I like this insight—not only nonlinear but actually discontinuous. There are some marginal instants of torture that are hugely negative, mixed in with those that are more mildly negative. This is due to something that’s often forgotten in these discussions: ongoing impact of a momentary experience.
Being “broken” by torture may make it impossible to ever recover enough for any future experiences to be positive. There may be a few quanta of brokenness, but it’s not the case that every marginal second is all that bad, only some of them.
To me all the talk about utilities seem broken at a fundamental level. An implication of Timeless Decision Theory should be that an agent running TDT calculates utilities as an integral over time, so final values don’t have any explicit time dependence.
This fixes a lot of things, especially when combined with the texture of human experience. Utility should be a function of the states of the world it affects integrated over time. Since we don’t get to make that calculation in detail, we can approximate by choosing the kinds of actions that minimize the future bad impacts and maximize good ones.
This is the only view of utility that I can think of that preserves the “wisdom of the elders” point of view. It’s strange how often they turn out to be right as one ages, in saying “only care for the ones caring for you”, “focus on bettering yourself and not wallowing in bad circumstances” etc. These are the kind of actions that incorporate the notion that life is ongoing. One person only realizes these in an experiential way after having access to dozens of years of memories to reflect on.
Consequentialism (and utilitarianism as well IMO) is broad enough to incorporate both the necessity of universality and the view of virtue ethics if one thinks in the timeless utility perspective.
I like this insight—not only nonlinear but actually discontinuous. There are some marginal instants of torture that are hugely negative, mixed in with those that are more mildly negative. This is due to something that’s often forgotten in these discussions: ongoing impact of a momentary experience.
Being “broken” by torture may make it impossible to ever recover enough for any future experiences to be positive. There may be a few quanta of brokenness, but it’s not the case that every marginal second is all that bad, only some of them.
To me all the talk about utilities seem broken at a fundamental level. An implication of Timeless Decision Theory should be that an agent running TDT calculates utilities as an integral over time, so final values don’t have any explicit time dependence.
This fixes a lot of things, especially when combined with the texture of human experience. Utility should be a function of the states of the world it affects integrated over time. Since we don’t get to make that calculation in detail, we can approximate by choosing the kinds of actions that minimize the future bad impacts and maximize good ones.
This is the only view of utility that I can think of that preserves the “wisdom of the elders” point of view. It’s strange how often they turn out to be right as one ages, in saying “only care for the ones caring for you”, “focus on bettering yourself and not wallowing in bad circumstances” etc. These are the kind of actions that incorporate the notion that life is ongoing. One person only realizes these in an experiential way after having access to dozens of years of memories to reflect on.
Consequentialism (and utilitarianism as well IMO) is broad enough to incorporate both the necessity of universality and the view of virtue ethics if one thinks in the timeless utility perspective.