From: Hal Finney (hal@finney.org)
Date: Thu May 29 2003 - 11:21:54 MDT
Several people have objected to my reductio of the "averagist" position,
the altruist whose goal is to maximize the average happiness of members
of the human race.
I have to admit that I was wrong to neglect the impact of the killing
of half of all people on the happiness of the remainder. So my argument
does not really work.
However I still think there is a core of truth to what I said. Imagine a
race of people who are, for some reason, not bothered if the averagist
kills others. Maybe they think he is God (or maybe he actually is God)
and so they believe that his actions are for the best. Or perhaps their
psychology is simply radically different from ours.
Among such people, the averagist would now proceed to kill all except one.
It is exactly the same principle used if you were given a barrel full
of potatoes, and told that you could remove them such that you should
maximize the average weight of the potatoes in the barrel. The answer
is that you just leave in the heaviest potato. In the same way, the
averagist will kill all but the happiest person.
I don't think most of us would agree that this is a truly altruistic
action, even among people such as I have described, who are not bothered
by the killing of others. Killing all but one of them is incredibly
harmful and is not altruistic in any meaningful sense of the word.
Therefore I still claim that averagism is not a legitimate form of
altruism.
Hal
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Thu May 29 2003 - 11:35:34 MDT