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Pascal's Mugger Strikes Again

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 November 2020

Dylan Balfour Open the ORCID record for Dylan Balfour [Opens in a new window]
Dylan Balfour*
Affiliation:
University of Edinburgh
*
*Corresponding author. E-mail: dylan.balfour@ed.ac.uk
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Abstract

In a well-known paper, Nick Bostrom presents a confrontation between a fictionalised Blaise Pascal and a mysterious mugger. The mugger persuades Pascal to hand over his wallet by exploiting Pascal's commitment to expected utility maximisation. He does so by offering Pascal an astronomically high reward such that, despite Pascal's low credence in the mugger's truthfulness, the expected utility of accepting the mugging is higher than rejecting it. In this article, I present another sort of high value, low credence mugging. This time, the mugger utilises research on existential risk and the long-term potential of humanity to exploit Pascal's expected-utility-maximising descendant. This mugging is more insidious than Bostrom's original as it relies on plausible facts about the long-term future, as well as realistic credences about how our everyday actions could, albeit with infinitesimally low likelihood, affect the future of humanity.

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Information
Utilitas , Volume 33 , Issue 1 , March 2021 , pp. 118 - 124
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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press

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References

Beckstead, Nick. 2019. A Brief Argument for the Overwhelming Importance of Shaping the Far Future. In Greaves, Hilary and Pummer, Theron (eds) Effective Altruism: Philosophical Issues (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), pp. 80–98.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
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