From: Hal Finney (hal@finney.org)
Date: Sat May 31 2003 - 17:11:04 MDT
I see both the averagist and totalist positions as being too extreme to
be effective strategies for altruism. The averagist falls into the trap
that eliminating unhappy people makes the average happiness level rise.
And the totalist falls into the corresponding error, of increasing the
population beyond the carrying capacity until everyone is just one step
from committing suicide.
All else being equal, everyone would agree that more and happier people
are good. The problem is in how you judge the tradeoffs. At some
point, adding more people is not good if it makes them less happy.
And making them happier is not good if it reduces the numbers who can
enjoy the happiness. We need a balance.
Then there is the problem of inter-personal comparisons of happiness.
It is very questionable whether this can be done properly. Some people
may be internal "dramatists" who see relatively small changes in their
circumstances as causing great swings in their happiness. Others are on
a more even keel. Some would say that they are generally happy, others
that they are generally unhappy. I don't see how we can say that person
A's happiness ranges from -500 to 1000 while person B's happiness ranges
from -50 to 20, and somehow combine these values numerically to decide
that A's welfare is more important than B's.
Economists manage to avoid this problem. Essentially, they assume that
happiness is not inter-comparable. If you do this, your job becomes
easier. All you can have as your goal is Pareto-optimality.
A Pareto-optimal state is one where you can't make anyone happier
without making someone else less happy. Generally in economics this is
judged solely in terms of distribution of goods, but I think it could
be generalized to compare world-states, making it a tool for altruists.
Now, it might seem at first that rearranging goods to make one person
happy will inevitably require making someone else unhappy. However that
is not the case; it is often possible for A and B to exchange goods such
that both sides end up happier. These are what we know as voluntary
trades. A Pareto-optimal state is one where all voluntary trades have
been allowed to occur. Once you have reached this state, no one can be
made happier without hurting someone else.
From the altruist's perspective, this is not a bad solution. If everyone
is happier in state X than in state Y (or at least, no less happy),
then X is a better goal state than Y for the altruist. Totalists,
averagists, and altruists of all stripes would agree on this, I think.
The Pareto-optimal states are just those where there are no states that
"dominate" in terms of happiness, no states where everyone is happier,
or at least as happy.
The problem is that Pareto-optimality is too weak a condition. There are
too many states that are Pareto-optimal but which don't satisfy our
instincts about altruism. For example, a state where one guy has
everything and everyone else has nothing could be Pareto-optimal.
There's no way to improve anyone's state without taking something from
the guy who has all the goods. But this won't sound like a very good
world to most altruists.
Nevertheless, Pareto-optimality seems to be the best you can do if you
reject inter-personal comparison of happiness. To go beyond it, you
have to start taking from Peter to pay Paul, and ultimately that means
you have to decide that Peter's happiness is less important than Paul's
(where there may be multiple Pauls and just one Peter, for example).
You have to be able to come up with a number that tells just how much
each person's happiness is affected by changes in the world, and some
way of comparing these numbers between people.
It looks to me like a very tricky philosophical problem, making these
kinds of judgements. People differ enormously in their attitudes
towards pleasure and reward; some of their responses are biological,
and some due to training. An altruist better be prepared to address
these thorny philosophical issues, if he is going to compare happiness
levels between individuals.
Hal
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