This is absurd. I really, really would rather pay $8,000 a year than be a vegetarian. Do you think I’m lying or don’t understand my own preferences? (I’m an economist and so understand money and tradeoffs and I’m on a paleo diet and so understand my desire for meat.)
I would rather live in a world in which I donate $8,000 a year to MIRI and press the button to one in which I’m a vegetarian and donate nothing to charity.
There is no market for your proposed trade. In this case using money as a proxy for utility/preference doesn’t net you any insight because you can’t exchange vegetarianism or animal-years-of-torture for anything else. Of course you can convert to dollars if you really want to, but you have to convert both sides—how much would you have to be paid to allow an animal to be tortured for three days? (This is equivalent to the original question, we’ve just gone through some unnecessary conversions).
This is absurd. I really, really would rather pay $8,000 a year than be a vegetarian. Do you think I’m lying or don’t understand my own preferences? (I’m an economist and so understand money and tradeoffs and I’m on a paleo diet and so understand my desire for meat.)
I would rather live in a world in which I donate $8,000 a year to MIRI and press the button to one in which I’m a vegetarian and donate nothing to charity.
There is no market for your proposed trade. In this case using money as a proxy for utility/preference doesn’t net you any insight because you can’t exchange vegetarianism or animal-years-of-torture for anything else. Of course you can convert to dollars if you really want to, but you have to convert both sides—how much would you have to be paid to allow an animal to be tortured for three days? (This is equivalent to the original question, we’ve just gone through some unnecessary conversions).