Relevance: There’s reasoning that goes, “if you ever drive to the store to get a chocolate bar, you’re risking crashing into and killing someone, therefore you don’t value people’s lives infinitely more than eating chocolate”. I reject it on the above grounds. Systematically avoiding all situations where you’re risking someone’s life in exchange for a low-importance experience would assemble into a high-importance life-ruining experience for you (starving to death in your apartment, I guess?). Given that, we’re now comparing same-tier experiences, and here I’m willing to be additive, calculating that killing a person with very low probability is better than killing yourself (by a thousand cuts) with certainty.
Ok, but if you don’t drive to the store one day to get your chocolate, then that is not a major pain for you, yes? Why not just decide that next time you want chocolate at the store, you’re not going to go out and get it because you may run over a pedestrian? Your decision there doesn’t need to impact your other decisions.
Then you ought to keep on making that choice until you are right on the edge of those choices adding up to a first-tier experience, but certainly below.
This logic generalizes. You will always be pushing the lower tiers of experience as low as they can go before they enter the upper-tiers of experience. I think the fact that your paragraph above is clearly motivated reasoning here (instead of “how can I actually get the most bang for my buck within this moral theory” style reasoning) shows that you agree with me (and many others) that this is flawed.
Ok, but if you don’t drive to the store one day to get your chocolate, then that is not a major pain for you, yes? Why not just decide that next time you want chocolate at the store, you’re not going to go out and get it because you may run over a pedestrian? Your decision there doesn’t need to impact your other decisions.
Then you ought to keep on making that choice until you are right on the edge of those choices adding up to a first-tier experience, but certainly below.
This logic generalizes. You will always be pushing the lower tiers of experience as low as they can go before they enter the upper-tiers of experience. I think the fact that your paragraph above is clearly motivated reasoning here (instead of “how can I actually get the most bang for my buck within this moral theory” style reasoning) shows that you agree with me (and many others) that this is flawed.