Hmm, I don’t really feel the force of this objection. My decision to wear my own seatbelt is causally unconnected to both everyone else’s decisions and whatever consequences everyone else faces, and everyone else’s decisions are unconnected to mine. It seems odd that I should then be integrating over those decisions, regardless of what decision theory/heuristic I’m using.
For example, suppose I use expected value theory, and I value my own life a little less than everyone else’s. I judge that the trivial inconvenience of putting on a seatbelt genuinely is not worth the decreased risk to my life, although I would counsel other people to wear seatbelts given the higher value of their lives (and thus upon reflection support a universal policy of seatbelt wearing). Do you think I ought to integrate over everyone’s decisions and wear a seatbelt anyway? If so, I think you’re arguing for something much stronger than standard expected value reasoning.
Right, gotcha.
I have conflicting intuitions here. In the case as you described it, I want to bite the bullet and say that everyone is acting rationally, and the 8000 are just unlucky. Something seems off about reducing risk for yourself in service of the project of reducing overall suffering, when you wouldn’t do it in service of the project of reducing your own suffering.
That said, if you change the thought experiment so that everyone can experience Y in order to prevent a 1 in a million chance of someone else experiencing X, I’m much more inclined to say that we should integrate as you’ve described. It seems like the dynamics are genuinely different enough that maybe I can make this distinction coherently?
Re: seatbelts, I was a bit confused; you seemed to be saying that when you integrate over “decisions anyone makes that cause benefit/harm,” you collapse back to expected utility theory. I was suggesting that expected utility theory as I understand it does not involve integrating over everyone’s decisions, since then e.g. the driver with deflated self-worth in my previous example should wear a seatbelt anyway.