...wisely, as per Constraint 3 below, you need ~non-varying (biological or cultural) architecture to avoid self-destructive dynamics:
Rationalists and futurists would do well to realize that ‘lighting up the landscape of possible experiences’ is related to the vast internal, phenomenological, and embodiment issues at hand.
We have terrible lanterns, search lights, and maps for what it actually means to be human to the variety and degrees that exist.
The homogeneity problem has roots in what was overlooked in the last few hundred years, as emphasis was on discerning reducible and symmetry-maintaining laws - which is good for certain insights, but lacking in others.
So yes, cheers to keeping the means of exploration, curiosity, capacity, and articulation of experience alive.
I sometimes toyed with thoughts like this when considering my lack of concern for other animal life. The way I figure it the loss of a cat dying or not flourishing etc. is probably less than of a much more diverse and rich human life being spoiled. However this is quite likely rationalization for my small mindedness, so the move is suspect.
There is a weird tension in the way population ethics is considered. In real life variety is valuable for practical reasons, diverse populations are less susceptible to disease, experimenting with things generates new ideas, new technologies, new ways of living and so on. Also enforcing homogeneity has clear human costs (absent some perfect humane means of social control). The sort of motives for homogeneity you list seem to wish away such practical considerations, they assume everything that can be known will, everything that can be invented will, every way of life that can be lived will have been tried its parameters known, there will be no surprises, no disasters, everyone will behave appropraitely and so on. A perfect instrumentality will render all instrumental virtues and considerations null, we merely judge it good, will it and it happens.
If so would there really be a motive for homogeneity. Surely variety would be as easy as homogeneity with perfect instrumentality and could be engineered by our perfect imagineers to bring about just as much felicity and so on. If there is no such perfect control of outcomes to be had, the practical arguments for diversity return.
I think we have deep problems with reasoning on this abstract level. Both because we confuse our autotelechies and our instrumental ends and because we wish away practical problems only to bring them in through the backdoor to create a dilemma and so on.
It's not true that views which put all wellbeing on equal footing imply that Monoculture is better than Variety. Monoculture would be a version of the experience machine, where everyone's relationships are 100% fake (since they're all qualitative duplicates of the best-off person in Variety, that means that none of the other people from Variety exist, so all their experiences of having a relationship with those other people must be fake). On either a preference or objective list theory of wellbeing, this is going to leave them much worse-off than the people in Variety. On the other hand, if you try to modify the scenario so that people in Monoculture aren't radically deceived about everything in their entire lives, then there's no longer any reason to think they'll be happier than the average person in Variety - most likely, they will be much less happy, since they live in a much more boring world and don't meet anyone who's different from them, so they get no interesting social interactions. I think this latter case is what leads to the intuition that a diverse world is much better than a homogenous one - it's because it's better for the individual people in the world for it to be diverse, not because the distribution of types of wellbeing matters for its own sake.
I also think the saturation view has its own version of the Repugnant Conclusion, which is much, much worse than the original version. You have to accept that an arbitrarily small increase of wellbeing for a single person could outweigh an arbitrarily large increase of wellbeing for arbitrarily many people as long as the latter was a type of wellbeing that had been experienced many times already and the former wasn't. On this view, it would be better to give one person a single M&M, rather than to give infinitely many people lives of perfect bliss (who currently live lives not worth living) as long as no one has ever eaten an M&M or something similar to it before, while many people have already had lives of perfect bliss of the same sort you're going to give to the infinity people. So we still end up with a situation where it could be better for lots of people to live lives barely worth living (or even not worth living at all), rather than everyone living lives of perfect bliss, except that now the tradeoff is not a massively larger population, but a single person experiencing the tiniest of pleasures. If negative wellbeing is handled the same way as positive wellbeing, you can get even worse implications - it could be good to take infinitely many people living lives of perfect eternal bliss, and instead send them to lives of eternal torment, all so that a single person can eat an M&M, so long as the space in the wellbeing landscape for the particular kinds of bliss and torment in question are already saturated by other people.
It also doesn't solve infinite ethics, but makes it much worse. On the Saturation view, if infinitely many people have already had some kind of experience, then its marginal value goes to zero. So in an infinite world, nothing would matter at all - every type of wellbeing is already saturated, so any marginal change in wellbeing makes no difference whatsoever. You can go around murdering people, and it will make no difference at all to how good the world is.
