It shouldn’t, IMO. The reasonable job description for Thud should be some combination of protecting a particular set of people and a particular piece of land, and that doesn’t cover rescuing synthesized humans.
If that is the extent of his job description, should he stop all humanitarian aid to foreign nations where it has no direct benefit to his own set of people?
And would that allow him to eliminate the rest of humanity for some marginal benefit to his countrymen?
Along these lines, why do each of us individually do pretty much nothing, or at best something pretty minimal, to help the millions of people in the real world living in poverty or dying from preventable diseases? It seems to me our empathy has only a “limited range”, something like the “monkeysphere” effect I suppose, whereby we only really care about those closest to us. We have some abstract empathy for the less fortunate, but not enough to really do much about it.
I can imagine also that empathy asymptotes to almost zero at the emotional distance of simulated people (and that we can only think about large numbers of people logarithmically, so that there is hardly any difference between millions and trillions of people to the empathy portion of our utility function). As the scenario demonstrates, it seems like this behaviour has great survival value.
And to answer your question, the real world demonstrates the answer. The amount of foreign aid given to developing countries is abysmally small compared to the value we should place on the lives of those living in disease and poverty, if we indeed cared about them anything like as much as we cared about those who affect our lives more directly. The current amount of foreign aid given is more closely proportional to its UN and local PR value. It is politically, not morally, motivated.
For the second question, well we are generally more adverse to direct negative intervention that to lack of positive intervention, such as in the case of the runaway train that is about to kill a group of schoolchildren, and a big fat man either a) happens to fall in the path of the train (stopping it), but you could intervene and save him—but this would result in the deaths of the schoolchildren; or b) you are in a position where you could push the big fat man in front of the train, thus saving the children but killing the fat man. Most people would not save the fat man, but they would not push him in front of the train either.
I expect the explanation for this is that killing people for the immediate benefit of the group destroys social cohesion, since those in the group live in fear of whether or not their comrades will suddenly turn on them for the benefit of a naive kind of global utility. Likewise eliminating most of humanity for the benefit of said countrymen doesn’t seem like it could be done without similarly introducing extreme suspicion into the remaining society. This problem is less evident with the foreign aid situation, although of course the possibility that no foreign aid might easily extend to reduced domestic aid might erode trust in those furthest from central power.
Letting the simulated people suffer is not likely to induce similar social chaos, unless perhaps the aliens can convince the citizens of the Earth that they themselves might be the simulated ones.
“And would that allow him to eliminate the rest of humanity for some marginal benefit to his countrymen?”
That doesn’t sound too far from the principle which many militaries throughout history and in the present follow, including what some very large factions within American politics want the military to follow.
For example, 50,000 civilians were killed in the war in Afghanistan (and that estimate is a few years old); if the Afghanistan war is justified because of 9/11, that gives a value of at least 16 Afghans per American. If we assume that the war wasn’t just barely* justified- that nobody would switch their opinion due to it being 60,000 rather than 50,000 casualties- a ratio of 20 Afghans to 1 American or probably higher seems quite reasonable. Extrapolating from that we can see that killing 6-7 Billion Afghans to save ~300 million Americans would be quite reasonable.
(if we count based on the Iraq War, it would be to save 30 million Americans)
the actual utilitarian preventative calculations are complicated here, namely because the war in Afghanistan most likely made further terrorist attacks more* likely rather than less, so I’m just assuming revenge is our utility function. I’m also not counting the American soldiers lost in Afghanistan.
Now, to clarify, if the war in Afghanistan is justified because even more Afghans would have died under Taliban rule otherwise, then that wouldn’t apply. But it seems to me that the main argument presented in favor of the war, even by liberals who support it, is over “preventing terrorism” rather than humanitarian interests, which seems to be widely appealing to the vast majority of the American public.
Obviously that’s to actually avenge or prevent the deaths of a large portion of the country, not “some marginal benefit”. Still, I don’t think it’s too far off to say that quite a few people do hold that view and would not be at all inconsistent, in that regard, in wanting General Thud to control their armed forces.
You failed to consider a combination. For instance, the main objective of the war is preventing terrorism, but the fact that the Taliban would have killed people if left in power changes it from “lots of lives lost to prevent terrorism” to “few lives lost to prevent terrorism”. Just because preventing the Taliban from killing wasn’t our main goal doesn’t mean that it can’t affect the balance in favor of the goal that we did have.
