When you use philosophical reflection to override naive intuition, you should have explicit reasons for doing so. A reason for valuing 10,000 lives 10 times as much as 1,000 lives is that both of these are tiny compared to the total number of lives, so if you valued them at a different ratio, this would imply an oddly sharp bend in utility as a function of lives, and we can tell that there is no such bend because if we imagine that there were a few thousand more or fewer people on the planet, our intuitions about that that particular tradeoff would not change. This reasoning does not apply to decisions affecting astronomically large numbers of lives, and I have not seen any reasoning that does which I find compelling.
It is also not true that people are trying to figure out whether to overrule their intuition when they talk about Pascal’s mugging; typically, they are trying to figure out how to justify not overruling their intuition. How else can you explain the preponderence of shaky “resolutions” to Pascal’s mugging that accept the Linear Utility Hypothesis and nonetheless conclude that you should not pay Pascal’s mugger, when “I tried to estimate the relevent probabilities fairly conservatively, multiplied probabilities times utilities, and paying Pascal’s mugger came out far ahead” is usually not considered a resolution?
When you use philosophical reflection to override naive intuition, you should have explicit reasons for doing so. A reason for valuing 10,000 lives 10 times as much as 1,000 lives is that both of these are tiny compared to the total number of lives, so if you valued them at a different ratio, this would imply an oddly sharp bend in utility as a function of lives, and we can tell that there is no such bend because if we imagine that there were a few thousand more or fewer people on the planet, our intuitions about that that particular tradeoff would not change. This reasoning does not apply to decisions affecting astronomically large numbers of lives, and I have not seen any reasoning that does which I find compelling.
It is also not true that people are trying to figure out whether to overrule their intuition when they talk about Pascal’s mugging; typically, they are trying to figure out how to justify not overruling their intuition. How else can you explain the preponderence of shaky “resolutions” to Pascal’s mugging that accept the Linear Utility Hypothesis and nonetheless conclude that you should not pay Pascal’s mugger, when “I tried to estimate the relevent probabilities fairly conservatively, multiplied probabilities times utilities, and paying Pascal’s mugger came out far ahead” is usually not considered a resolution?