I think you overestimate how much you’ll care about this post in few years.
On top of this—see, you are acting in a mildly self destructive manner. The vat grown steak can be considerably safer, or taste better, but you pre-commit anyway without even tasting it. Clearly this pre-commitment not to maximize the utility in the future, is a net expected loss of utility.
That’s the issue. Evil is generally self destructive, the more evil, the more self destructive it is. I believe that’s in part because it is hard to define self in such a way that the evil is only hurting the others like you but not self, future self, parts of self, etc. That’s just not easy to define, and not easy to process. Take extreme example, psychopaths. They are very self destructive. They do things on spur of the moment at expense of their future selves—perfectly rational selfish action as the future selves are to some extent different people—but not effective for an agent. There is not much more reason to care about future yourself, than to care about anyone else.
I think you overestimate how much you’ll care about this post in few years.
On top of this—see, you are acting in a mildly self destructive manner. The vat grown steak can be considerably safer, or taste better, but you pre-commit anyway without even tasting it. Clearly this pre-commitment not to maximize the utility in the future, is a net expected loss of utility.
That’s the issue. Evil is generally self destructive, the more evil, the more self destructive it is. I believe that’s in part because it is hard to define self in such a way that the evil is only hurting the others like you but not self, future self, parts of self, etc. That’s just not easy to define, and not easy to process. Take extreme example, psychopaths. They are very self destructive. They do things on spur of the moment at expense of their future selves—perfectly rational selfish action as the future selves are to some extent different people—but not effective for an agent. There is not much more reason to care about future yourself, than to care about anyone else.