What do you think is the lowest bar for a person to have net-positive HU externalities, compared to their nonexistence?

Assume a person in the developed world, and count only the externalities, e.g. assume they are a p-zombie for sake of analysis.

One would naturally assume that most EAs are quite a bit above that bar, but what about average citizens? And what would you look at if you wanted to find out the minimal standard, e.g. if you could decide to make another such p-zombie for free, or save one from an illness etc., for free.

Basically a kind of zero-point externality benchmark.

Maybe a good starting point would be to figure out what a person's externalities already are. The biggest I can think of would be meat eating and environmental impact from e.g., driving a car.

peterhurford wrote:Maybe a good starting point would be to figure out what a person's externalities already are. The biggest I can think of would be meat eating and environmental impact from e.g., driving a car.

Yes, those were on my list also. Additionally, economic and political externalities are plausible.

By the way, if we hold WAS pessimism, the average environmental imact doesn't have to be negative, but could be positive from replacement. Similarly, economic acitivity doesn't have to be positive, it could have negative flow-through effects. It obviously depends on how strongly we think current human econcomies are correlated with future utility (positive and negative).

Yeah, it could go either way depending on our assumptions. For what it's worth, my intuition is that the net impact of the typical person isn't that high, as people tend to have generally positive influences on others. It's especially handy that our capitalist system, for the most part, requires people to work full-time making some other people somewhat happy.

Though maybe perpetuating factory farming is that bad...

peterhurford wrote: It's especially handy that our capitalist system, for the most part, requires people to work full-time making some other people somewhat happy.

Well, this depends on the additional externalities of that happiness. If econimic growth perpetually depended on making some bottom layer of victims unhappy, it could be plausibly a negative. And as Brian has pointed out in the past, the sign of marginal speedups of growth is not clear either.

Though maybe perpetuating factory farming is that bad...

Right. Though the WAS replacement argument mitigates it somewhat.

I also thought that perhaps if you live in a democracy, paying taxes for your system is net-positive on average, since it competes with non-democracies. Democracy is bad, but the competition is currently much less humane still. (argument from lesser evil and power vacuum)

Hedonic Treader wrote:Well, this depends on the additional externalities of that happiness. If economic growth perpetually depended on making some bottom layer of victims unhappy, it could be plausibly a negative. And as Brian has pointed out in the past, the sign of marginal speedups of growth is not clear either.

I suppose I should have said "prima facie" instead of "for the most part", as that captures the claim I actually wanted to make. My best guess is that the typical American capitalist activity is net positive, but of course I'm unsure.

I also thought that perhaps if you live in a democracy, paying taxes for your system is net-positive on average, since it competes with non-democracies. Democracy is bad, but the competition is currently much less humane still. (argument from lesser evil and power vacuum)

You also do fund some ostensibly beneficial things, like foreign aid, welfare, and research. Though it's plausible that other things might be net negative.