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Kaj_Sotala comments on In favour of total utilitarianism over average - Less Wrong Discussion

0 Post author: casebash 22 December 2015 05:07AM

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Comment author: Kaj_Sotala 24 December 2015 11:55:10AM 2 points [-]

I think that "this case will never occur in real life, thus we should ignore it when evaluating the validity of a moral theory" is a valid objection to the premises of a thought experiment, for the same reason why "this classification algorithm systematically misclassifies images of dogs as cats, but we were only going to use it for spam filtering not for image recognition so that's irrelevant" is a valid argument.

Comment author: casebash 24 December 2015 12:33:30PM 0 points [-]

I've already written a few articles on this on Less Wrong (http://lesswrong.com/lw/mt5/hypothetical_situations_are_not_meant_to_exist/), plus a few others.