I don't get how under Total Utilitarianism you can have the Repugnant Conclusion in the real world. You simply can't add trillions of trillions of trillions ... etc of people to "beat" the original optimal solution. Even considering the future generations.
Speaking of those. Why's there should be temporal discounting at all? Can't you get away with the usual expected value decay by probability? The payoffs further down the causal chain will have a natural limitations to their utility due to shit-happening and uncertainty.
@dpwiz What is this "usual expected value decay by probability"? If you think it's possible that there will be a countably infinite set of people in the universe (I can't reject this hypothesis because we don't know all rules of physics of our universe) and try to apply total utilitarianism, expected utility will not exist because the corresponding sum over this infinite set will not converge.
@p future value has non-zero probability of failure because ever-increasing number of factors that can prevent it from fruition.
Something being further in the future means longer causal chain where each step can fail.
@dpwiz So you're thinking something like the universe is ticking and has a nearly constant probability to end with each tick? That doesn't seem reasonable to me.
I think there's a nonzero probability that the rules of physics (the territory, not the map) are made so that it will be ticking forever and it will be possible for conscious being to not stop existing. But in this case the expected utility is undefined.
@dpwiz If physics are in such way that it's impossible to make a bomb that'll go a VERY BIG BIG BADA BOOM, then launch dem Von Neumann probes and nothing might go wrong with them with a large portion of them in one hundred years. In my opinion the probability that we're living in such a universe is nonzero.
@p nope, that would be lame.
My point is that Expected Value drops naturally for causally-distant events and you don't need time-relative discounting.
Consider one event in isolation. What could go wrong during
1 second? What could go wrong within 1-year interval? One hundred years?