You're looking at Less Wrong's discussion board. This includes all posts, including those that haven't been promoted to the front page yet. For more information, see About Less Wrong.

wedrifid comments on Torturing people for fun - Less Wrong Discussion

13 Post author: cousin_it 14 February 2011 08:52PM

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

Comments (44)

You are viewing a single comment's thread.

Comment author: wedrifid 15 February 2011 03:49:15AM *  1 point [-]

2) If you say X or N must be very large, does this prove that you measure torture and fun using in effect different scales, and therefore are a deontologist rather than a utilitarian?

Not in and of itself. That proof would also require knowing that this deviates from the actual utility assigned to each state. Without knowing those numbers you can only draw inferences that they are probably deontologists based on estimating the implausibility of the implied utility evaluations.

Mind you, the vast majority of people claiming to be utilitarian do seem to be deontologists, regardless of their verbal expressions to the contrary.