Paul_Gowder comments on Circular Altruism - Less Wrong

40 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 22 January 2008 06:00PM

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Comment author: Paul_Gowder 26 January 2008 07:24:00AM 6 points [-]

Eliezer -- depends again on whether we're aggregating across individuals or within one individual. From a utilitarian perspective (see The Post That Is To Come for a non-utilitarian take), that's my big objection to the specks thing. Slapping each of 100 people once each is not the same as slapping one person 100 times. The first is a series of slaps. The second is a beating.

Honestly, I'm not sure if I'd have given the same answer to all of those questions w/o having heard of the dust specks dilemma. I feel like that world is a little too weird -- the thing that motivates me to think about those questions is the dust specks dilemma. They're not the sort of things practical reason ordinarily has to worry about, or that we can ordinarily expect to have well-developed intuitions about!