The Saturation View: some responses

A couple of weeks ago, I published a draft of a new population axiology that I’ve been working on with Christian Tarsney. It got a lot of comments and pushback — thanks to everyone who engaged! They’ll feed into the more-polished academic-draft paper that Christian and I are working on.Here I’ll quickly respond to some of the most common or noteworthy responses. I’ll generally avoid stuff that is already covered in the draft.What’s the view? Isn’t this old hat?Very roughly, the Saturation view says that the value of a life, experience, or welfare-event depends not only on how high-welfare it is, but also on how many relevantly similar lives, experiences, or welfare-events already exist. The addition of near-duplicates has diminishing marginal impersonal value, tending toward a bound. The value of a world is a function of the total welfare in that world, and how widely distributed that welfare is across different types of lives / experiences / welfare-events. (Full draft here.)Some people suggested this is old news. And it’s totally correct that the suggestion that variety of experiences matters is not new (e.g. Yudkowsky here). The phrase “tiling the universe with hedonium” is normally used pejoratively for a reason. In fact, the idea that there’s value in variety has got a long pedigree, especially motivated by the puzzle of why God would create so many different types of being. Plato discussed the idea, as did (in different ways) Plotinus, Aquinas, Leibniz and Lovejoy.What’s new is (i) developing this thought into a specific formal population axiology (where there are many ways one could go with the basic idea; a previous version of the paper suggested “similarity-based discounting” but it had some problems I thought were serious); (ii) showing that the same basic machinery that helps with the monoculture problem can also help with the repugnant conclusion, fanaticism, and some forms of infinitarian incomparability and paralysis.Isn’t this just Scott Alexander’s U