Indeed, it’s not incoherent, at some level though I’d argue that morality is at it’s core simply a tool for deciding what actions one should take, and a system that both follows a utilitarian model and makes it extremely easy for someone’s life to be negative carries the implication that the world would be happier were you to just kill off the huge segment of the population who end up on the negative side. As this is completely contrary to our instincts about what we want morality to be, and completely impractical to act on, it is no longer a very useful tool if one assumes that.
I do tend towards a variant of utilitarianism myself as it has a useful ability to weigh options that are both bad or both good, but for the reason above I tend to define “zero” as a complete lack of happiness/maximum of suffering, and being unhappy as having low happiness rather than negative (making a negative value impossible), though that carries it’s own implications that I know not everyone would agree with.
lukewarm_ozone@lemmy.today 1 week ago
Not necessarily. Someone dying isn’t the same as someone not existing at all.* It does imply that the world would be better off if it stopped existing, and under some assumptions implies it’d be moral to, say, instantly end all of humanity. I’m not sure that these conclusions are necessarily “contrary to our instincts”.
*one reason why we really ought to keep track of that is that if we didn’t distinguish between those, then if an average life had positive value, it’d be immoral not to have as many children as possible, until the marginal value of an extra life fell to zero once again (kind of like how Malthus thought societies worked, except as a supposedly moral thing to do). That conclusion is something I do consider very contrary to my instincts.
I too am an utilitarianism, sure. I’m not sure I can possibly buy “maximum suffering and no happiness” being the zero point. I very strongly feel that there are plenty of lives that would be way worse than dying (and than never having existed, too). It’s a coherent position I think, just a very alien one to me.