this post was submitted on 29 Jul 2023
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[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (6 children)

You would need a crazy low probability of a lunatic or a mass murderer being down the line to justify not to kill one person

Edit: Sum(2^n (1-p)^(n-1) p) ~ Sum(2^n p) for p small. So you'd need a p= (2×2^32 -2) ~ 1/(8 billion) chance of catching a psycho for expected values to be equal. I.e. there is only a single person tops who would decide to kill all on earth.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago (5 children)

You don't even need a lunatic or mass murderer. As you say, the logical choice is to kill one person. For the next person, the logical choice is to kill two people, and so on.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 years ago (1 children)

It does create the funny paradox where, up to a certain point, a rational utilitarian would choose to kill and a rational mass murderer trying to maximise deaths would choose to double it.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 years ago (1 children)

It's always "double it" Anyone after 34 flips the kill all humans, that's their fault not yours

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Why do you care whose fault it is? You'd want to minimise human deaths, not win a blame game.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

Doubling action forever minimizes human deaths.

Unless someone decide to hit kill. In that case, it's them doing it. I'm invalidating the argument that pre-empting imaginary future mass murders justifies killing one person today.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago

Idk which moral system you operate under, but I'm concerned with minimising human suffering. That implies hitting kill because chances of a mass murderer are too high not to. You also don't follow traffic laws to a t, but exercise caution because you don't really care whose fault it ends up being, you want to avoid bad outcomes (in this case the extinction of humankind).

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