• ApfelstrudelWAKASAGI@feddit.de
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    1 year ago

    You would need a crazy low probability of a lunatic or a mass murderer being down the line to justify not to kill one person

    Edit: Sum(2^n (1-p)^(n-1) p) ~ Sum(2^n p) for p small. So you’d need a p= (2×2^32 -2) ~ 1/(8 billion) chance of catching a psycho for expected values to be equal. I.e. there is only a single person tops who would decide to kill all on earth.

    • ChrisGrantsBrownlow@aussie.zone
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      1 year ago

      You don’t even need a lunatic or mass murderer. As you say, the logical choice is to kill one person. For the next person, the logical choice is to kill two people, and so on.

      • ApfelstrudelWAKASAGI@feddit.de
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        1 year ago

        It does create the funny paradox where, up to a certain point, a rational utilitarian would choose to kill and a rational mass murderer trying to maximise deaths would choose to double it.

            • interdimensionalmeme@lemmy.ml
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              1 year ago

              Doubling action forever minimizes human deaths.

              Unless someone decide to hit kill. In that case, it’s them doing it. I’m invalidating the argument that pre-empting imaginary future mass murders justifies killing one person today.

              • ApfelstrudelWAKASAGI@feddit.de
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                1 year ago

                Idk which moral system you operate under, but I’m concerned with minimising human suffering. That implies hitting kill because chances of a mass murderer are too high not to. You also don’t follow traffic laws to a t, but exercise caution because you don’t really care whose fault it ends up being, you want to avoid bad outcomes (in this case the extinction of humankind).