Comment on Open thread, Mar. 2 - Mar. 8, 2015

Tue, 03 Mar 2015 15:33:12 GMT

I hesitate to call consequentialism trivial

I just meant I accept the consequentialist idea in decision theory that we should maximize, e.g. pick the best out of alternatives. But said in this way, it's a trivial point. I reject more general varieties of consequentialism (for reasons that are not important right now, but basically I think a lot of weird conclusions of consequentialism are due to modeling problems, e.g. the set up that makes consequentialism work doesn't apply well).

normal things are normal and weird things are weird

I don't know what you are saying here. Can you taboo "weird?" Newcomb is weird for CDT because it explicitly violates an assumption CDT is using. The answer here is to go meta and think about a family of decision theories of which CDT is one, indexed by their assumption sets.

Discuss