Unknown comments on The "Intuitions" Behind "Utilitarianism" - Less Wrong

29 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 28 January 2008 04:29PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (193)

Sort By: Old

You are viewing a single comment's thread.

Comment author: Unknown 28 January 2008 07:47:41PM 1 point [-]

The only reason Eliezer didn't put death on the same scale as the dust mote was on account of his condition that the dust specks have no further consequences. In real life, everything has consequences, and so in real life, death is on the same scale with everything else, including dust motes. Eliezer expressed this extremely well: "Whatever value is worth thinking about at all, must be worth trading off against all other values worth thinking about, because thought itself is a limited resource that must be traded off."

So yes, in real life there is some number of dust motes such that it would be better to prevent the dust storm than to save a life.