If, by some cosmic happenstance the effect of a chicken’s life or death affected your grandmother exactly zero—no gravitational effects of the Australian chicken’s beak on your grandmother’s heart, no nothin’—then the utilities get more complicated. If the smallest possible non-zero probability a chicken could kill or save your grandmother were 10^-2,321,832,934,903, then the utilities could be something like:
It seems more likely that he really isn’t VNM-compliant. Chickens are tasty and nutritious, 1⁄1,000,000 is a small number and lets face it, grandparents of adults are already old and have much more chance than that of dying every day. It would be surprising if Said is so perfectly indifferent to chickens, especially since he’s already been explicitly telling us that he isn’t VNM-compliant.
Yep. But you probably don’t care about chickens.
If, by some cosmic happenstance the effect of a chicken’s life or death affected your grandmother exactly zero—no gravitational effects of the Australian chicken’s beak on your grandmother’s heart, no nothin’—then the utilities get more complicated. If the smallest possible non-zero probability a chicken could kill or save your grandmother were 10^-2,321,832,934,903, then the utilities could be something like:
dead-chicken-dead-grandma 0
live-chicken-dead-grandma 1
dead-chicken-live-grandma 10^2,321,832,934,903 + 1
live-chicken-live-grandma 10^-2,321,832,934,903 + 2
It seems more likely that he really isn’t VNM-compliant. Chickens are tasty and nutritious, 1⁄1,000,000 is a small number and lets face it, grandparents of adults are already old and have much more chance than that of dying every day. It would be surprising if Said is so perfectly indifferent to chickens, especially since he’s already been explicitly telling us that he isn’t VNM-compliant.