The mugger can also just say “Give me $5 or I will cause you to lose 3^^^3 times more utility than that $5 is worth.” This makes the issue a bit clearer, though I’m sure one can still fail to answer the challenge head-on.
This brings up the end of the second approach I mentioned; does it really make sense to talk about an individual experiencing that much (negative) utility? Even if it’s not a ‘more northerly than the north pole’ definitional impossibility, might it be a ‘climb higher than Mount Everest’ physically practical impossibility?
Oops, took so long to write my reply that this post went from having no comments to having a discussion of my main point :-) (But my reply still expands on these points, so I won’t just delete it.)
This brings up the end of the second approach I mentioned; does it really make sense to talk about an individual experiencing that much (negative) utility?
Short answer: This objection is saying that your utility function should be bounded, which is one of the standard answers, though I think that many people suggesting a bounded utility function were just doing so as a way to fix the problem, rather than arguing from first principles that you really shouldn’t care that much more about the mugger’s threat than about losing five dollars.
The mugger can also just say “Give me $5 or I will cause you to lose 3^^^3 times more utility than that $5 is worth.” This makes the issue a bit clearer, though I’m sure one can still fail to answer the challenge head-on.
This brings up the end of the second approach I mentioned; does it really make sense to talk about an individual experiencing that much (negative) utility? Even if it’s not a ‘more northerly than the north pole’ definitional impossibility, might it be a ‘climb higher than Mount Everest’ physically practical impossibility?
Oops, took so long to write my reply that this post went from having no comments to having a discussion of my main point :-) (But my reply still expands on these points, so I won’t just delete it.)
Short answer: This objection is saying that your utility function should be bounded, which is one of the standard answers, though I think that many people suggesting a bounded utility function were just doing so as a way to fix the problem, rather than arguing from first principles that you really shouldn’t care that much more about the mugger’s threat than about losing five dollars.
Thank you. That removes many extraneous issues from the problem.