From: Lee Corbin (lcorbin@tsoft.com)
Date: Fri May 30 2003 - 21:21:35 MDT
Wei Dai wrote
> Sent: Thursday, May 29, 2003 12:23 PM
>
> > Therefore I still claim that averagism is not a
> > legitimate form of altruism.
>
> I think it's too early to reach that conclusion.
Well, FWIW, I agree with Hal.
> Take the example in a recent thread of migrating to a
> better universe. Averagism says we shouldn't leave
> copies behind who would be relatively miserable.
> That doesn't seem absurd on its face.
Perhaps we all agree that we prefer not to create (or
leave behind, same thing) copies that are absolutely
miserable. Here, I have always found the idea of
"having a life worth living" to be invaluable.
That is, being a "totalist", I suppose, I'm in favor
of having more copies of myself (or of someone) made
so long as they have lives worth living. In this sense,
they *add* to the total happiness.
Hal had earlier argued very well that as we cannot
accurately measure happiness, we certainly cannot
tell precisely whether it's present or not. But I
think that most of us would concede that we believe
in the obvious markers in the cases we have some
experience with; for example, patients that testify
to the efficacy of palliatives.
Lee
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