So here’s a reply to that philosopher’s scenario, which I have yet to hear any philosopher’s victim give:
“You stipulate that the only possible way to save five innocent lives is to murder one innocent person, and this murder will definitely save the five lives, and that these facts are known to me with effective certainty. But since I am running on corrupted hardware, I can’t occupy the epistemic state you want me to imagine. Therefore I reply that, in a society of Artificial Intelligences worthy of personhood and lacking any inbuilt tendency to be corrupted by power, it would be right for the AI to murder the one innocent person to save five, and moreover all its peers would agree. However, I refuse to extend this reply to myself, because the epistemic state you ask me to imagine, can only exist among other kinds of people than human beings.
ie. the repugnant conclusion tells us a lot more about how human cognition works rather than how consequentionalism fundamentally works.
It’s certainly a reply, but if this argument were sound, it would apply to everything in human cognition. Seems like it’s being applied selectively, such that all the repugnant conclusions are things we somehow cannot be sure of and therefore can’t endorse, but all the non-repugnant conclusions of the philosophy are things we are sure about and can endorse. It’s also a bit off, since in the first part he says the issue is definite knowledge, and the issue in the second part is that power corrupts. These are two separate replies, although both suffer from being selectively applied.
I think this is the standard reply to the repugnant conclusion, from Yudkowsky’s Ends Don’t Justify Means (Among Humans) (emphasis mine).
ie. the repugnant conclusion tells us a lot more about how human cognition works rather than how consequentionalism fundamentally works.
It’s certainly a reply, but if this argument were sound, it would apply to everything in human cognition. Seems like it’s being applied selectively, such that all the repugnant conclusions are things we somehow cannot be sure of and therefore can’t endorse, but all the non-repugnant conclusions of the philosophy are things we are sure about and can endorse. It’s also a bit off, since in the first part he says the issue is definite knowledge, and the issue in the second part is that power corrupts. These are two separate replies, although both suffer from being selectively applied.