The unbounded utility function (in some physical objects that can be tiled indefinitely) in Pascal’s mugging gives infinite expected utility to all actions, and no reason to prefer handing over the money to any other action. People don’t actually show the pattern of preferences implied by an unbounded utility function.
If we make the utility function a bounded function of happy lives (or other tilable physical structures) with a high bound, other possibilities will offer high expected utility. The Mugger is not the most credible way to get huge rewards (investing in our civilization on the chance that physics allows unlimited computation beats the Mugger). This will be the case no matter how huge we make the (finite) bound.
Bounding the utility function definitely solves the problem, but there are a couple of problems. One is the principle that the utility function is not up for grabs, the other is that a bounded utility function has some rather nasty consequences of the “leave one baby on the track” kind.
One is the principle that the utility function is not up for grabs,
I don’t buy this. Many people have inconsistent intuitions regarding aggregation, as with population ethics. Someone with such inconsistent preferences doesn’t have a utility function to preserve.
Also note that a bounded utility function can allot some of the potential utility under the bound to producing an infinite amount of stuff, and that as a matter of psychological fact the human emotional response to stimuli can’t scale indefinitely with bigger numbers.
And, of course, allowing unbounded growth of utility with some tilable physical process means that process can dominate the utility of any non-aggregative goods, e.g. the existence of at least some instantiations of art or knowledge, or overall properties of the world like ratios of very good to lives just barely worth living/creating (although you might claim that the value of the last scales with population size, many wouldn’t characterize it that way).
Bounded utility functions seem to come much closer to letting you represent actual human concerns, or to represent more of them, in my view.
The unbounded utility function (in some physical objects that can be tiled indefinitely) in Pascal’s mugging gives infinite expected utility to all actions, and no reason to prefer handing over the money to any other action. People don’t actually show the pattern of preferences implied by an unbounded utility function.
If we make the utility function a bounded function of happy lives (or other tilable physical structures) with a high bound, other possibilities will offer high expected utility. The Mugger is not the most credible way to get huge rewards (investing in our civilization on the chance that physics allows unlimited computation beats the Mugger). This will be the case no matter how huge we make the (finite) bound.
Bounding the utility function definitely solves the problem, but there are a couple of problems. One is the principle that the utility function is not up for grabs, the other is that a bounded utility function has some rather nasty consequences of the “leave one baby on the track” kind.
I don’t buy this. Many people have inconsistent intuitions regarding aggregation, as with population ethics. Someone with such inconsistent preferences doesn’t have a utility function to preserve.
Also note that a bounded utility function can allot some of the potential utility under the bound to producing an infinite amount of stuff, and that as a matter of psychological fact the human emotional response to stimuli can’t scale indefinitely with bigger numbers.
And, of course, allowing unbounded growth of utility with some tilable physical process means that process can dominate the utility of any non-aggregative goods, e.g. the existence of at least some instantiations of art or knowledge, or overall properties of the world like ratios of very good to lives just barely worth living/creating (although you might claim that the value of the last scales with population size, many wouldn’t characterize it that way).
Bounded utility functions seem to come much closer to letting you represent actual human concerns, or to represent more of them, in my view.