And if you cannot act such that 0 rights are violated? Your function would seem to suggest that you are indifferent between killing a dictator and committing the genocide he would have caused, since the number of rights violations is (arguably, of course) in both cases positive.
It does occur to me that I wasn’t objecting to the hypothetical existence of said function, only that rights aren’t especially useful if we give up on caring about them in any world where we cannot prevent literally all violations.
I was connecting it to and agreeing with Zack M Davis’ thought about utilitarianism. Even with Roko’s utility function, if you have to choose between two lotteries over outcomes, you are still minimizing the expected number of rights violations. If you make your utility function lexicographic in rights, then once you’ve done the best you can with rights, you’re still a utilitarian in the usual sense within the class of choices that minimizes rights violations.
And if you cannot act such that 0 rights are violated? Your function would seem to suggest that you are indifferent between killing a dictator and committing the genocide he would have caused, since the number of rights violations is (arguably, of course) in both cases positive.
Correct. But it’s still an implementable policy. I didn’t say it was sensible!
It seems as though you’re reading this hypothetical utility function properly.
It does occur to me that I wasn’t objecting to the hypothetical existence of said function, only that rights aren’t especially useful if we give up on caring about them in any world where we cannot prevent literally all violations.
It seems like a non-sequitur in response to Roko’s illustration of what a utility function can be used to represent.
I was connecting it to and agreeing with Zack M Davis’ thought about utilitarianism. Even with Roko’s utility function, if you have to choose between two lotteries over outcomes, you are still minimizing the expected number of rights violations. If you make your utility function lexicographic in rights, then once you’ve done the best you can with rights, you’re still a utilitarian in the usual sense within the class of choices that minimizes rights violations.