With Nozick's experience machine, at least as I imagine it, once you go in you no longer know you are in the machine, have a perfect illusion of being out in the real world. You are living a lie but not consciously, since you believe the lie.
Yes once you go in, the experiences are indistinguishable from reality. But at the pre-experience machine decision stage, when you are still outside of the Matrix, you are deciding whether believing a false reality is worth the welfare it produces.
Additionally, I don’t think the ethical question is whether YOU would go into the experience machine (this decision is subjective and outside the realm of ethics). Rather, it’s whether you can reasonably justify forcing others into the experience machine. Or forcing them to agree to the the utility coach’s lifeplan in this case.
Utilitarianism implies that this would be a duty. Yet if freedom is valued independently and prioritized over welfare, doing so would be immoral. And because I argue that freedom should be what we value in one another, ethical principles are contractual, being those principles that free people could not reasonably reject.
"No one would want to consciously live a lie. "
With Nozick's experience machine, at least as I imagine it, once you go in you no longer know you are in the machine, have a perfect illusion of being out in the real world. You are living a lie but not consciously, since you believe the lie.
Yes once you go in, the experiences are indistinguishable from reality. But at the pre-experience machine decision stage, when you are still outside of the Matrix, you are deciding whether believing a false reality is worth the welfare it produces.
Additionally, I don’t think the ethical question is whether YOU would go into the experience machine (this decision is subjective and outside the realm of ethics). Rather, it’s whether you can reasonably justify forcing others into the experience machine. Or forcing them to agree to the the utility coach’s lifeplan in this case.
Utilitarianism implies that this would be a duty. Yet if freedom is valued independently and prioritized over welfare, doing so would be immoral. And because I argue that freedom should be what we value in one another, ethical principles are contractual, being those principles that free people could not reasonably reject.