After reading this several times, I have to conclude that I don’t understand what “comparable” means in this comment. Otherwise, I have no idea how one could thinking both that A and B aren’t comparable and that A > B.
even an infinite amount of dust specks are worse than a single person being tortured or dying. People arbitrarily place some bad things into a category that’s infinitely worse than another category.
I mean “comparable” as the negation of this line of thought.
So, you meant something like: if I think A is worse than B, but not infinitely worse than B, and I don’t have some kind of threshold (e.g., a threshold of probability) below which I no longer evaluate expected utility of events at all, then my beliefs about B are irrelevant to my decisions because my decisions are entirely driven by my beliefs about A?
I mean, that’s trivially true, in the sense that a false premise justifies any conclusion, and any finite system will have some threshold for which events not to evaluate.
After reading this several times, I have to conclude that I don’t understand what “comparable” means in this comment. Otherwise, I have no idea how one could thinking both that A and B aren’t comparable and that A > B.
I mean “comparable” as the negation of this line of thought.
Ah.
So, you meant something like: if I think A is worse than B, but not infinitely worse than B, and I don’t have some kind of threshold (e.g., a threshold of probability) below which I no longer evaluate expected utility of events at all, then my beliefs about B are irrelevant to my decisions because my decisions are entirely driven by my beliefs about A?
I mean, that’s trivially true, in the sense that a false premise justifies any conclusion, and any finite system will have some threshold for which events not to evaluate.
But in a less trivial sense… hm.
OK, thanks for clarifying.