On 10/20/2011 7:20 PM, nihil0 wrote:
I think most consequentialists, especially utilitarians, consider all
sentient beings to have moral status.
But *equal* moral status? I cannot believe anyone has ever even attempted to live by such
an ethic.
Utilitarians say an action is
morally better to the extent that it produces more well-being in the
world.
But measured over what time period?
Anyway I would prefer to focus on whether act consequentialism implies
that all actions as morally equivalent, if the universe might be
canonically infinite.
There seems to an inconsistency at the heart of this. The multiverse is postulated to
avoid wave-function collapse, so the world evolves strictly unitarily, which is to say
deterministically. So you have no libertarian free will with which to make choices anyway.
Brent
Jon
On Oct 21, 2:50 am, meekerdb<meeke...@verizon.net> wrote:
On 10/20/2011 6:37 PM, nihil0 wrote:
However, this class action argument assumes that the value-density
approach is an acceptable way to measure the value in a world. There
are a few problems with the value-density approach. First of all, it
seems to give up aggregationism (total consequentialism) in favor of
average consequentialism. Average consequentialism has the
counterintuitive implication that we should kill people who have below-
average utility and few friends or loved ones, such as some hermits
and homeless people. Secondly, the value-density approach "places
ethical significance on the spatiotemporal distribution of value."
This is at odds with consequentialism's commitment to impartiality
(the idea that equal amounts of value are equally good to promote, no
matter who or where the beneficiaries are).
But this kind of consequentialism is already unworkable. Who counts as a
beneficiary? a
fetus? someone not yet conceived? chimpanzees? dogs? spiders? In practice we
value the
well-being of some people a lot more than others and we do so for the simple
reason that
it makes our life better.
Brent
Third, the value-density
approach fails to apply to inhomogeneous infinite worlds . . . because
value-density is undefined for such worlds." (16)
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