I also think that, structurally, this theory just doesn't match up with what really matters. There's a common objection to utilitarianism that says that it ignores the separateness of persons, and while that argument is complete nonsense when it comes to traditional versions of utilitarianism, which treat every individual's wellbeing as a distinct token of goodness that matters for the sake of that individual, and whose value isn't affected by others' wellbeing, the objection applies in full force against the Saturation view. Different individuals' wellbeing can't be treated separately here, because it turns out your wellbeing doesn't matter as much if it's a type others have already experienced. Wellbeing is no longer good for the sake of the individual experiencing it, but for the sake of making to total collection of pleasures in the world as diverse as possible.
Hi Will,
I really enjoy your thinking around philosophy and this piece specifically. However, I fear the Saturation View makes a large incorrect assumption which causes many of its benefits to disappear.
You write that "There’s an upper bound on brightness that can never quite be reached" clarifying that "Total achievable value is bounded above". I agree that a genuine upper bound resolves issues of fanaticism and the repugnant conclusion. But what motivates a hard ceiling compared to a logarithm which is also concave with diminishing returns; but unbounded? With an unbounded function this means the problem of the repugnant conclusion returns: Instead of trading n barely happy lives for a utopia, we could now trade 10^n (or whatever the discount rate implies).
I think intuitions in base utilitarianism push against such a ceiling. Regarding your analogy, it would say the brightness limit is in the eye and not the territory. The Point of View of the Universe would delight in a new happy person existing, no matter how many similar minds there are already.
This isn't to endorse pure maximizing EV utilitarianism for population ethics however. I think moral uncertainty and risk aversion can resolve some of these problems more naturally. Having diversity of minds hedges for uncertainty given both what is good and the uncertainty around sentience.
These also resolve repugnant conclusion worries in particular. Different moral theories have different definitions of "a life barely worth living". It ranges from hedonistic utilitarianism's sum Planck second of epsilon utility to Mill's hours at the opera, to something even more demanding. If you have credence across many theories and are risk averse, then satisfying "a life barely worth living" leads to a dimensional and rich life; removing the repugnancy from the repugnant conclusion's Z world.
This is exciting and I look forward to the paper. The homogeneity problem seems really important and indeed unappreciated. But I don’t see how it avoids the repugnant conclusion. You write:
“But, on the Saturation view, barely-positive lives can only illuminate a tiny corner of the landscape.”
This might be true for lives at a constant low level of wellbeing but not for lives that have lots of ups and downs and are barely positive on balance, right? Such lives could have all the variety and diversity we like, just add enough pain alongside (or before or after) it in the life. Sufficiently many of those lives, which are barely worth living at all, would still be better, on your view, than a billion marvelous lives.
Interesting analysis, but doesn’t this view suffer from the major drawback that whether or not it’s good to help people in the here and now and how good different things are compared to each other becomes dependent on what’s going on in galaxy‘s far away or other universes. Seems problematic, especially since we actually have very little idea of what’s going on outside the visible universe or in other universes which implies a radical level of uncertainty about what to do in the here and now.
The Saturation View is neat and it's great to get something genuinely new in population ethics, but it seems obvious to me that Homogeneity is better than Variety.
To move from Homogeneity to Variety, you have to make some particular person's life worse without making anyone else's life better. And what can you say to that harmed person? You can point to the increased variety in the universe, but the facts of the case imply that absolutely no one benefits from this variety. No one cares about this increased variety, at least in some sense of the word 'care.' You yourself -- the person choosing Variety over Homogeneity -- wouldn't care if you were incarnated into this universe.
I think Bostrom puts a thought like this pretty well in Deep Utopia: "the question is not 'How interesting is a utopia to look at?' but rather 'How good is it to live in?'."
Interesting theory, and it does solve a lot of paradoxes. But, just to play the devil's advocate: I have an identical twin brother, our lives and experiences are eerily similar. Do I now have less moral worth than normal people?
This seems similar to Scott Alexander's (tongue-in-cheek) answer to Theodicy that God creates evil because there are only so many sufficiently distinguishable worlds with above-zero quality.
- What would falsify or refine your particular selection of saturation curve?
- How would you refine it under knightian uncertainty in terms of civ or X-risk...and how would it differ from the fractal distribution of diversity we see across the tree of life and human cultures?
- I greatly look forward to getting your reaction to a manuscript I'm working on, 'The Questionable Conclusion', the first half of which works through the utilitarian frame...under pragmatic finitude constraints:
https://pragmaticfutures.substack.com/p/minimal-physicalist-axioms-for-modern
Interesting read. Why does maximising utility necessarily imply a monoculture? Couldn't there be many ways of being that maximise utility per unit of resource - multiple peaks in ways-of-being space?
