Thank you, I too was curious.

We need names for these positions; I'd use hyper-rationalist but I think that's slightly different. Perhaps a consequentialist does whatever has the maximum expected utility at any given moment, and a meta-consequentialist is a machine built by a consequentialist which is expected to achieve the maximum overall utility at least in part through being trustworthy to keep commitments a pure consequentialist would not be able to keep.

I guess I'm not sure why people are so interested in this class of problems. If you substitute Clippy for my lift, and up the stakes to a billion lives lost later in return for two billion saved now, there you have a problem, but when it's human beings on a human scale there are good ordinary consequentialist reasons to honour such bargains, and those reasons are enough for the driver to trust my commitment. Does anyone really anticipate a version of this situation arising in which only a meta-consequentialist wins, and if so can you describe it?