My stronger claim, in case you agree with all of the above but think it is irrelevant, is that all humans have a bounded utility function.
I think that this is plausible. In the vaguer language of 0., we could wonder if "any utility function that approximates the preferences of a human being is bounded." The partner of this claim, that events with probability 10^(-500) can't happen, is also plausible. For instance, they would both follow from any kind of ultrafinitism. But however plausible we find it, none of us yet know whether it's the case, so it's valuable to consider alternatives.
Write X for a terrible thing (if you prefer the philanthropy version, wonderful thing) that has probability 10^(-500). To pay 5$ to prevent X means by revealed preference that |U(X)| > 5*10^(500). Part of Komponisto's proposal is that, for a certain kind of utility function, this would imply that X is very complicated -- too complicated for him to write down. So he couldn't prove to you (not in this medium!) that so-and-so's utility function can take values this high by describing an example of something that terrible. It doesn't follow that U(X) is always small -- especially not if we remain agnostic about ultrafinitism.
For background, see here.
In a comment on the original Pascal's mugging post, Nick Tarleton writes:
Coming across this again recently, it occurred to me that there might be a way to generalize Vassar's suggestion in such a way as to deal with Tarleton's more abstract formulation of the problem. I'm curious about the extent to which folks have thought about this. (Looking further through the comments on the original post, I found essentially the same idea in a comment by g, but it wasn't discussed further.)
The idea is that the Kolmogorov complexity of "3^^^^3 units of disutility" should be much higher than the Kolmogorov complexity of the number 3^^^^3. That is, the utility function should grow only according to the complexity of the scenario being evaluated, and not (say) linearly in the number of people involved. Furthermore, the domain of the utility function should consist of low-level descriptions of the state of the world, which won't refer directly to words uttered by muggers, in such a way that a mere discussion of "3^^^^3 units of disutility" by a mugger will not typically be (anywhere near) enough evidence to promote an actual "3^^^^3-disutilon" hypothesis to attention.
This seems to imply that the intuition responsible for the problem is a kind of fake simplicity, ignoring the complexity of value (negative value in this case). A confusion of levels also appears implicated (talking about utility does not itself significantly affect utility; you don't suddenly make 3^^^^3-disutilon scenarios probable by talking about "3^^^^3 disutilons").
What do folks think of this? Any obvious problems?