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orthonormal comments on Please Don't Fight the Hypothetical - Less Wrong Discussion

19 Post author: TimS 20 April 2012 02:29PM

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Comment author: orthonormal 22 April 2012 06:06:48PM 1 point [-]

Let's be clear: I do subscribe to utilitarianism, just not a naive one. (Long-range consequences and advanced decision theories make a big difference.) If I had magical levels of certainty of the problem statement, then I'd bite the bullet and pick torture. But in real life, that's an impossible state for a human being to occupy on object-level problems.

Truly meta-level problems are perhaps different; given a genie that magically understands human moral intuitions and is truly motivated to help humanity, I would ask it to reconcile our contradictory intuitions in a utilitarian way rather than in a deontological way. (It would take a fair bit of work to turn this hypothetical into something that makes real sense to ask, but one example is how to structure CEV.)

Does that make sense as a statement of where I stand?