You would need a crazy low probability of a lunatic or a mass murderer being down the line to justify not to kill one person
Edit: Sum(2^n (1-p)^(n-1) p) ~ Sum(2^n p) for p small. So you’d need a p= (2×2^32 -2) ~ 1/(8 billion) chance of catching a psycho for expected values to be equal. I.e. there is only a single person tops who would decide to kill all on earth.
You don’t even need a lunatic or mass murderer. As you say, the logical choice is to kill one person. For the next person, the logical choice is to kill two people, and so on.
It does create the funny paradox where, up to a certain point, a rational utilitarian would choose to kill and a rational mass murderer trying to maximise deaths would choose to double it.
It’s always “double it” Anyone after 34 flips the kill all humans, that’s their fault not yours
Why do you care whose fault it is? You’d want to minimise human deaths, not win a blame game.
Doubling action forever minimizes human deaths.
Unless someone decide to hit kill. In that case, it’s them doing it. I’m invalidating the argument that pre-empting imaginary future mass murders justifies killing one person today.
Idk which moral system you operate under, but I’m concerned with minimising human suffering. That implies hitting kill because chances of a mass murderer are too high not to. You also don’t follow traffic laws to a t, but exercise caution because you don’t really care whose fault it ends up being, you want to avoid bad outcomes (in this case the extinction of humankind).
Double it. Then the other guy will double it, and so on. Infinite loop = no deaths.
And then there’s some psycho on round 34 who kills all 8 billion people alive on earth.
Lever half way and it crashes.
Might hit the 2nd guy with a lever and the peeps behind him depending on speed.
It might. Still better odds.
Attempting to subvert the thought experiment only makes things worse. The trolley is full of child prodigies, all future geniuses that will cure cancer and solve the world’s problems. By sticking the lever halfway you kill all of them. The only way to save the child prodigies is to choose, left or right.
You couldn’t even bother putting in adult scientists that have already helped the world. It’s a hypothetical scenario, you know, you can put in anyone you want. So I’m putting the child prodigies to a test by having the save themselves from the half-lever. Should be relatively easy for them.
Can I move the rails to kill them all and then circle around and hit me?
