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Ghatanathoah comments on Jews and Nazis: a version of dust specks vs torture - Less Wrong
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Maybe you misunderstand the concept of lying. They would really believe that all Jews are dead if successfully lied to, so their stress would decrease just as much as as if they all were indeed dead.
This is more interesting. Here we go, the definitions:
Assumption: we assume that it is possible to separate overall personal happiness level into components (factors), which could be additive, multiplicative (or separable in some other way). This does not seem overly restrictive.
Definition 1: A component of personal happiness resulting from others being unhappy is called "malicious".
Definition 2: A component of personal happiness resulting from others being happy is called "virtuous".
Definition 3: A component of personal happiness that is neither malicious nor virtuous is called "neutral".
Now your suggestion is that malicious components do not count toward global decision making at all. (Virtuous components possibly count more than neutral ones, though this could already be accounted for.) Thus we ignore any suffering inflicted on Nazis due to Jews existing/prospering.
Does this sound right?
If this is the case then the Nazis do not really want to kill the Jews. What they really want to do is decrease their stress, killing Jews is just an instrumental goal to achieve that end. My understanding of the original thought experiment was that killing Jews was a terminal value for the Nazis, something they valued for its own sake regardless of whether it helped them achieve any other goals. In other words, even if you were able to modify the Nazi brains so they didn't feel stress at the knowledge that Jews existed, they would still desire to kill them.
Yes, that's exactly the point I was trying to make, although I prefer the term "personal satisfaction" rather than "personal happiness" to reflect the possibility that there are other values then happiness.