It’s interesting that you have that intuition! I don’t share it, and I think the intuition somewhat implies some of the “You shouldn’t leave your house” type things alluded to in the dialogue.
I’m pretty happy to bite that bullet, especially since I’m not an egoist. I should still leave my house because others are going to suffer far worse (in expectation) if I don’t do something to help, at some risk to myself. It does seem strange to say that if I didn’t have any altruistic obligations then I shouldn’t take very small risks of horrible experiences. But I have the stronger intuition that those horrible experiences are horrible in a way that the nonexistence of nice experiences isn’t. And that “I” don’t get to override the preference to avoid such experiences, when the counterfactual is that the preferences for the nice experiences just don’t exist in the first place.
I started writing a comment, then it got too long, so I put in my shortform here. :)
It’s interesting that you have that intuition! I don’t share it, and I think the intuition somewhat implies some of the “You shouldn’t leave your house” type things alluded to in the dialogue.
I’m pretty happy to bite that bullet, especially since I’m not an egoist. I should still leave my house because others are going to suffer far worse (in expectation) if I don’t do something to help, at some risk to myself. It does seem strange to say that if I didn’t have any altruistic obligations then I shouldn’t take very small risks of horrible experiences. But I have the stronger intuition that those horrible experiences are horrible in a way that the nonexistence of nice experiences isn’t. And that “I” don’t get to override the preference to avoid such experiences, when the counterfactual is that the preferences for the nice experiences just don’t exist in the first place.