Coming late to this, and having to skim because Real Life, but I would modify:
Keltham is being coherent, said the Watcher.
Keltham’s decision is a valid one, given his own utility function (said the Watcher); you were wrong to try to talk him into thinking that he was making an objective error.
However, the Watcher said, Keltham’s utility function is also awful and Keltham should be shunned for it by any being with decent ethics.
I really don’t care how valid your utility function is, or how rational you think you are, if it turns you into the sort of person who has to weigh the possibility of a child dying against materialistic concerns. In that case, you’ve sacrificed your soul for the sake of optimising something worthless.
Since you are posting on this thread, I am going to assume that you probably own a computer. Even if your computer is quite cheap, its cost trades off against a substantial probability of being able to save a child’s life (much greater than the loss incurred by a 15-second delay).
I conclude therefore that by your own morality you should be shunned by any being with decent ethics, for having sacrificed your soul and chosen a worthless computer instead.
We don’t live in a world of clear perceptions and communications about abstract, many-times-removed ethical trade-offs.
We’re humans, with a tiny little window focused on the trivia of our day-to-day lives, trying to talk to other humans doing the same thing.
Sometimes, we manage to rise a little above that, which is wonderful, and we need to work out how to co-ordinate civilisation better in that direction.
But mostly we are just stumbling about in the mud, and don’t pretend that ridiculous sophist exercises in philosophical equivalence have any relation to real people and real experiences.
People don’t often get the chance to participate in real, close, and meaningful ethical dilemmas. A quite-possibly-drowning-child that you can save by simply taking obvious physical action would be one of them. And anyone who refuses to take that action is scum.
Coming late to this, and having to skim because Real Life, but I would modify:
I really don’t care how valid your utility function is, or how rational you think you are, if it turns you into the sort of person who has to weigh the possibility of a child dying against materialistic concerns. In that case, you’ve sacrificed your soul for the sake of optimising something worthless.
Since you are posting on this thread, I am going to assume that you probably own a computer. Even if your computer is quite cheap, its cost trades off against a substantial probability of being able to save a child’s life (much greater than the loss incurred by a 15-second delay).
I conclude therefore that by your own morality you should be shunned by any being with decent ethics, for having sacrificed your soul and chosen a worthless computer instead.
We don’t live in a world of clear perceptions and communications about abstract, many-times-removed ethical trade-offs.
We’re humans, with a tiny little window focused on the trivia of our day-to-day lives, trying to talk to other humans doing the same thing.
Sometimes, we manage to rise a little above that, which is wonderful, and we need to work out how to co-ordinate civilisation better in that direction.
But mostly we are just stumbling about in the mud, and don’t pretend that ridiculous sophist exercises in philosophical equivalence have any relation to real people and real experiences.
People don’t often get the chance to participate in real, close, and meaningful ethical dilemmas. A quite-possibly-drowning-child that you can save by simply taking obvious physical action would be one of them. And anyone who refuses to take that action is scum.