There is an extant meme about early human history, that the invention of agriculture was a huge mistake. Noah Yuval Hariri popularized the idea in Sapiens. He pointed out that ancient foragers were “taller and healthier than their peasant descendants”. Foragers also suffered less from famine and plague and had a “relatively short working week”. As a result, Hariri calls the agricultural revolution “history’s biggest fraud”.
You make a good case that 'raising the average' seems a bad metric. But I don't see that 'total utilitarianism' is the only justifiable one. It does imply the repugnant conclusion (which you don't dispute, you just dispute the empirics) ... that there must be some number of people who 'barely refrain from suicide' that would be better than say, 10 billion happy humans in perpetuity.
I don't see why there's anything "unreasonable" about having a person-affecting view or simply a welfare function that is some concave function of 'number of people ever or in the future' and 'how happy they are'.
I also think the "very few people commit suicide therefore they must leave net positive lives claim/implication" might be overstated. I think once you are alive it is perhaps very hard to commit suicide, there's some sort of 'biases' against not doing so, not to mention the stigmas/taboos.
But it seems to me a very real thing that there are lots of people in the world today as well as in the past that a reasonable outsider behind the veil of ignorance would say "I'd vastly rather not be born than to have that life."
You make a good case that 'raising the average' seems a bad metric. But I don't see that 'total utilitarianism' is the only justifiable one. It does imply the repugnant conclusion (which you don't dispute, you just dispute the empirics) ... that there must be some number of people who 'barely refrain from suicide' that would be better than say, 10 billion happy humans in perpetuity.
I don't see why there's anything "unreasonable" about having a person-affecting view or simply a welfare function that is some concave function of 'number of people ever or in the future' and 'how happy they are'.
I also think the "very few people commit suicide therefore they must leave net positive lives claim/implication" might be overstated. I think once you are alive it is perhaps very hard to commit suicide, there's some sort of 'biases' against not doing so, not to mention the stigmas/taboos.
But it seems to me a very real thing that there are lots of people in the world today as well as in the past that a reasonable outsider behind the veil of ignorance would say "I'd vastly rather not be born than to have that life."