I think I, and maybe others, are still confused about the point of your top-level comment. Simon Knutsson’s argument is against utilitarianism, and I think Richard Ngo wanted to see if there was a good counter-argument against it from a utilitarian perspective, or if a utilitarian just has to “bite the bullet”. It seems like the motivation for both people were to try to figure out whether utilitarianism is the right moral philosophy / correct normative ethics.
Your reply doesn’t seem to address their motivation, which is why I’m confused. (If utilitarianism is the right moral philosophy then it would give the right action guidance even if one was 100% sure of it and other considerations such as contractarianism didn’t apply, so it seems beside the point to talk about contractarianism and overconfidence.) Is the point that utilitarianism probably isn’t right, but some other form of consequentialism is? If so, what do you have in mind?
I think I, and maybe others, are still confused about the point of your top-level comment. Simon Knutsson’s argument is against utilitarianism, and I think Richard Ngo wanted to see if there was a good counter-argument against it from a utilitarian perspective, or if a utilitarian just has to “bite the bullet”. It seems like the motivation for both people were to try to figure out whether utilitarianism is the right moral philosophy / correct normative ethics.
Your reply doesn’t seem to address their motivation, which is why I’m confused. (If utilitarianism is the right moral philosophy then it would give the right action guidance even if one was 100% sure of it and other considerations such as contractarianism didn’t apply, so it seems beside the point to talk about contractarianism and overconfidence.) Is the point that utilitarianism probably isn’t right, but some other form of consequentialism is? If so, what do you have in mind?