What We Owe the Future by William MacAskill

Author:William MacAskill [MacAskill, William]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2022-06-09T00:00:00+00:00

The Total View

If we reject both the intuition of neutrality and the average view, the most natural alternative is the total view. In this view, one population is better than another if it contains more total wellbeing.

The basic motivation for the total view is simply that more of a good thing is better.23 Good lives are good. More of a good thing is better. So increasing the number of good lives makes the world better.

Figure 8.3. Box diagram illustrating that, on the average view, creating lives with negative wellbeing can be better than creating lives with positive wellbeing. Starting from the happy population represented by the black bar, adding a large number of people with lower, but still positive, wellbeing (resulting in population A) reduces average wellbeing by more than adding a sufficiently smaller number of people with lives that are so horrible it would have been better for them to never have been born (resulting in population B).

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