Average View

Definition and Formal Characterization

In population ethics, the Average View (often called average utilitarianism) is the principle that the moral value of an outcome is determined by the average level of well-being of the people who exist in that outcome. Unlike total utilitarianism, which sums the well-being of all individuals, the Average View compares outcomes by dividing total well-being by the number of people.

Formally, let an outcome contain individuals (1, 2, \dots, n), each with well-being levels (w_1, w_2, \dots, w_n). The average well-being is:

[ \bar{w} = \frac{w_1 + w_2 + \dots + w_n}{n}. ]

The Average View holds that:

• An outcome (A) is better than outcome (B) if and only if (A) has a higher (\bar{w}) than (B).
• Moral decision-making should, other things equal, aim to maximize average well-being, regardless of how many people exist.

This makes the view number-sensitive (it tracks how many individuals there are) but evaluates outcomes only via the effect that numbers have on the average, not on the total.

Motivations and Intuitive Appeal

Proponents introduce the Average View largely to avoid certain counterintuitive implications of total views in population ethics.

1. Avoiding the Repugnant Conclusion
   Total utilitarianism implies that, for any population of very happy people, there is a much larger population with lives barely worth living whose total well-being is greater and thus is judged better. This is known as Parfit’s Repugnant Conclusion.

   The Average View typically avoids this: a very large population with lives barely worth living will have a very low average, which can be lower than the average in a small, very happy population. Thus, it can say that the smaller, happier population is better.

2. Focus on Quality over Quantity
   Many find it appealing to prioritize the quality of lives rather than the quantity of lives. The Average View encodes this intuition: adding more people is not good as such; it is only good if it improves average well-being.

3. Symmetry Between Existing and Additional People
   Some defenders argue that the moral value of an outcome should not depend merely on how many exist, but on how well each existing person fares. Average well-being is then seen as a natural, symmetric measure of how good life is for the “typical” person.

4. Decision-Theoretic Simplicity
   From a practical standpoint, especially in policy or global-planning contexts, maximizing average well-being may seem more manageable: it directly connects to measures like average income, life expectancy, or subjective life satisfaction.

These features have led several philosophers to treat the Average View as a serious competitor to total views, particularly in debates about optimal population size and long-term future ethics.

Standard Objections and Paradoxes

Despite its attractions, the Average View faces a range of well-known criticisms. Many philosophers regard it as highly counterintuitive in some scenarios.

1. The “Sadistic” or Anti-Natalist Implication
   Suppose a world with a fixed number of people whose average well-being is moderately high. Now consider adding some additional people whose lives are barely worth living but still positive.

   • Total view: This makes the world better (total well-being increases).
   • Average View: If these lives are below the existing average, their presence lowers the average and so makes the outcome worse.

   Taken further, if the additional people would have slightly positive well-being but below average, the Average View suggests it would be better if they did not exist at all. Critics say this treats the mere existence of people with positive lives as a moral cost whenever they fall below the current average.

2. Preference for Very Small but Elitely Happy Populations
   Because it ignores total well-being, the Average View can favor outcomes with a tiny number of extremely happy people over outcomes with very many people whose lives are clearly good but somewhat less excellent. Critics find it implausible that a world with, say, a few ecstatic individuals could be better than a rich, diverse civilization in which billions have solidly good lives.

3. Perverse Incentives About Ending Lives
   Since removing very badly off individuals can increase the average, the Average View appears to generate troubling implications:

   • Eliminating or preventing the existence of people whose lives are below average would, in principle, be morally desirable (so long as no one else is harmed).
   • At the extreme, if there are some very badly off people and some moderately well-off people, it could be better to have fewer people (by excluding or ending the lives of the worse off) to raise the overall average.

   Defenders often reply with additional constraints (e.g., rights, constraints against killing), but critics argue that these are external to the core Average View and reveal a deep problem with making average well-being the sole criterion.

4. The “Non-Identity” and Variable-Population Problems
   In non-identity cases, our choices affect who exists, not just how well existing people fare. The Average View must evaluate large-scale policies (e.g., climate policy, reproductive policy) by looking at how they affect average well-being across potentially different sets of people. It can yield contentious results: a policy might be judged better because it slightly raises average well-being, even if it does so by preventing many merely decent lives from existing.

5. Incomparability with Intuitive Moral Constraints
   The Average View often conflicts with widely held moral intuitions about fairness, distribution, and rights. For example, it may treat small increases to already very well-off individuals as more important than giving a tolerable life to a new person who would otherwise not exist, so long as the latter would slightly reduce the average.

Many philosophers therefore regard the Average View as theoretically simple but normatively unstable, in the sense that it produces attractive verdicts in some thought experiments while starkly clashing with basic moral judgments in others.

Place in Population Ethics

Within population ethics, the Average View functions both as a positive theory and as a foil in argumentative debates.

• As a positive theory, average utilitarianism is sometimes defended (in pure or modified forms) as a criterion for large-scale policy evaluation, particularly where overpopulation, resource limits, or environmental concerns make high population sizes problematic.
• As a foil, it is often employed in philosophical work (e.g., by Derek Parfit and subsequent authors) to explore the trade-offs between different plausible axioms: avoiding the Repugnant Conclusion, treating additional positive lives as good, respecting person-affecting intuitions, and ensuring that morality is not indifferent to who exists.

Some contemporary approaches attempt hybrid views, such as:

• Combining total and average considerations (e.g., giving lexical or weighted priority to average well-being while also valuing total).
• Adding side constraints—for example, prohibitions against killing or harming—alongside an average-maximizing component.
• Restricting the Average View to non-identity or very large-scale choices, while using other principles for ordinary interpersonal ethics.

Because no view in population ethics is free of paradoxical implications, the Average View remains an important reference point. It highlights the difficulty of reconciling intuitions about the value of additional lives, the importance of quality of life, and the ethics of large, temporally extended populations. Rather than being universally accepted or rejected, it functions as one node in an ongoing network of arguments about how to evaluate worlds with different numbers and kinds of people.