Yes, if enough people are made to suffer sufficiently by virtue of my existence, and there’s no way to alleviate that suffering other than my extermination, then I endorse my extermination.
To do otherwise would be unjustifiably selfish.
Be careful, TheOtherDave! Utility Monsters are wily beasts.
A lot of the difficulty here, of course, as in many such scenarios, is that I’m being asked to consider the sufferers in this scenario people, even though they don’t behave like any people I’ve ever known.
That said, I can imagine something that suffers the way they do and that I still care about alleviating the suffering of.
The threshold between what I care about and what I don’t is, as always, pretty friggin arbitrary.
Be careful, TheOtherDave! Utility Monsters are wily beasts.
(nods) Yup.
A lot of the difficulty here, of course, as in many such scenarios, is that I’m being asked to consider the sufferers in this scenario people, even though they don’t behave like any people I’ve ever known.
That said, I can imagine something that suffers the way they do and that I still care about alleviating the suffering of.
The threshold between what I care about and what I don’t is, as always, pretty friggin arbitrary.