Stuart_Armstrong comments on A (small) critique of total utilitarianism - Less Wrong

36 Post author: Stuart_Armstrong 26 June 2012 12:36PM

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Comment author: Stuart_Armstrong 27 June 2012 12:28:29PM 1 point [-]

I'm still vague on what you mean by "contradictions".

Comment author: Lukas_Gloor 27 June 2012 02:10:10PM 0 points [-]

Not in the formal sense. I meant for instance what Will_Savin pointed out above, a neutral life (a lot of suffering and a lot of happiness) being equally worthy of creating as a happy one (mainly just happiness, very little suffering). Or for "critical levels" (which also refers to the infamous dust specks), see section VI of this paper, where you get different results depending on how you start aggregating. And Peter Singer's prior-existence view seems to contain a "contradiction" (maybe "absurdity" is better) as well having to do with replaceability, but that would take me a while to explain. It's not quite a contradiction that the theory states "do X and not-X", but it's obvious enough that something doesn't add up. I hope that led to some clarification, sorry for my terminology.