TLDR

The Saturation View holds that a world of varied joys is better than a world of equal but identical joys. Elliott Thornley objected that no one benefits from this variety, and Will MacAskill answered that it is a claim about the pattern of value in the world, rather than about individuals' experiences. This post elaborates on Thornley's point and argues that a pattern that possibly no one ever experiences is not a valid moral category. Treating it as intrinsically valuable smuggles a fictional experiencer into the moral conversation.

I call this the reified referent: the mirror image of Carol J. Adams's absent referent. Where the absent referent hides a real being, the reified referent invents an unreal one.

There may be good instrumental arguments for variety, but we should reject the claim that a world can be made better by a change that no individual gains from. And if, like me, you care more about reducing suffering than increasing happiness, there may be a danger in valuing variety, since it can push toward widening the spectrum of valence, away from stability and perhaps tranquility.

Thanks to @KonradKozaczek and @Alistair Stewart for helpful comments on this post. 

My View on Saturationism's Main Claim

In The Saturation View, Will MacAskill, in work with Christian Tarsney, proposes that the value of an experience depends not only on its welfare but on how many relevantly similar experiences already exist. Near duplicates have diminishing marginal value. A world's value is a function of total welfare and of how widely that welfare is spread across the landscape of possible experience types. So Variety, a world of diverse excellent lives, beats Homogeneity, a world of equal welfare concentrated in identical copies of the single best life.

I think variety could have instrumental value: exploration, robustness, error correction, and hedging under moral uncertainty. Felt variety is valuable too: novelty, contrast, and surprise are good experiences. But that is already counted inside the welfare, so at the experience level variety should not be double counted. If two beings have the same valence, one from a very familiar experience and one from a novel one, then whatever the novelty adds is already inside the number, and something else in the familiar experience is making up the difference.

But the crux of Saturationism is not at the individual level but the pattern level. Elliott Thornley pressed this in his comment: "no one benefits from this variety. No one cares about this increased variety, at least in some sense of the word 'care.' You yourself, the person choosing Variety over Homogeneity, wouldn't care if you were incarnated into this universe." MacAskill answered: "The claim that Variety is better than Homogeneity is not a claim that each person in Variety is better off. It is a claim about the pattern of value in the world." I argue that the main mistake of this view sits exactly there. "The pattern of value in the world" invites us to count a fictional character's experience of variety, even though it could be that no individual experiences this variety at any moment in time.

The Reified Referent

In The Sexual Politics of Meat (1990), Carol J. Adams coined the absent referent: the animal is made to vanish from the meat, so that a living individual disappears behind a word. I propose the inverse operation, which I call the reified referent: language makes a nonentity appear inside the moral conversation and treats it as a stakeholder. The absent referent hides someone who is really there. The reified referent invents someone who is not there, at the expense, to a certain extent, of the individuals who are.

God is taken by some to be a case of this kind. If no god exists, then "we must do this because it pleases God" brings the preferences of a fictional character into ethics. The subtler cases are much harder to detect. A group made of you and your friend is real in the sense that its parts are real; the group as a collection is a useful thought experiment, but it has no patienthood of its own. A specific case of the reified referent happens when the group itself, or the "total picture", is quietly promoted from a collection of experiences to an experiencing subject who gets a vote.

There is a simple test: restate every value claim in terms of what some being feels or will feel. Whatever cannot be restated this way relies on a reified referent.

This is quite counterintuitive to me, but truth that is viewed as an intrinsic value is also a reified referent. I value truth enormously, but there is no God looking at the world and feeling happy when truth is revealed or reflected in it. Hence it should be viewed as of instrumental value.

Environmental ethics runs on this error, in my view. Intrinsic biodiversity value treats the diversity itself as mattering; the last rare lizard is said to matter intrinsically more than an individual of an abundant species. But no lizard knows he is endemic. The rarity is not in the lizard's life; it is in a catalog. The environmental language consistently hides the sentient and highlights the insentient, reified referents: "the ecosystem", "the species", "the balance of nature". But a forest full of color, valued apart from any mind watching it, is actually colorless. Color is not the wavelengths themselves. It appears when light meets a mind, which transforms signals from "outside", through the visual system from the retina to the brain, into something completely different in quality and essence. Without a mind, the beautiful picture is just waves and particles, and the forest is silent.