While I share the intuition that a diversity of experience is better than homogeneity, all else being equal, I believe making diversity a terminal value in this saturation view creates more problems than it solves.
As other comments have pointed out, there are still similarly unintuitive problems with infinity ethics and highly repugnant conclusions.
Furthermore, defining the saturation landscape and function appears quite arbitrary.
Total utilitarianism, in contrast, strikes me as far more elegant. It can easily motivate the instrumental promotion of diversity, as you mentioned yourself in your article, because a more diverse society is better able to generate new ideas, is more resistant to detrimental lock-in scenarios, and offers many other benefits.
The classic repugnant conclusion in total utilitarianism can, I believe, be fairly convincingly argued away by employing instrumental logic, including but not limited to:
1. A population with low average welfare but significant variance would presumably include a non-negligible fraction of people with negative welfare. Such individuals would likely be significantly less motivated to contribute constructively to society.
2. Similarly, people with low, albeit positive, welfare might believe they have little to lose and much to gain from engaging in dangerous, reckless, or antisocial behavior, or perhaps drug use. These actions would generate negative externalities for society, which were likely not included in the original welfare calculation.
For these reasons, a simplistic application of the repugnant conclusion would not yield the total long-term welfare one might initially expect.
However, when the repugnant conclusion scenario is adjusted with these practical considerations, and assuming the average long-term welfare, all things considered, is indeed as specified, I find it far less repugnant.
In practice, one should still avoid proposing a reduction in the welfare of a current population in favor of creating more, less happy people. This, too, can be explained instrumentally. If people were to expect you would later take actions to reduce their welfare, they would be less likely to cooperate with you. So, in a sense, we owe it to existing people not to unnecessarily worsen their lives.
And then, there is moral uncertainty as well as moral trade, which are practical considerations that motivate one to avoid extreme actions, particularly fanaticism.
However, all these instrumental considerations are compatible with classic total utilitarianism, in my view.
Super cool theory here. It gels with my belief that consciousness is the substrate and locus of all possible value, but that the variety of possible valuable experiences is infinitely expansive.
It offends my sensibilities to imagine the universe being tiled with exact copies of Life A, even if we stipulate that Life A is full of the highest possible welfare experiences a person can have. But I don’t trust my sensibilities here because I believe I’m relying on heuristics about the ordinary value of differences between lives.
But my question about the Saturation View is this.
Imagine again Life A: a full finite life tuned to such a high level of welfare that it is very hard to improve upon it as a finite life. In Life A, the subject experiences every major kind of valuable experience we could identify: friendship, romantic and erotic satisfaction, athleticism, scholarship, art, beauty, moral effort, and so on. Say the subject is a sort of “master of all trades.”
How much of a problem is it, then, to copy that life infinitely many times, as formal welfarism would recommend? If varied high welfare is what matters, by stipulation Life A already gets us a lot of variety. What it doesn’t do is exhaust every possibility on the landscape. The intuition against copying a life infinitely many times, I think, comes from the ordinary-world fact that repeated templates are usually impoverished and thin. But in this thought experiment, the repeated template isn’t impoverished. It is highly varied and rich.
Does it matter that this rich, balanced life doesn’t include infinitely many different kinds of lives that are less balanced but still high welfare? For example, Life B, the artistic ascetic who only does one very specific kind of painting and lives like a monk. Life A includes art, but it doesn’t include a whole (high-welfare) life organized around one narrow artistic obsession. Pick any other example you please. Does it matter that these highly varied lives are excluded from the Life-A-copied-over-and-over universe?
If the grain of the relevant value-space is broad, Life A may cover the important territory and thus be copyable. If the grain is extremely fine, then every specialized or lopsided life adds something new. But then the view risks fetishizing novelty, as opposed to just variegated welfare. And if it’s fetishizing novelty, it seems like we’re just collecting permutations rather than valuing morally important forms of flourishing.
Variety seems to matter, but perhaps the monoculture objection is strongest when it applies to thin lives and weaker when it applies to very rich lives. Which outcome is more desirable: tiling the universe with one maximally rich and high-welfare life, or tiling the universe with instantiations of every possible variation worth distinguishing, because the variation itself is valuable?
Like nearly all of today's systems of value, this one also presumes in advance that conscious experience is all that matters -- the life experience, the movie, of separate "beings" that "have" consciousness. Where do contemporary people get such assumptions?
