Talk:Pascal's mugging

This page was proposed for deletion by Carchasm (talk · contribs) on 17 September 2022.

Philosophy Start‑class

	Philosophy portal This article is within the scope of WikiProject Philosophy, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of content related to philosophy on Wikipedia. If you would like to support the project, please visit the project page, where you can get more details on how you can help, and where you can join the general discussion about philosophy content on Wikipedia.PhilosophyWikipedia:WikiProject PhilosophyTemplate:WikiProject PhilosophyPhilosophy
Start	This article has been rated as Start-class on Wikipedia's content assessment scale.
???	This article has not yet received a rating on the project's importance scale.

Effective Altruism C‑class Mid‑importance

	This article is within the scope of WikiProject Effective Altruism, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of topics relevant to effective altruism on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.Effective AltruismWikipedia:WikiProject Effective AltruismTemplate:WikiProject Effective AltruismEffective Altruism
C	This article has been rated as C-class on Wikipedia's content assessment scale.
Mid	This article has been rated as Mid-importance on the importance scale.

Where is the justification for "these utilities can grow faster than the probability diminishes"? Is there any example that demonstrates this? The mugging scenario described does not seem to. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 76.66.88.168 (talk) 01:12, 21 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

The general finding that this is a property of most otherwise-reasonable systems, is sourced to [1]. The general concept is sourced to Bostrom's article in which the victim is forced to acknowledge that there is an rough lower bound of "one in 10 quadrillion" to how much probability the victim's cognition assigns to a certain unoutlandish hypotheses. Rolf H Nelson (talk) 19:22, 21 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Virtue ethics (ish) of rejecting immoral promises

I wonder if there's a way of re-weighting the utility promised by the mugger.

It assumes that the virtuous person is not naive about muggers, and not myopic about the suffering of others.

It involves supposing that the mugger would keep his (from the problem statement) promise. Then ask, what will the mugger have to do, to collect the resources to keep the promise. Then ask, what value will the side-effects of that collection have, with respect to my morality. Assume that it is significant and negative; probably more negative than the value of the collected resources.

On that collection of reasoning and assumptions, it is wrong to accept the promise, so the promise should not alter my decision about the incompetent mugging.

Has any philosopher produced a water-tight argument along the same lines? ArthurDent006.5 (talk) 08:51, 20 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]