Two Sealed Rooms

Two beings live in sealed rooms. They will never meet, never learn of each other. In World V, being A spends an hour receiving a foot massage and being B eats a wonderful meal. In World H, both eat the wonderful meal. Every experience involved has exactly the same valence, the same quality level of goodness. Ask A whether she wants to switch worlds: she is indifferent, and she must be, because if she preferred one, the welfare would not be equal. Ask B, same answer, because nothing changes for him. No being, at any moment, in either world, is one drop better or worse off than in the other, yet the Saturation View holds that World V is better. "Better", though better for no one, is a sentence in search of a subject. The only way to make sense of it is to imagine a viewpoint hovering over both rooms, comparing the kinds of experiences, and preferring the spread. That viewpoint is the reified referent.

To count that look as a cost is to charge real beings for the boredom of a ghost. To view a being's joy as less worthy because of his species, or his location, or the fact that there are other beings with similar joys, seems equally mistaken to me.

Could Variety Push for More Suffering?

Variety is not the only pattern one could value. Think about spikes: a life where valence swings between very low and very high, against one with the same total welfare but a narrow, calm range.

Let's assume your total life's valence is just a bit above neutral. Within your life, you may prefer the spikes, which are more attuned to excitement, or the opposite, stable valence (tranquilism pushes further in that direction). I am more sympathetic to the latter. 

Spikes could be one parameter inside variety. If I get this right, stable valence does not leave much room for valence diversity, whereas spikes could give us, even under the same total valence and the same total equal valence for each individual, more variety of valence, hence of experience. This can lead us to a dangerous place where we push for a wider and wider spectrum of valence. I am especially worried about this since I value reducing suffering, especially the worst kinds, more than increasing happiness. A wider spectrum of valence is a bigger risk of severe suffering.

Why the Ghost Feels So Right

I argue that using a reified referent is a mistake, but it is a tempting one, and I have a few thoughts about why:

• You cannot imagine an unwatched world without mentally watching it, or think about a world no one thinks about. But apart from individuals, almost by definition, no one is watching the world. I think it is better to see the world as the sum of experiences, nothing else. Any outside view, beyond individual experience, is not loyal to reality.
• Homogeneity really does lower our welfare through boredom and diminishing returns, so we carry that feeling across lives, where it no longer applies. It is a bias.
• No one proposes an ugly impersonal value. Diversity, beauty, complexity, wilderness: every impersonal value ever proposed is a pleasure to think about. If impersonal value were really independent of observers, that would be a strange coincidence. If impersonal values are observer pleasures projected onto a fictional observer, this is exactly what we should expect.

Is Pareto Using a Ghost Too?

When I claim a world with five suffering beings is worse than a world with three flourishing beings and two suffering ones, am I adopting a viewpoint nobody occupies? No individual experiences the sum. If the Totalist may hover above the world and add, why may the Saturationist not hover and compare types of experiences? One can argue that either both are ghosts or neither is.

This argument puzzles me, and I think there is something deeper here I am not able to put my finger on. 

I will say this: the summing view uses an imaginary accountant, yet that accountant only counts real things: valence, intensity, duration of consciousness, all of them properties present in the experience itself. Hence, the beings vote, and the accountant counts the votes. Under the Saturation View, the accountant votes: it discounts a joy according to a relation no one feels.

But what about inequality? Inequality is also a pattern that possibly no one feels. Imagine the two sealed rooms again: in world A the two someones have a positive welfare of 2 and 10, and in world B both have a welfare of 6. No one ever feels any inequality, so why should we prefer world B?

• Compare the two worlds individual by individual, which I think is the right way to judge any situation, and the valence changes for every individual. If we push a button and switch from world A to world B, something meaningful happens to someone. This is not the case with the Saturation View, which could prefer one world over another where no individual is worse or better off, so pushing the button changes nothing for anyone.
• If the signs were reversed and the numbers represented suffering, the value of reducing the most intense suffering would make us prefer world B.

Epilogue

The universe has no point of view. When we pretend it has one only in order to count what real beings really feel, I think that is a justifiable ethical move. When we let that pretend point of view vote, real beings pay the price. On the Saturation View there is always some point where real felt welfare should be sacrificed for an unfelt pattern: some being's day made worse so that the world looks better to no one. A civilization steering by this view is putting a lot of effort into decorating a gallery that has no visitors.