Raising the stakes in this way does not work, because of the issue described in Ethical Injunctions: it is less likely that Omega has presented you with this choice, than that you have gone insane.
So imagine yourself in the most inconvenient possible world where Omega is a known feature of the environment and has long been seen to follow through on promises of this type; it does not particularly occur to you or anyone that believing this fact makes you insane.
When I phrase it that way—imagine myself in a world full of other people confronted by similar Omega-induced dilemmas—I suddenly find that I feel substantially less uncomfortable; indicating that some of what I thought was pure ethical constraint is actually social ethical constraint. Still, it may function to the same self-protective effect as ethical constraint.
To add to the comments below, if you’re going to take this route, you might as well have already decided that encountering Omega at all is less likely than that you have gone insane.
That may be true, but it’s still a dodge. Conditional on not being insane, what’s your answer?
Additionally, I don’t see why Omega asking you to give it 100 dollars vs 15 human lives necessarily crosses the threshold of “more likely that I’m just a nutbar”. I don’t expect to talk to Omega anytime soon...
Raising the stakes in this way does not work, because of the issue described in Ethical Injunctions: it is less likely that Omega has presented you with this choice, than that you have gone insane.
So imagine yourself in the most inconvenient possible world where Omega is a known feature of the environment and has long been seen to follow through on promises of this type; it does not particularly occur to you or anyone that believing this fact makes you insane.
When I phrase it that way—imagine myself in a world full of other people confronted by similar Omega-induced dilemmas—I suddenly find that I feel substantially less uncomfortable; indicating that some of what I thought was pure ethical constraint is actually social ethical constraint. Still, it may function to the same self-protective effect as ethical constraint.
To add to the comments below, if you’re going to take this route, you might as well have already decided that encountering Omega at all is less likely than that you have gone insane.
That may be true, but it’s still a dodge. Conditional on not being insane, what’s your answer?
Additionally, I don’t see why Omega asking you to give it 100 dollars vs 15 human lives necessarily crosses the threshold of “more likely that I’m just a nutbar”. I don’t expect to talk to Omega anytime soon...