From: Matt Mahoney (matmahoney@yahoo.com)
Date: Wed May 07 2008 - 08:30:07 MDT
--- Stuart Armstrong <dragondreaming@googlemail.com> wrote:
> You own utility and the utility you have regarding others are quite
> different things. And the pain I was thinking of was along the lines
> of "hideous torture" rather than "some shortness of breath, combined
> with the grim satisfaction that you are doing something worthy".
You are confusing collective utility with ethics. We have already seen
the dangers of maximizing total human utility vs. average utility. (One
leads to a very large population, the other very small). Weighting
utility on a nonlinear scale to fit your ethical model will just lead to
other disasters. (I will leave it to others to come up with examples if
you can't think of any yourself). Individual ethical models are much more
complex than that. There is no universally "right" model, just models
that lead to higher fitness.
-- Matt Mahoney, matmahoney@yahoo.com
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