Having read a lot of philosophers talking of morality here, and having read a lot of economists talking of utility, I think I will concentrate on the economists.
I was going to say I think my utility is maximized by spending no more time on the philosophers and using that on economists instead. But of course someone who chose the philosophers might say she believes the moral thing to do is to study the morality instead of the utility.
In physics sometimes you get to a point where your calculation involves subtracting an infinite quantity from another intfinite quantity in order to reach a finite result. Probably not often, but my recollection is there is a statistical mechanical calculation of the self-energy of an electron or some such where the only way forward is to pretend these two infinities difference to zero, and then from there you get results which are highly useful in predicting the real world’s behavior. I think in a lot of these moral utility arguments, if you can’t make the argument work using numbers of a trillion people or less, that you are too far out of anything real to have any faith at all that your arguments mean anything at all about the real world.
Does anybody know of any case in human history where some great improbable wrong was averted by people being concerned about improbable events that require the ^ character to be compactly expressed?
Does anybody know of any case in human history where some great improbable wrong was averted by people being concerned about improbable events that require the ^ character to be compactly expressed?
I think you’d be better off looking for cases where some great improbable wrong occurred since no one was concerned about improbable events. That said, human history requires some very large numbers, but not any ^s.
Having read a lot of philosophers talking of morality here, and having read a lot of economists talking of utility, I think I will concentrate on the economists.
I was going to say I think my utility is maximized by spending no more time on the philosophers and using that on economists instead. But of course someone who chose the philosophers might say she believes the moral thing to do is to study the morality instead of the utility.
In physics sometimes you get to a point where your calculation involves subtracting an infinite quantity from another intfinite quantity in order to reach a finite result. Probably not often, but my recollection is there is a statistical mechanical calculation of the self-energy of an electron or some such where the only way forward is to pretend these two infinities difference to zero, and then from there you get results which are highly useful in predicting the real world’s behavior. I think in a lot of these moral utility arguments, if you can’t make the argument work using numbers of a trillion people or less, that you are too far out of anything real to have any faith at all that your arguments mean anything at all about the real world.
Does anybody know of any case in human history where some great improbable wrong was averted by people being concerned about improbable events that require the ^ character to be compactly expressed?
I think you’d be better off looking for cases where some great improbable wrong occurred since no one was concerned about improbable events. That said, human history requires some very large numbers, but not any ^s.