huh.Furthermore, I love how you automatically disregard any method of measuring happiness besides averages. You realize that there are other statistics that people might find important, right? For instance, people analyze the happiness quotient of different nations because they are also interested in the distribution of happiness-- that way, we know where to direct our efforts to improve the world. Averaging together the whole world together can be useful, but you also lose large swaths of important information in the process.
i guess some people don't go for averages or total utility in deciding what's best -- they value equality as well as happiness, so they might pick an even distribution of welfare over one that has a slightly higher average but is highly inegalitarian. (the extreme version of this would be the maximin rule.) but although i might call that consequentialist (if you think that bringing about these good consequences is the only thing that matters), it's pretty far from what i would recognize as utilitarian. i guess i associate utilitarianism with total, aggregative approaches, or maybe with averages, but certainly not with maximin.
anyway, exactly none of this matters to the repugnant conclusion, where everyone has the same level of welfare.
i'm not even sure what starglider is on about
one thing that bothers me is that utility is almost impossible to measure in anything except a strictly comparative sense. like, you can say "my monday was better/happier/more valuable to me than my tuesday" but it's hard to know what it means to say "alice is twice as happy as bob" or "the happiness of cindy's life is equal to the happiness of daniel's life plus the happiness of eileen's life"
hmm, i'm not sure i'd say that. unless i'm missing something, atheistic systems require one fewer gigantic assumption (i.e. that there is a god)sometimes i really want to just bust out on sdn that any atheistic morality or metaphysics probably requires just as many basic assumptions about the universe as theistic ones do