orthonormal comments on Consequentialism Need Not Be Nearsighted - Less Wrong

53 Post author: orthonormal 02 September 2011 07:37AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (118)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 04 September 2011 05:59:46AM 4 points [-]

Related, here is Eliezer's answer to the railroad switch dilemma from the ends don't justify the means (among humans):

"You stipulate that the only possible way to save five innocent lives is to murder one innocent person, and this murder will definitely save the five lives, and that these facts are known to me with effective certainty. But since I am running on corrupted hardware, I can't occupy the epistemic state you want me to imagine. Therefore I reply that, in a society of Artificial Intelligences worthy of personhood and lacking any inbuilt tendency to be corrupted by power, it would be right for the AI to murder the one innocent person to save five, and moreover all its peers would agree. However, I refuse to extend this reply to myself, because the epistemic state you ask me to imagine, can only exist among other kinds of people than human beings."