Would it make a difference if instead of simulation, they had gotten human dna and were speed-growing clones to torture?
It shouldn’t, IMO. The reasonable job description for Thud should be some combination of protecting a particular set of people and a particular piece of land, and that doesn’t cover rescuing synthesized humans.
If that is the extent of his job description, should he stop all humanitarian aid to foreign nations where it has no direct benefit to his own set of people?
And would that allow him to eliminate the rest of humanity for some marginal benefit to his countrymen?
Along these lines, why do each of us individually do pretty much nothing, or at best something pretty minimal, to help the millions of people in the real world living in poverty or dying from preventable diseases? It seems to me our empathy has only a “limited range”, something like the “monkeysphere” effect I suppose, whereby we only really care about those closest to us. We have some abstract empathy for the less fortunate, but not enough to really do much about it.
I can imagine also that empathy asymptotes to almost zero at the emotional distance of simulated people (and that we can only think about large numbers of people logarithmically, so that there is hardly any difference between millions and trillions of people to the empathy portion of our utility function). As the scenario demonstrates, it seems like this behaviour has great survival value.
And to answer your question, the real world demonstrates the answer. The amount of foreign aid given to developing countries is abysmally small compared to the value we should place on the lives of those living in disease and poverty, if we indeed cared about them anything like as much as we cared about those who affect our lives more directly. The current amount of foreign aid given is more closely proportional to its UN and local PR value. It is politically, not morally, motivated.
For the second question, well we are generally more adverse to direct negative intervention that to lack of positive intervention, such as in the case of the runaway train that is about to kill a group of schoolchildren, and a big fat man either a) happens to fall in the path of the train (stopping it), but you could intervene and save him—but this would result in the deaths of the schoolchildren; or b) you are in a position where you could push the big fat man in front of the train, thus saving the children but killing the fat man. Most people would not save the fat man, but they would not push him in front of the train either.
I expect the explanation for this is that killing people for the immediate benefit of the group destroys social cohesion, since those in the group live in fear of whether or not their comrades will suddenly turn on them for the benefit of a naive kind of global utility. Likewise eliminating most of humanity for the benefit of said countrymen doesn’t seem like it could be done without similarly introducing extreme suspicion into the remaining society. This problem is less evident with the foreign aid situation, although of course the possibility that no foreign aid might easily extend to reduced domestic aid might erode trust in those furthest from central power.
Letting the simulated people suffer is not likely to induce similar social chaos, unless perhaps the aliens can convince the citizens of the Earth that they themselves might be the simulated ones.
“And would that allow him to eliminate the rest of humanity for some marginal benefit to his countrymen?” That doesn’t sound too far from the principle which many militaries throughout history and in the present follow, including what some very large factions within American politics want the military to follow.
For example, 50,000 civilians were killed in the war in Afghanistan (and that estimate is a few years old); if the Afghanistan war is justified because of 9/11, that gives a value of at least 16 Afghans per American. If we assume that the war wasn’t just barely* justified- that nobody would switch their opinion due to it being 60,000 rather than 50,000 casualties- a ratio of 20 Afghans to 1 American or probably higher seems quite reasonable. Extrapolating from that we can see that killing 6-7 Billion Afghans to save ~300 million Americans would be quite reasonable. (if we count based on the Iraq War, it would be to save 30 million Americans)
the actual utilitarian preventative calculations are complicated here, namely because the war in Afghanistan most likely made further terrorist attacks more* likely rather than less, so I’m just assuming revenge is our utility function. I’m also not counting the American soldiers lost in Afghanistan.
Now, to clarify, if the war in Afghanistan is justified because even more Afghans would have died under Taliban rule otherwise, then that wouldn’t apply. But it seems to me that the main argument presented in favor of the war, even by liberals who support it, is over “preventing terrorism” rather than humanitarian interests, which seems to be widely appealing to the vast majority of the American public.
Obviously that’s to actually avenge or prevent the deaths of a large portion of the country, not “some marginal benefit”. Still, I don’t think it’s too far off to say that quite a few people do hold that view and would not be at all inconsistent, in that regard, in wanting General Thud to control their armed forces.
You failed to consider a combination. For instance, the main objective of the war is preventing terrorism, but the fact that the Taliban would have killed people if left in power changes it from “lots of lives lost to prevent terrorism” to “few lives lost to prevent terrorism”. Just because preventing the Taliban from killing wasn’t our main goal doesn’t mean that it can’t affect the balance in favor of the goal that we did have.