Besides, intuitively if you were really offered with perfect confidence a bet with a 99.99...90% chance of winning you a dollar but if you lose all the souls in the world will burn in hell forever do you really think it would be a worthwhile bet to take?
While I genuinely appreciate how implausible it is to consider that bet worthwhile, there is a flipside. See the The LIfespan Dilemma. The point is that people have inconsistent preferences here, so it is easy to find intuitive counterexamples to any position one could take. I find the bounded approach to be the least of all evils.
What is bad about Pascal’s mugging isn’t the existence of arbitrarily bad outcomes, it’s the existence of arbitrarily bad expectations. What we really want is that the integral of utility relative to the probability measure is never infinite.
It is actually pretty hard to achieve this. Consider a sequence of lives L1, L2, etc. such that (i) the temporary quality of each life increases over time in each life, and increases at the same rate, (ii) the duration of the lives in the sequence is increasing and approaching infinity, (iii) the utility of each lives in the sequence is approaching infinity. And now consider an infinitely long life L whose temporary quality increases at the same rate as L1, L2, etc. Plausibly, L is better than L1, L2, etc. This means L has a value which exceeds any finite value, and it means you will take any chance of L, no matter how small, to any of the Li, no matter how certain it would be. When choosing among different available actions which may lead to some of these lives, you would, in practice, consider only the chance of getting an infinitely long life, turning to other considerations only to break ties. Upshot: weak background assumptions + unbounded utility function --> obsessing over infinities, neglecting finite considerations except to break ties.
To be clear, the background assumptions are: that L, L1, L2, etc. are alternatives you could reasonably have non-zero probability in; that L is better than L1, L2, etc.; normal axioms of decision theory.
(You may also consider a variation of this argument involving histories of human civilization, rather than lives.)
While I genuinely appreciate how implausible it is to consider that bet worthwhile, there is a flipside. See the The LIfespan Dilemma. The point is that people have inconsistent preferences here, so it is easy to find intuitive counterexamples to any position one could take. I find the bounded approach to be the least of all evils.
It is actually pretty hard to achieve this. Consider a sequence of lives L1, L2, etc. such that (i) the temporary quality of each life increases over time in each life, and increases at the same rate, (ii) the duration of the lives in the sequence is increasing and approaching infinity, (iii) the utility of each lives in the sequence is approaching infinity. And now consider an infinitely long life L whose temporary quality increases at the same rate as L1, L2, etc. Plausibly, L is better than L1, L2, etc. This means L has a value which exceeds any finite value, and it means you will take any chance of L, no matter how small, to any of the Li, no matter how certain it would be. When choosing among different available actions which may lead to some of these lives, you would, in practice, consider only the chance of getting an infinitely long life, turning to other considerations only to break ties. Upshot: weak background assumptions + unbounded utility function --> obsessing over infinities, neglecting finite considerations except to break ties.
To be clear, the background assumptions are: that L, L1, L2, etc. are alternatives you could reasonably have non-zero probability in; that L is better than L1, L2, etc.; normal axioms of decision theory.
(You may also consider a variation of this argument involving histories of human civilization, rather than lives.)