Effective Altruism: An Introduction – 80,000 Hours cover image

Eight: Prof Hilary Greaves on moral cluelessness, population ethics, & harnessing the brainpower of academia to tackle the most important research questions

Effective Altruism: An Introduction – 80,000 Hours

CHAPTER

Is B One Better Than B Two?

Claim that if you add an extra person, then you make things exactly equally as good as were before. But in both b one and b two, everybody who already exists in an a has the same welfare level that they had in a. So now what do we get? Well, by the prete principle, it is obvious to us that b one's better than b two. We just said b one is better than bTwo. So we have a contradiction. That's like one example of how this maybe initially plausible sounding principle ends into structural trouble.

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