jimrandomh comments on Jews and Nazis: a version of dust specks vs torture - Less Wrong

16 Post author: shminux 07 September 2012 08:15PM

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Comment author: jimrandomh 08 September 2012 01:19:12AM 3 points [-]

The mistake here is in saying that satisfying the preferences of other agents is always good in proportion to the number of agents whose preference is satisfied. While there have been serious attempts to build moral theories with that as a premise, I consider them failures, and reject this premise. Satisfying the preferences of others is only usually good, with exceptions for preferences that I strongly disendorse, independent of the tradeoffs between the preferences of different people. Also, the value of satisfying the same preference in many people grows sub-linearly with the number of people.