LESSWRONG
LW

Ben4
0010
Message
Dialogue
Subscribe

Posts

Sorted by New

Wikitag Contributions

Comments

Sorted by
Newest
No wikitag contributions to display.
The "Intuitions" Behind "Utilitarianism"
Ben418y00

This whole dust vs. torture "dilemma" depends on a couple assumptions: (1) That you can assign a cost to any event and that all such values lie within the same group (allowing multiples of one event to "add up" to another event) and (2) That the function that determines the cost of a certain number of a specific type of events does not have a hard upper limit (such as a logistic function). If either of these assumptions is wrong then the largeness of 3^^^3 or any other "large" number is totally irrelevant. One way to test (1) is to replace "torture" with "kill". If the answer is no then (1) is an invalidate assumption.

Reply
No posts to display.