Don’t Fall for the Longtermism Sales Pitch w/ Émile P. Torres
Tech Won't Save Us
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Is Utilitarianism Really Quantitative?
In his new book, John McCaskill argues that utilitarianism is not sensitive to numbers. If you crunch the numbers, if you have 1 billion trillion trillion with units of five amounts of happiness versus a universe that has just 10 people with 1,000 units of happiness, the former is better because what matters is the total quantity. And so this gets at your point that it may be better to have an enormous number of future people who have very low kind of happiness levels than a much smaller number of people that have really high amounts of happiness.
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