Utilitarianism, decision theory and eternity

Abstract

This work delves into the complexities of contrasting the utilitarian merits of infinite worlds, a challenge arising from utility values being positive, negative, or ill-defined. This paradox is further exacerbated for standard accounts of total utility since they cannot compare infinite worlds due to the values diverging or being undefined. Proposed solutions, such as Peter Vallentyne and Shelly Kagan’s dominance-based approach or Nick Bostrom’s hyperreal utility calculation, face limitations. Vallentyne and Kagan’s method, while providing a partial ordering of utilities, lacks practical applicability due to its non-numerical nature. Bostrom’s approach, utilizing hyperreals, is intricate and prone to dependence on an arbitrary choice of ultrafilter. Alternatively, this work suggests evaluating the utilitarian merits by comparing expected utilities instead of utilities directly. This approach can leverage Vallentyne and Kagan’s dominance principle in conjunction with reasonable assumptions regarding convergence of utility differences. In many realistic cases, this method yields order-independent results, relying on a notion of counterpart identity across possible worlds, rather than a preferred ordering. – AI-generated abstract.