It raises interesting questions about the conditions for experience identicality. Can two identical -- in first person subjective experience -- qualia be nevertheless distinct?
I don’t know about the math, but in maybe almost the same model we can be agnostic, or undecided about utility. We don’t know how to live, and so living the maximum variety of possible lives, is a good strategy—you feel around if it’s dark. As a moral aim, the goal to increase the territory of possible lives is in some situations more instructive than the slipperiness of utility. I think that there is also an interesting angle here in the bounds that are created, when contingently flung beings aim towards boundlessness. Some types of life experience are not compatible with others. Some moves constrict possibility rather than expand it. We can get pretty far I think by considering which types of lives or actions in a life increase the potential for variety, and which decrease. When we’ve gotten that far and look up, did we need some concept of utility at all to get us there?
Hi Dhruva—yes! This is what I was maybe trying to articulate in a way. Not at all my discipline, so I find your linked post hard to follow, despite its clear exposition. I don’t think that I’ll ever be in a position to comment intelligently on Lineage Filtration Theory, from an evolutionary science perspective. However, it maybe accords or at least resonates with my intuitions about morality in response to MacAskill’s post here. I think that maximizing the plurality of that which persists is a moral end, and maybe even sufficient to drop the utility portion of MacAskill’s theory. An architecture which gets the greater variance of lineages through filtration events is more moral, than an architecture in which the lineages are less varied. My not-fully-explored intuition is that this is enough normative content—and we maybe don’t also need to look at and count the positive utility of individuals living within that architecture, to judge one possible world as better. Variety has inherent bounds due to evolutionary pressures, starting conditions etc. However, I think those bounds are maybe enough normative content to work with?There is something restrictive about evil. Murder and slavery, limit possibility in obvious senses. There might be ways of re-framing immoral actions as variance/ possessing possibility limiting, rather than as negative utility/value. If we work on maximizing the possible variety of that which persists (recognizing this isn’t unbounded), then I think that maybe this isn’t meaningfully different from working on some mixture of variety and positive utility as prescribed by MacAskill here. I know that this is a leap, and I don’t have it fleshed out enough to argue for it fulsomely. Maybe, even if we don’t thing of it as such our moral sense is a kind of architecture to navigate through Lineage Extinction Filters? Just spit balling here.
As there is neither infinite energy nor certainty *unbounded variance seeking* is a path to ruin. Sexual reproduction shows how you balance homogeneity with variety...wisely, as per Constraint 3 below, you need ~non-varying (biological or cultural) architecture to avoid self-destructive dynamics:
https://pragmaticfutures.substack.com/p/analyzing-the-anti-ruin-architectural
Rationalists and futurists would do well to realize that ‘lighting up the landscape of possible experiences’ is related to the vast internal, phenomenological, and embodiment issues at hand.
We have terrible lanterns, search lights, and maps for what it actually means to be human to the variety and degrees that exist.
The homogeneity problem has roots in what was overlooked in the last few hundred years, as emphasis was on discerning reducible and symmetry-maintaining laws - which is good for certain insights, but lacking in others.
So yes, cheers to keeping the means of exploration, curiosity, capacity, and articulation of experience alive.
I sometimes toyed with thoughts like this when considering my lack of concern for other animal life. The way I figure it the loss of a cat dying or not flourishing etc. is probably less than of a much more diverse and rich human life being spoiled. However this is quite likely rationalization for my small mindedness, so the move is suspect.
There is a weird tension in the way population ethics is considered. In real life variety is valuable for practical reasons, diverse populations are less susceptible to disease, experimenting with things generates new ideas, new technologies, new ways of living and so on. Also enforcing homogeneity has clear human costs (absent some perfect humane means of social control). The sort of motives for homogeneity you list seem to wish away such practical considerations, they assume everything that can be known will, everything that can be invented will, every way of life that can be lived will have been tried its parameters known, there will be no surprises, no disasters, everyone will behave appropraitely and so on. A perfect instrumentality will render all instrumental virtues and considerations null, we merely judge it good, will it and it happens.
If so would there really be a motive for homogeneity. Surely variety would be as easy as homogeneity with perfect instrumentality and could be engineered by our perfect imagineers to bring about just as much felicity and so on. If there is no such perfect control of outcomes to be had, the practical arguments for diversity return.
I think we have deep problems with reasoning on this abstract level. Both because we confuse our autotelechies and our instrumental ends and because we wish away practical problems only to bring them in through the backdoor to create a dilemma and so on.