Some people would say that dying honorably is better than living dishonorably. I'm not endorsing this view, I'm just trying to figure out why it's irrational, while the utilitarian sacrifice of children is more rational.
Utilitarian calculation is a more rational process of arriving at a decision, while for the output of this process (a decision) for a specific question you can argue that it's inferior to the output of some other process, such as free-running deliberation or random guessing. When you are comparing the decisions of sacrifice of children and war to the death, first isn't "intrinsically utilitarian", and the second isn't "intrinsically emotional".
Which of the decision is (actually) the better one depends on the preferences of one who decides, and preferences are not necessarily reflected well in actions and choices. It's instrumentally irrational for the agent to choose poorly according to its preferences. Systematic processes for decision-making allow agents to explicitly encode their preferences, and thus avoid some of the mistakes made with ad-hoc decision-making. Such systematic processes may be constructed in preference-independent fashion, and then given preferences as parameters.
Utilitarian calculation is a systematic process for computing a decision in situations that are expected to break intuitive decision-making. The output of a utilitarian calculation is expected to be better than an intuitive decision, but there are situations when utilitarian calculation goes wrong. For example, the extent to which you value things could be specified incorrectly, or a transformation that computes how much you value N things based on how much you value one thing may be wrong. In other cases, the problem could be reduced to a calculation incorrectly, losing important context.
However, whatever the right decision is, there normally should be a way to fix the parameters of utilitarian calculation so that it outputs the right decision. For example, if the right decision in the topic problem is actually war to the death, there should be a way to more formally understand the situation so that the utilitarian calculation outputs "war to the death" as the right decision.
I'm not convinced utilitarian reasoning can always be applied to situations where two preferences come into conflict: Calculating "secondary" uncertain factors which could influence the value of each decision ruins the possibility of exactness. Even in the trolley problem, in all its simplicity, each decision has repercussions whose values have some uncertainty. Thus a decision doesn't always have a strict value, but a probable value distribution! We make a trolley decision by 1) Considering only so many iterations in trying to get a value distri...
It's just possible that some lesswrong readers may be unfamiliar with Torchwood: It's a British sci-fi TV series, a spin-off from the more famous, and very long-running cult show Dr Who.
Two weeks ago Torchwood Series 3 aired. It took the form of a single story arc, over five days, shown in five parts on consecutive nights. What hopefully makes it interesting to rationalist lesswrong readers who are not (yet) Whovians was not only the space monsters (1) but also the show's determined and methodical exploration of an iterated Trolley Problem: in a process familiar to seasoned thought-experimenters the characters were tested with a dilemma followed by a succession of variations of increasing complexity, with their choices ascertained and the implications discussed and reckoned with.
An hypothetical, iterated rationalist dilemma... with space monsters... and monsters a great deal more scary - and messier - than Omega - what's not to like?
So, on the off chance that you missed it, and as a summer diversion from more academic lesswrong fare, I thought a brief description of how a familiar dilemma was handled on popular British TV this month, might be of passing interest (warning: spoilers follow)
The details of the scenario need not concern us too much here (and readers are warned not too expend too much mental energy exploring the various implausibilities, for want of distraction) but suffice to say that the 456, a race of evil aliens, landed on Earth and demanded that a certain number of children be turned over to them to suffer a horrible fate-worse-than-death or else we face the familiar prospects of all out attack and the likely destruction of mankind.
Resistance, it almost goes without saying, was futile.
The problems faced by the team could be roughly sorted into some themes
The Numbers dilemma - is it worth sacrificing any amount of children to save the rest?
The Quality dilemma: does it make any difference which children?
The choice dilemma: how should the sacrifical cohort be chosen?
The limits of human rationality: are there certain 'rational' decisions that are simply too much to expect a human being to be able to make?
Actually despite my jocular tone in the first paragraph I don't want to make too light of this series, as it was disturbing viewing.
Anyway: that being said: rationalist lesswrong community members may want to think dispassionately about the their answers before I reveal the conclusions that Russell T Davies (the writer) came to:
Numbers
Quality
Choice
This was handled by the politicians who considered two dimensions in the selection:
Rationality at the limit
On the question of 'how close' a straightforward evolutionary approach was used. Children of the decision-makers were safe, and grandchildren.
"And our nephews?" "Don't push it".
But the limits of rationality, it seems, are dependent upon gender: While it was recognised that no woman could be expected to agree to the rational sacrifice of her child, it was expected by some that men might have to, and in the end the main character - male - sacrificed a grandchild.
And that's it. Perhaps not a complete disposal of the trolley problem, but nevertheless an interesting excursion into the realms of philosphical dilemmas for a popular drama. Rationalism is a meme - pass it on.
(1) like many TV aliens: surprisingly able to construct spaceships without the benefit of an opposable thumb (2) Yes, that was actually the 1965 back-story.