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J_Taylor comments on Jews and Nazis: a version of dust specks vs torture - Less Wrong
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Comments (151)
(shrug) Sure, I'll bite this bullet.
Yes, if enough people are made to suffer sufficiently by virtue of my existence, and there's no way to alleviate that suffering other than my extermination, then I endorse my extermination.
To do otherwise would be unjustifiably selfish.
Which is not to say I would necessarily exterminate myself, if I had sufficiently high confidence that this was the case... I don't always do what I endorse.
And if it's not me but some other individual or group X that has that property in that hypothetical scenario, I endorse X's extermination as well.
And, sure, if you label the group in an emotionally charged way (e.g., "Nazis exterminating Jews" as you do here), I'll feel a strong emotional aversion to that conclusion (as I do here).
Be careful, TheOtherDave! Utility Monsters are wily beasts.
(nods) Yup.
A lot of the difficulty here, of course, as in many such scenarios, is that I'm being asked to consider the sufferers in this scenario people, even though they don't behave like any people I've ever known.
That said, I can imagine something that suffers the way they do and that I still care about alleviating the suffering of.
The threshold between what I care about and what I don't is, as always, pretty friggin arbitrary.