Ésta es la pregunta que Eliezer Yudkowsky se plantea en Overcoming Bias en el 63 aniversario del lanzamiento de la bomba atómica. Un ángulo interesante. Eliezer en los comentarios:
The issue is whether establishing a precedent for using nuclear weapons, increased the probability of their future usage, potentially costing billions of lives.
(...) Apparently many people just don't have a mental bin for global risks to humanity, only counting up the casualties to their own tribe and country. Either that or they're just short-term thinkers. They can ask how much use of the Bomb helped America, or even how much use of the Bomb hurt (or helped) Japan, but not how use of the Bomb affected the probability of nuclear war for the next 63 years and beyond.
I can tell you that I've spoken to nuclear proliferation specialists and they say that perceived hypocrisy by America is a major problem in convincing other nations not to develop nuclear weapons. Now we don't know what those nations would be saying, if no one had ever used nuclear weapons. Maybe they would just find a different excuse. But at least to first order, it looks like Hiroshima had knock-on effects on nuclear proliferation and nuclear diplomacy.
Actualización: Scott Aaronson pone hábilmente en duda que el planteamiento utilitarista de Eliezer sea relevante.
Eliezer, I certainly worry about global risks to humanity, but I also worry about the "paradoxes" of utilitarian ethics. E.g., would you advocate killing an innocent person if long-term considerations convinced you it would have an 0.00001% chance of saving the human race? I'm pretty sure most people wouldn't, and if asked to give a reason, might say that they don't trust anyone to estimate such small probabilities correctly.
