Saying “a thousand people” invokes the wrong intuitions. Your brain imagines a thousand distinct people, and torturing a unique person would destroy their potential unique contribution to society.
A better analogy might be that if you push the button, Omega will give you $100 now, and then arranges for you to spend a thousand years in hell after you die instead of being annihilated instantly.
This is where we differ: a separate instance of a person is a separate person. I see no reason to attach special significance to unique experiences. Suppose you and an identical version of you happen to evolve separately on different worlds, make identical choices to travel on a spaceship to the same planet, and meet each other. Up until now your experiences have been identical. Are you okay with committing suicide as soon as you realize this identical person exists? Are you okay with Omega coming in one day and deciding to kill you and take all your belongings because he knows that you’re going to spend the rest of your life having an identical experience to someone else in the multiverse?
Maybe your answers to all these questions are yes, but mine aren’t. Society is filled with people who are mostly redundant. Do we really “need” Dude #3432 who grows up to be a hamburger flipper whose job eventually gets replaced by a robot? No. But morality isn’t (shouldn’t be) designed to protect some nebulous “society”. It’s designed to protect individual people.
This is especially true in the sort of post-singularity world where this sort of hypothetical even matters. If you have the technology to produce 1000 copies of a person, you probably don’t “need” people to contribute to society in the first place. People’s only inherent value is in their ability to enjoy life.
If I take your hypothetical in the sense I think you intend, then yes. In practice, I’d rather not, for the same reason I’d want to create copies of myself if only one existed to begin with.
I agree that the value of society is the value it provides to the people in it. However, I don’t think we should try to maximize the minimum happiness of everyone in the world: that way lies madness. I’d rather create one additional top-quality work of great art or culture than save a thousand additional orphans from starvation.
(If the thousand orphans could be brought up to first-world standards of living, rather than only being given mere existence, then they might produce more than one top-quality work of great art or culture on average between them. But the real world isn’t always that morally convenient.)
And in any case, even if there’s only two “unique” experiences, you’re still flipping a coin and either getting 1000 years of torture (say, −10,000,000 utility) or $100 (say, 10 utility), and the expected utility for hitting the button is still overwhelmingly negative.
Saying “a thousand people” invokes the wrong intuitions. Your brain imagines a thousand distinct people, and torturing a unique person would destroy their potential unique contribution to society.
A better analogy might be that if you push the button, Omega will give you $100 now, and then arranges for you to spend a thousand years in hell after you die instead of being annihilated instantly.
This is where we differ: a separate instance of a person is a separate person. I see no reason to attach special significance to unique experiences. Suppose you and an identical version of you happen to evolve separately on different worlds, make identical choices to travel on a spaceship to the same planet, and meet each other. Up until now your experiences have been identical. Are you okay with committing suicide as soon as you realize this identical person exists? Are you okay with Omega coming in one day and deciding to kill you and take all your belongings because he knows that you’re going to spend the rest of your life having an identical experience to someone else in the multiverse?
Maybe your answers to all these questions are yes, but mine aren’t. Society is filled with people who are mostly redundant. Do we really “need” Dude #3432 who grows up to be a hamburger flipper whose job eventually gets replaced by a robot? No. But morality isn’t (shouldn’t be) designed to protect some nebulous “society”. It’s designed to protect individual people.
This is especially true in the sort of post-singularity world where this sort of hypothetical even matters. If you have the technology to produce 1000 copies of a person, you probably don’t “need” people to contribute to society in the first place. People’s only inherent value is in their ability to enjoy life.
If I take your hypothetical in the sense I think you intend, then yes. In practice, I’d rather not, for the same reason I’d want to create copies of myself if only one existed to begin with.
I agree that the value of society is the value it provides to the people in it. However, I don’t think we should try to maximize the minimum happiness of everyone in the world: that way lies madness. I’d rather create one additional top-quality work of great art or culture than save a thousand additional orphans from starvation.
(If the thousand orphans could be brought up to first-world standards of living, rather than only being given mere existence, then they might produce more than one top-quality work of great art or culture on average between them. But the real world isn’t always that morally convenient.)
And in any case, even if there’s only two “unique” experiences, you’re still flipping a coin and either getting 1000 years of torture (say, −10,000,000 utility) or $100 (say, 10 utility), and the expected utility for hitting the button is still overwhelmingly negative.