Thanks for the reference, seems better than my post and I hadn’t seen it. (I think it’s the version of the argument I allude to in this comment.)
Note that if you have unboundedly positive and unboundedly negative outcomes, then you must also violate the weaker version of the countable sure thing principle with weak inequality instead of strict inequality. Violating the weak version of the sure thing principle seems much worse to me. And I think most proponents of unbounded preferences would advocate for them to point in both directions, so they run into this stronger problem.
That said, countability and strength of the sure thing principle are orthogonal: countable weak sure thing + finite strong sure thing --> countable strong sure thing. Negative utilities are only relevant as a response to someone who is OK saying “a 1% chance of an infinitely good outcome is just as good as a sure thing,” since that view is inconsistent if the 1% chance of an infinitely good outcome could be balanced out by a 2% chance of an infinitely bad outcome.
Thanks for the reference, seems better than my post and I hadn’t seen it. (I think it’s the version of the argument I allude to in this comment.)
Note that if you have unboundedly positive and unboundedly negative outcomes, then you must also violate the weaker version of the countable sure thing principle with weak inequality instead of strict inequality. Violating the weak version of the sure thing principle seems much worse to me. And I think most proponents of unbounded preferences would advocate for them to point in both directions, so they run into this stronger problem.
That said, countability and strength of the sure thing principle are orthogonal: countable weak sure thing + finite strong sure thing --> countable strong sure thing. Negative utilities are only relevant as a response to someone who is OK saying “a 1% chance of an infinitely good outcome is just as good as a sure thing,” since that view is inconsistent if the 1% chance of an infinitely good outcome could be balanced out by a 2% chance of an infinitely bad outcome.