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cousin_it comments on The Aliens have Landed! - Less Wrong
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And you can set up a scenario without dragging in torture and extinction. Aliens from Ganymede are about to ink a contract to trade us tons of Niobium in exchange for tons of Cobalt. But then the aliens reveal that they have billions of cloned humans working as an indentured proletariat in the mines of the Trojan asteroids. These humans are generally well treated, but the aliens offer to treat them even better - feed them ice cream - if we send the Cobalt without requiring payment in Niobium.
The central problem in all of these thought experiments is the crazy notion that we should give a shit about the welfare of other minds simply because they exist and experience things analogously to the way we experience things.
Your variation is better than mine! Not sure about your solution though, it looks a little hurried.
However it is a different problem. An interesting problem in its own right but one for which many people's coherent preferences will produce a different answer for slightly different reasons.