This is another one of those thought experiments where I’d annoy the asker by challenging the legitimacy of the thought experiment. ;) No cat killing for me.
This may have come up in the audience questions but if I were to engage the thought experiment itself, I’d say that I have no idea how much my threat/promise to my friend actually impacted their odds of suicide. I wouldn’t kill the cat (assuming I even made the promise/threat to kill it in the first place) because it clearly didn’t act as a deterrent for my friend and thus I wouldn’t need to maintain a “we don’t negotiate with terrorists” commitment to killing it after they died.
If the person posing the thought experiment insists that I have special, Omega-like information about how the promise/threat impacted my friend’s odds of committing suicide, I’d push back on the fact that the experiment is pretending I have access to magic knowledge and drawing too much real-life impacting from magical thought experiments is a slippery slope into madness (e.g. Bentham’s Bulldog).
This is another one of those thought experiments where I’d annoy the asker by challenging the legitimacy of the thought experiment. ;) No cat killing for me.
This may have come up in the audience questions but if I were to engage the thought experiment itself, I’d say that I have no idea how much my threat/promise to my friend actually impacted their odds of suicide. I wouldn’t kill the cat (assuming I even made the promise/threat to kill it in the first place) because it clearly didn’t act as a deterrent for my friend and thus I wouldn’t need to maintain a “we don’t negotiate with terrorists” commitment to killing it after they died.
If the person posing the thought experiment insists that I have special, Omega-like information about how the promise/threat impacted my friend’s odds of committing suicide, I’d push back on the fact that the experiment is pretending I have access to magic knowledge and drawing too much real-life impacting from magical thought experiments is a slippery slope into madness (e.g. Bentham’s Bulldog).