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Creating a less-than-average life would become an immoral act. Furthermore, in a world where everyone was experiencing very bad lives that were not worth living, adding more people whose lives were also not worth living, but were less unpleasant than the lives of those who already existed, would raise the average, and appear to be a moral duty.
519:) may temper the aforementioned undesirable conclusions. That is, actually practicing a rule that we must "kill anyone who is less happy than average" would almost certainly cause suffering in the long run. Alternatively, average utilitarianism may be bolstered by a "life worth living" threshold. This threshold would be placed very low (
474:(or "happiness points") is judged as preferable to a group of 1,000 people with 99 hedons each. More counter intuitively still, average utilitarianism evaluates the existence of a single person with 100 hedons more favorably than an outcome in which a million people have an average utility of 99 hedons.
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To survive the mere addition paradox with a consistent model of total utilitarianism, total utilitarians have two choices. They may either assert that higher utility living is on a completely different scale from, and thus incomparable to, the bottom levels of utility, or deny that there is anything
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are still relevant here: Even though "Parfit's repugnant conclusion" (mentioned above) is avoided by average utilitarianism, some generally repugnant conclusions may still obtain. For instance, if there are two completely isolated societies, one a 100-hedon society and the other a 99-hedon society,
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Parfit himself provided another similar criticism. Average utilitarianism seems to reject what Parfit calls "mere addition": the addition or creation of new lives that, although they may not be as happy as the average (and thus bring down the average), may still be intuitively well worth living.
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to consider their execution. This obtains the intuition that a generally lower 'average utility' is to be endured provided there are no individuals who would be "better off dead". This would also allow average utilitarianism to acknowledge the general human preference for life.
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Total utilitarianism is a method of applying utilitarianism to a group to work out what the best set of outcomes would be. It assumes that the target utility is the maximum utility across the population based on adding all the separate utilities of each individual together.
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wrong with the repugnant conclusion. (Although, Sikora argues that we may already be living within this minimal state. Particularly as quality of life measurements are generally relative and we cannot know how we would appear to a society with very high quality of life.)
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principles, population ought to be encouraged to increase, is not that at which average happiness is the greatest possible...but that at which the product formed by multiplying the number of persons living into the amount of average happiness reaches its maximum." ~
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Utilitarian theory is embarrassed by the possibility of utility monsters who get enormously greater sums of utility from any sacrifice of others than these others lose ... the theory seems to require that we all be sacrificed in the monster's maw.
549:(not total happiness) and 'good' (which he takes as meaning per capita happiness), although the same principle of course applies to average and total happiness. His conclusion "we want the maximum good per person" is taken as being self-evident.
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then strict average utilitarianism seems to support killing off the 99-hedon society (this violent action would increase the average utility in this scenario). This criticism is also exemplified by Nozick's
486:, a hypothetical being with a greater ability to gain utility from resources, who takes all those resources from people in a fashion that is seen as completely immoral. Nozick writes:
446:", which argues that a likely outcome of following total utilitarianism is a future where there is a large number of people with very low utility values.
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414:, a philosophical field that deals with problems arising when our actions affect the number or identity of individuals born in the future.
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Maximizing the average utility allows a person to kill everyone else if that would make him ecstatic, and so happier than average.
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545:'s goal of "the greatest good for the greatest number" is impossible. Here he is saying that it is impossible to maximize both
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410:'s question, "Is it total or average happiness that we seek to make a maximum?". They are theories of
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Average utilitarianism may lead to repugnant conclusions if practiced strictly. Aspects of Parfit's
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Average utilitarianism is treated as being so obvious that it does not need any explanation in
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terms this "the repugnant conclusion", believing it to be
631:. United Kingdom. pp. Book 4, chapter 1, section 2.
598:. Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University. 2022.
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Average utilitarianism values the maximization of the
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711:Anarchy, State, and Utopia
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27:Variants of utilitarianism
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624:Sidgwick, Henry (1907).
517:two-level utilitarianism
709:Nozick, Robert (1974).
595:The Nonidentity Problem
290:Replaceability argument
275:Demandingness objection
148:Types of utilitarianism
73:Claude Adrien Helvétius
676:Average Utilitarianism
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315:Rational choice theory
18:Average utilitarianism
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280:Mere addition paradox
418:Total utilitarianism
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245:Equal consideration
571:Ecological fallacy
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611:Methods of Ethics
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203:Key concepts
135:Peter Singer
51:Predecessors
452:intuitively
428:Utilitarian
320:Game theory
769:Categories
577:References
554:Roger Chao
547:population
235:Eudaimonia
185:Preference
130:R. M. Hare
68:David Hume
63:Shantideva
637:cite book
629:(7th ed.)
535:'s essay
515:(or else
392:averagism
230:Happiness
215:Suffering
190:Classical
170:Two-level
696:, ch. 19
560:See also
396:totalism
268:Problems
220:Pleasure
155:Negative
35:a series
33:Part of
729:Science
468:average
404:utility
384:Average
225:Utility
180:Average
688:Parfit
472:hedons
448:Parfit
737:here.
525:begin
175:Total
748:Chao
735:and
733:here
643:link
394:and
386:and
210:Pain
160:Rule
58:Mozi
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165:Act
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