Average and total utilitarianism

[2] They are theories of population ethics, a philosophical field that deals with problems arising when our actions affect the number or identity of individuals born in the future.

Nozick writes: Utilitarian theory is embarrassed by the possibility of utility monsters who get enormously greater sums of utility from any sacrifice of others than these others lose ... the theory seems to require that we all be sacrificed in the monster's maw.

That is, actually practicing a rule that we must "kill anyone who is less happy than average" would almost certainly cause suffering in the long run.

Alternatively, average utilitarianism may be bolstered by a "life worth living" threshold.

This obtains the intuition that a generally lower 'average utility' is to be endured provided there are no individuals who would be "better off dead".

Average utilitarianism is treated as being so obvious that it does not need any explanation in Garrett Hardin's essay The Tragedy of the Commons,[9] where he points out that Jeremy Bentham's goal of "the greatest good for the greatest number" is impossible.

[citation needed] Proponents of the so-called "negative average preference utilitarianism", such as Roger Chao, argue that such an ethical framework avoids the Repugnant Conclusion and leads to few, if any, counterintuitive results.

"the point up to which, on Utilitarian principles, population ought to be encouraged to increase, is not that at which average happiness is the greatest possible...but that at which the product formed by multiplying the number of persons living into the amount of average happiness reaches its maximum." ~ Henry Sidgwick [ 3 ]