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Nick_Tarleton comments on The Preference Utilitarian’s Time Inconsistency Problem - Less Wrong
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If not killing has lexical priority, all other concerns will be entirely overridden by tiny differences in the probability of killing, in any non-toy case.
Anyway, our preferences seem more directly not to give life lexical priority. We're willing to drive to the store for convenience, and endorse others doing so, even though driving imposes a nontrivial risk of death on oneself and others.
One can't really equate risking a life with outright killing.
If we want any system that is aligned with human morality we just can't make decision based on the desirability of the outcome. For example: "Is it right to kill a healthy person to give its organs to five terminally ill patients and therefore save five lives at a cost of one." Our sense says killing an innocent bystander as immoral, even if it saves more lives. (See http://www.justiceharvard.org/)
It is possible to move away from human morality, but the end result will be that most humans will perceive the decisions of the AI monstrous at least in the beginning... ;)
Even if you can cleanly distinguish them for a human, what's the difference from the perspective of an effectively omniscient and omnipotent agent? (Whether or not an actual AGI would be such, a proposed morality should work in that case.)
Er, doesn't that just mean human morality assigns low desirability to the outcome innocent bystander killed to use organs? (That is, if that actually is a pure terminal value - it seems to me that this intuition reflects a correct instrumental judgment based on things like harms to public trust, not a terminal judgment about the badness of a death increasing in proportion to the benefit ensuing from that death or something.)
If we want a system to be well-defined, reflectively consistent, and stable under omniscience and omnipotence, expected-utility consequentialism looks like the way to go. Fortunately, it's pretty flexible.
To me, "omniscience" and "omnipotence" seem to be self-contradictory notions. Therefore, I consider it a waste of time to think about beings with such attributes.
OK. Do you think that if someone (e.g. an AI) kills random people for positive overall effect but manages to convince the public that they were random accidents (and therefore public trust is maintained), then it is a morally acceptable option?
That's why I put "I am unsure how you define utilitarism". If you just evaluate the outcome, then you see f(1 dead)+f(5 alive). If you evaluate the whole process, you see "f(1 guy killed as an innocent bystander) + f(5 alive)", which may have a much lower desirability due to morality impact.
The same consideration applies to the OP: If you only evaluate the final outcome: you may think that killing hard to satisfy people is a good thing. However if you add the morality penalty of killing innocent people, then the equation suddenly changes.
The question of 1/multi-dimensional objective remains: the extreme liberal moralism would say that it is not allowed to take one dollar from a person, even if it could pay for saving one life, or killing one innocent bystander is wrong even if it could save billion lifes. Just because our agents are autonomous entities and they have unalienable rights to life, property, freedom, that can't be violated, even for the greater good.
The above problems can only be solved if the moral agents voluntarily opt into a system that takes away a portion of their individual freedom for a greater good. However this system should not give arbitrary power to a single entity but every (immoral) violation of autonomy should happen for a well defined "higher" purpose.
I don't say that this is the definitive way to address morality abstractly in the presence of a superintelligent entity, these are just reiterations of some of the moral principles our liberal western democracy are built upon.
That's what I told the judge when loaded one bullet into my revolver and went on a 'Russian killing spree'. He wasn't impressed.
If you didn't kill anyone, what were you convicted of - and what sentence did you get?
Edit: Blueberry's interpretation may be more accurate.
The sentence would be reckless endangerment in that case, possibly multiple counts; search engines suggest this is a gross misdemeanor in Washington State, which would make a typical maximum sentence of about a year. (Were I the judge, I would schedule the year for each count to be served successively, but that's me.)
In Washington, that's at least attempted manslaughter, which leads to a 10 year maximum. It may even be attempted murder, though we'd need to check the case law.
This is Australia. He started with possession of an unlicensed firearm and worked up from there.
The worst part was the appeal. I showed them the security footage in which I clearly reseeded the revolver between each of my four shots rather then firing four chambers sequentially and they wouldn't reduce the sentence by 22%.
If one of my shots had gone off on the second shot we could have seen if the judge was a frequentist. Would he call in a psychologist as an expert witness? "Was the defendant planning to shoot twice or shoot up to four times until the gun fired?"
Correction: a Class A felony has a maximum sentence of life in prison, according to your link. Otherwise, yeah, you're right.
That would be attempted murder, with a sentence of usually at least 20 years.
There is a huge difference between choosing a random person to kill and endangering someone.
Our society already expects that there are risks to life that are not killing: for example airlines can make analysis about how much certain security procedures cost and how much lives do they save. If they can show that if it costs more than (I guess) 7 million dollars to save one life, then it is not reasonable to implement that measure.
You really don't even have to go that far in your justification, if you're clever. You could just note that the actual result of such a practice is to make people go to greater efforts to avoid being in a position whereby they'll be selected for murder/organ harvesting, resulting in an aggregate waste of resources on such risk avoidance that is bad even from a utilitarian standpoint.
It's much harder to find scenarios where such an action is justified on utilitarian grounds than you might think.
Not at all. If it were revealed that a doctor had deliberately killed a patient to harvest the organs, it's not like people will say, "Oh, well, I guess the law doesn't make all doctors do this, so I shouldn't change my behavior in response." Most likely, they would want to know how common this is, and if there are any tell-tale signs that a doctor will act this way, and avoid being in a situation where they'll be harvested.
You have to account for these behavioral adjustments in any honest utilitarian calculus.
Likewise, the Catholic Church worries about the consequence of one priest breaking confidence of a confessioner, even if they don't make it a policy to do so afterward.
Unless I were under duress, no, but I can't imagine a situation how I'd be in the position to make such a decision without being under duress!
And again, I have to factor in the above calculation: if it's not a one time thing, I have to account for the information that I'm doing this "leaking out", and the fact that my very perceptions will be biased to artificially make this more noble than it really is.
Btw, I was recently in an argument with Gene Callahan on his blog about how Peter Singer handles these issues (Singer targets the situation you've described), but I think he deleted those posts.