I realized that not only am I forced to accept the position I discovered yesterday, there's an even more absurd conclusion that I am forced to. Let's set the minimum wellbeing value for a life worth living to 5 again.
Take two worlds. Both have populations A through Z (all the letters in between). In the first world, populations A through Z have a wellbeing of 5.1. Not too bad, since they all have lives worth living. In the second world, populations A through Y have a wellbeing of 100 quintillion, and populatoin Z has a wellbeing of 4.9. I am still forced to accept that the first world is better, but I simply do not see that. It doesn't seem realistic to me that anyone would say that world one is better, when 25/26 populations in world 2 are so much better off than those in the other world. And yet, if I maintain my attitude of the minimum wellbeing value trumping peak value, I have to accept this.
So as of right now, I have two options. Assuming, of course, that most people would agree with me and accept this conclusion as absurd, I could simply bite the bullet and say yes, I accept this conclusion. However, this is very unsatisfactory to me, so I will try to work around this by either adding in another feature or simply removing the minimum life worth living value.
This is kind of a setback, but oh well.
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Perhaps for more than two populations, you could average all populations without the peak value, and see if that is above minimum life worth living. Or, even better, average the entire world's well being to see if that is above the minimum, and then go by peak value. This way, if a world has an average well being above that worth living, it can be considered, and if it doesn't, it automatically is not better. I'm sure there are holes left to poke, but that's your job...
ReplyDeleteSo this seems like a good idea at first, but then I run into a similar problem. Let's imagine a world with two populations, A and B. Let's also set the minimum wellbeing value to 0 this time, for the sake of easier math. A has a wellbeing of 3 quintillion, B has a wellbeing of -2.9 quintillion. No one would disagree that B probably has a pretty bad life. However, the average is still above that of the level worth living (above 0), so technically this would be an acceptable world. I do not like this conclusion.
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