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Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Punching Utilitarians in the Face, published by AppliedDivinityStudies on July 13, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. A fun game for avowed non-utilitarians is to invent increasingly exotic thought experiments to demonstrate the sheer absurdity of utilitarianism. Consider this bit from Tyler’s recent interview with SBF: COWEN: Should a Benthamite be risk-neutral with regard to social welfare? BANKMAN-FRIED: Yes, that I feel very strongly about. COWEN: Okay, but let’s say there’s a game: 51 percent, you double the Earth out somewhere else; 49 percent, it all disappears. Would you play that game? And would you keep on playing that, double or nothing?.BANKMAN-FRIED: Again, I feel compelled to say caveats here, like, “How do you really know that’s what’s happening?” Blah, blah, blah, whatever. But that aside, take the pure hypothetical. COWEN: Then you keep on playing the game. So, what’s the chance we’re left with anything? Don’t I just St. Petersburg paradox you into nonexistence? Pretty damning! It sure sounds pretty naive to just take any bet with positive expected value. Or from a more academic context, here is FTX Foundation CEO Nick Beckstead alongside Teruji Thomas: On your deathbed, God brings good news. he’ll give you a ticket that can be handed to the reaper, good for an additional year of happy life on Earth. As you celebrate, the devil appears and asks “Won’t you accept a small risk to get something vastly better? Trade that ticket for this one: it’s good for 10 years of happy life, but with probability 0.999.” You accept. but then the devil asks again. “Trade that ticket for this one: it is good for 100 years of happy life–10 times as long–with probability 0.9992–just 0.1% lower.” An hour later, you’ve made 50,000 trades. You find yourself with a ticket for 1050,000 years of happy life that only works with probability 0.99950,000, less than one chance in 1021 Predictably, you die that very night. And it’s not just risk! There are damning scenarios downright disproving utilitarianism around every corner. Joe Carlsmith: Suppose that oops: actually, red’s payout is just a single, barely-conscious, slightly-happy lizard, floating for eternity in space. For a sufficiently utilitarian-ish infinite fanatic, it makes no difference. Burn the Utopia. Torture the kittens. .in the land of the infinite, the bullet-biting utilitarian train runs out of track. It’s looking quite bad for utilitarianism at this point. But of course, one man’s modus ponens is another man’s modus tollens, and so I submit to you that actually, it is the thought experiments which are damned by all this. I take the case for “common sense ethics” seriously, meaning that a correct ethical system should, for the most part, advocate for things in a way that lines up with what people actually feel and believe is right. But if your entire argument against utilitarianism is based on ginormous numbers, tiny probabilities, literal eternities and other such nonsense, you are no longer on the side of moral intuitionism. Rather, your arguments are wildly unintuitive, your “thought experiments” literally unimaginable, and each “intuition pump” overtly designed to take advantage of known cognitive failures. The real problem isn’t even that these scenarios are too exotic, it’s that coming up with them is trivial, and thus proves nothing. Consider, with apologies to Derek Parfit: Suppose that I am driving at midnight through some desert. My car breaks down. You are a stranger, and the only other driver near. I manage to stop you, and I ask for help. As you are against utilitarianism, you have committed to the following doctrine: when a stranger asks for help at midnight in the desert, you will give them the help they need free of charge. Unless they are a utilitarian, in which case you will punch them in the ...